Appalachian Poetry

Marita Garin, the editor of the new SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN POETRY anthology that I introduced on my last post, has just emailed me a good comment about Rob's observation in the ACT yesterday that some of the anthology poems sounded as if coming from the bottom of a TVA lake.

"Another thought about the TVA lake issue (or talking ghosts): one distinctive thing about poetry, to me, is that when it goes deep enough, it becomes universal, and that, to me, means that it can speak to people in many other places as well as having a timeless quality to it. Many of the poems in the collection work on that level. And human nature is pretty much the same everywhere."

So, speaking as if from under a TVA lake is not such a terrible thing for a poet, especially if one can go deep enough into one's subject. I remember a Scottish singer (Archie Fisher?) once saying that the old songs are like ghosts waiting for living voices to fill them. Perhaps poetry is like that, too, and our own living voices, whether internal or spoken aloud, make the poems come alive yet again as we enter them. For anyone drawn to Appalachian culture and lore, the old ballads and stories do seem to be waiting for us to reclaim them. So many of our contemporary mountain writers are bringing those old "voices" back to life, finding them as contemporary as those that speak out of the t.v. screen or from You Tube.