Notes On The State of Poetry, Part Two
NOTES ON THE STATE OF POETRY, Part Two
by Diann Blakely
Raleigh, NC
The Carolinas are so crowded with poets--and so geographically sprawling--that it’s difficult to list or even group them all, much less distribute the requisite laurels. Though not a native, its grande dame of poetry is indisputably Betty Adcock, and here’s what she has to say about being, in her words, a “Southern Woman Poet of a Certain Age.”
In the 1970’s, I was asked to give a talk on Southern Women Poets. The novelist Doris Betts was asked to speak on Southern Women Fiction Writers. Doris, of course, had a veritable Who’s Who in American Fiction to work with. To my chagrin, I discovered I did not know of a single southern woman poet with a notable body of work. Eleanor Ross Taylor--a completely original talent in her forties, writing the lives of women of the South and doing it there--had two books but remained almost unknown. That was it. I have never divined why there were so few Southern women writing poetry in those days when women elsewhere in the country were creating important work. Was it because poetry centered in the academy? Because fiction was more suited to the cultural place in which women lived? No Answers. And no one really asking the question. Today of course the south has many daughters of the muse and the question no longer matters.
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Southern. Southern woman. Southern woman poet. The label seems ... well, so regional and--“New York Poets,” by way of contrast, sounds sophisticated and refers to males exclusively, as does the term “The Fugitives.”
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My own experience? I fell into poetry. Not having sense enough to know I could not do it, could not write it nor publish it nor claim it , since I had/have no degrees, not even a BA. But reading poems of all periods, and finding that place in myself where I could make poems, was/is my way of seeing, my apprehension, my beholding. It was/is simply necessary. I had written verse since I was seven, given to wandering with woods behind my grandfather’s house with a Blue horse notebook and a pencil. It wasn’t so different in my twenties, thirties, forties. It isn’t so different now.
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There are clichés about the lives of Southerners, a good number of which are true. I knew the Bible inside out, King James Version, by the time I was in high school. Did that contribute to my love of density, music, and a certain lush imagery? Well, there are worse schools for beginning poets. People sat around and told stories about dead people. Did that contribute to my interest in merging narrative and lyric? There are worse schools.
I was lucky that the only creative writing class I ever took was with Guy Owen in 1965. Guy simply told me to go home and write, and he made me an editor for Southern Poetry Review, the magazine he founded and edited: the oldest poetry magazine in the South. After my first book came out I began to teach off and on, eventually settling into a Writer in Residence position at a Raleigh college, where I was paid as an adjunct but given a fancy title. Academia was never my whole livelihood nor poetry any key to tenure, salary, etc. That makes one invisible and lonely , as well as poor, in the literary world of that time and this one. It also makes one free. It was/is hard, but I have come to feel lucky.
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The south in which I grew up was in Texas, an odd outpost of the Old South settled in the New West in the 1820’s…bringing all the baggage along. My father used to say those Tennesseans, Virginians and North Carolinians who settled in what is called deep East Texas had headed west but had stopped abruptly and sat right down in the last forests going west, a landscape lush, gorgeous, hot, and full of flowers, game, rivers.
My hometown was near a genuine wilderness, the Big Thicket, that spread for thousands of acres even as late as my childhood, before the timber cutters destroyed most of it.
There are worse schools for aspiring poets.
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In the 1990’s, one very well known southern male poet introduced a round-up review of books by Southern women with words to the effect that southern women poets weren’t all alike but were rather like “different varieties of tea roses” or “different violins.” Tea roses? Violins?
The review of my first book appeared in a Fayetteville, NC newspaper. The headline read “Raleigh Housewife Writes Book of Poems.”
I don’t regret a thing.
Why would she? Adcock’s most recent collection, Slantwise, published by LSU in 2008, was awarded the L.E. Phillabaum Prize, named for the Press’s director for nearly twenty-five years. The praise for Slantwise, and Intervale: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 2001), has surpassed that for nearly all of her past work combined. Given the overall excellence that characterizes her work, I believe the increasing accolades signify only that she, like Eleanor Ross Taylor, has finally reached the larger audience she has long deserved.
Winston-Salem / Raleigh / Charlotte
Merging narrative and lyric. Adcock’s questions might have as simple an answer as this: the tired, tired, tired insistence on “story-telling” as part of the Southern way of life and the essence of its literature. Fewer and fewer of us grow up in houses listening to our parents’ and grandparents’ stories, in many cases because they weren’t there; and in many front porches and living rooms, silence, not narrative, reigned. What contemporary Southern writers can say that they have not had their ears tuned far more by music--much of the best of it made right Down Here-- than the monologues of latter-day Miss Julia Coldfields?
Merging narrative and lyric. One good example is offered by the very title chosen for his memoir by Malcolm Jones: Little Boy Blues (Pantheon). Having managed to hang onto to his day job as a Newsweek book editor in the wake of creating a genuine phenomenon surrounding Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Jones took some time off to write his own autobiographical-lyric-in-prose. The kind of household I describe above is the kind Jones knew, and music, as well as movies, were his escape. Merging narrative and lyric. Some writers even allow lyric to become the story, dictating the material and shape, as in the case of Mark Kemp’s already canonical Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South (University of Georgia Press). Like most Southerners I know, I am morbidly / manically superstitious and was fascinated but not exactly surprised, somehow, to discover that Kemp was a friend of a poet whose work I’ve read for years with admiration: Al Maginnes (Ghost Alphabet, Film History, White Pines Press). And to discover that “friends” was just the surface of things: Kemp and Maginnes attended the same college, shared a major in English and even a house for awhile. They also shared a vocation, albeit one that forked in different directions. A crossroads, one might say.
AM: I went to East Carolina University, where I met Mark, to become a poet. After seeing the student literary journal I decided if this was poetry, I wasn’t writing it. This disappointment led to milling about, trying other majors, dropping out of school for a while, generally pursuing every distraction that came my way for several years.
MK: From the time I was a kid, I wanted to write about music, and I used to read Creem and Rolling Stone at the pharmacy where my mom worked. But by the time I got to ECU and met Al, I was studying English and philosophy and had read Kerouac and Ginsberg and thought maybe I should set my standards a bit higher than Lester Bangs. I tried writing a few short stories and poems, but I never thought I was good at it and was always embarrassed to let Al see what I wrote.
I was kind of politically active in college, too, and we had a mutual friend who was bonkers over Hunter Thompson, so I went back and re-read a lot of Thompson's older stuff. Thus I decided journalism was the direction I should take. When I got my first job at a small paper in central North Carolina, I asked my editor if--in addition to my police reporting(!)--I could do a pop music column. He said yes, and that was my first real music forum.
AM: Thompson and Kerouac, yes. Part of what was exciting about those days was that we often read the same books at the same time, so they became as much a part of our shared experience as bands we saw or certain albums or bars. Some writers--Harry Crews, Robert Stone, Hunter Thompson, William Styron--are inseparable from those years.
Poetry was more private. I took a poetry workshop when I returned to college after taking a couple of years off to hitchhike, work construction and have what seemed like grand adventures. One of the assignments in that class was to keep a journal, and I kept that journal for years. Eventually I started typing up some poems and sent them to small magazines. One got accepted almost immediately, but I thought of myself as a fiction writer until I took a workshop with Peter Makuck and discovered contemporary poetry.
MK: I agree, Al. Reading those same books and writers really was a bonding thing for us, and for so many people of our generation. The things that drew me to certain people in college were what they read, what they listened to, what their politics were -- not to mention how much good pot they had. It remained that way for me after I left college and eventually wound up in New York in the late '80s. It's funny: recently another mutual friend from our college years sent me a Walt Whitman excerpt to console me after the death of my nephew. Reading it reminded me of when I first got to New York and would ride the Staten Island Ferry just to read Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Such a hopeless romantic.
Like Al, I had taken some time off as a young man to explore more of the country than just the little mill town I came from. But for me, it was between high school and college. Like so many wannabe bohemians, I was obsessed with the '60s, hippies and Beat writers – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Dylan, Kesey, Kerouac, all that -- and decided to take a little pilgrimage to San Francisco with my friend, Jeff Whisnant. My older sister, who was a semi-quasi hippie, had moved to Yosemite National Park with her biologist boyfriend the year before, in 1977, so we took a detour there, too. We spent about three months on the road. Everything was new to us: the desert, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Ocean – places I'd only read about in books or magazines, or seen in photographs, or heard referenced in songs. To actually see the colors and feel the air was an awesome experience. Also, when you drive 6,000 miles at 18 with someone who shares your interests and values, it really solidifies what kind of person you're going to become, and Jeff and I ended up being roommates at ECU. By the time we got there, we were hungry to find a community of people we never could find in our hometown, and Al was part of that community.
I'm not so sure writing came naturally to me until after I began working as a reporter and practiced and mimicked other writers. Around that time Stanley Booth's book on the Rolling Stones came out, and when I read it, I realized music writing actually could be literature. It was an epiphany. Kerouac and Leroi Jones had written about jazz and Bangs sometimes waxed literary about rock & roll, but Stanley actually turned the Rolling Stones into literary characters and their music into a literary theme. He set the bar high. I can only dream of ever achieving fleeting moments of that level of writing, but it's what I aspire to. It's what any music writer worth his or her salt aspires to. (Note: Mr. Kemp was offered no money for his remarks, and the one time he visited our house, he ate take-out barbeque off styrofoam and we kept up his father after what was obviously his bedtime.)
AM: I love thinking of you reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” while you’re riding the Staten Island Ferry. I remember seeing Mark’s photos of his trip out west after I met him and Jeff. I still remember photos of Robert Hunter playing in a little club.
Like Mark (I'm putting words in his mouth here) and a lot of writers, I was more in love with the romance of writing at first than I was actually with writing. Being a writer meant you could drink in the morning, skip classes, behave horribly and be forgiven for it. The obsession with writing came later, probably in my thirties, once my MFA was finished. Probably out of fear, I developed a work habit that really only let up a bit when I became a father at 49. Now I find myself writing a bit less, but only a bit.
Looking back, it seems foreordained and inevitable, but it certainly could have gone in other ways. I might have taken another route and pursued a doctorate or gotten a teaching certificate and taught high school, gone to law school, programmed computers—all things some of my friends have done. I feel fortunate to have discovered poetry in early adulthood and to have lived so much of my life around poetry. Some of my happiest hours come on the sofa with a notebook in my lap, scribbling away. In those moments I feel I’m doing what I was meant to do. I’m sure Mark must sometimes feel the same way.
I remember reading Dixie Lullaby and feeling a sense of pride in knowing the guy who wrote this book that hit the nail on the head about so many things. I’d been reading Mark in Rolling Stone and the New York Times and knew he was a good writer, but this book was something more. I read a lot of books about music, and this is one of the few that I think deserves to be called literature. Mark and I were not in touch then, but I tracked him down and e-mailed him to tell him what a great book he had written.
MK: And that meant so much to me. I think we're both very fortunate to be doing what we set out to do. Most people don't get that opportunity -- or don't take it -- and we did. We're fortunate in a lot of ways. Both of us nearly romanced ourselves to death with our delusional ideas about what a writer is or what a writer should be or do -- the self-destruction stuff, you know -- but we survived that, too. So, for some reason, I guess we ARE meant to be doing this.
I like the image of you, too, sitting on your sofa, happily scribbling away. Sometimes when I'm reading your work, it occurs to me that you and I really are doing the same thing but from different angles. Like when I read "Legend," your eulogy for an unnamed folksinger, I felt like you were expressing the same things I try to express in my writing, just using another aspect of the language, another palette, so to speak; images and colors and concepts that I can't get to with journalism or even creative nonfiction. But I think we're saying the same things to our readers: listen, experience, remember, honor.
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Conway, South Carolina
Dan Albergotti, I must admit, first caught my attention when he selected my second collection of poems, Farewell, My Lovelies, for review in Alabama Writers Forum, about which you’ll hear more in the final piece in this series. Albergotti’s was the most psychologically astute reading I received, eerily more revealing of me, I’ve come to think, than the poems themselves when I was writing them and even after seeing them in print. So of course I snapped up his book, which won a publication prize named for my first editor, Al Poulin, Jr. Reading Albergotti’s poems elated me; indeed, I felt that it was a sign of downright grace that this ranging yet restrained sensibility had turned itself in the direction of my own work a few years ago.
My path has been strangely circuitous. I grew up unhappily in Florence, South Carolina. I often call that a “cruel historical irony.” The irony? The Albergotti family can be traced back to origins in Florence, Italy. My hometown is not the sister-city of Firenze; in fact, it may be its cultural antithesis.
Words helped. I found escape in the stories and poems I was assigned to read in middle school. They provided alternative worlds to live in for a while, and almost always the alternative was better. It wasn’t long before I was trying to create such worlds myself. My teen poetry was as dreadful, I’m sure, as most. But even at that age I understood that poetry was much grander than anyone’s whining. Coleridge and Keats had already taught me that.
I managed to get out of Florence, but not by very far. I earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English at Clemson, then a PhD at South Carolina. And the whole time, I only took one creative writing course despite the fact that I continued to write poems regularly—not as a pastime, but as the central work of my life.
Here we come to the part of the story where I must acknowledge that I’m one lucky bastard. After the PhD, and after five years of teaching in English departments in Tuscaloosa and Auburn, Alabama, I looked in the mirror and saw that I was not a critic, nor was meant to be. (Is it too perfectly Dantean that I was 35 years old when I found myself in this darkened wood?) I was fortunate at the time to be encouraged by a very dear friend to pursue poetry for real, and I applied to MFA programs in creative writing. I say I’m a lucky bastard because I ended up at the perfect program (UNC- Greensboro), having unwittingly prepared myself to make the most of it by studying poetry with a breadth and depth only two graduate degrees could provide. This unusual sequence (MA to PhD to MFA) wasn’t planned, but it worked out perfectly for me.
And now I return to the strange circuitousness of the path. After the MFA, I landed a teaching job at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, less than 55 miles from Florence. That’s where I am now, Associate Professor in the Department of English and editor of the online literary journal Waccamaw. My first collection, The Boatloads, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize in 2007 and was published by BOA Editions in 2008. It’s strange to have returned to an area so near my childhood home, but I’m happy in Conway. And I continue to be happy creating other worlds through poems. I rarely visit Florence.
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