DEEP WATER: Interview excerpts

Prior to my arriving at Lincoln Memorial University for the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival this weekend, Sara West, a student and promising young poet, asked me a series of questions for an interview to be published in LMU's The Emancipator. Here are some excerpts.

1. Where does the inspiration for your poetry come from?

What we call inspiration can come from just about anywhere; the important thing for a writer, or anybody, for that matter, is to try to stay attentive to what is happening both outside and within. Having said that, however, I can't deny that certain images, memories, lines from books I've read, slants of light, call to me in ways I can't ignore. I grew up surrounded by a legion of live oaks, hogs, cows, and cornfields, not to mention many cousins and other members of a large extended family. The landscape of that farm is probably the bedrock of my imagination, or certainly a huge part of it. The smells of it, the sounds, the stories rising up out of it, not to mention the growing sense as I grew older that it all was vanishing, that I would never be able to go back to the way it--and I--had been. At the same time I was in love with the mountains that we visited in the summer, the N.Ga. Blue Ridge where my father's family lived.

My grandmother had wanted to return to her home place before she died but never did. I knew I wanted to live in the mountains after graduate school, which I guess is a good example of that inner tug at one's attention I mentioned above. I've lived here in WNC since '68, and this Appalachian landscape has become as important to my imagination as that long ago S. Georgia one. The two seem to be partners in my imagination.

2. What part of the writing process do you most enjoy and why? (i.e., first drafting, revision, editing, poetry readings?)

How can one resist that first excitement of a rough draft, the fire of that first appearance of words that seem to be moving ahead of you, drawing you toward ....what? And who cares? The important thing is to follow as long as the verbal energy keeps uncoiling. I must say, though, that I enjoy the fruitful revision that comes later as a poem becomes more and more apparent in its shape and cadence. I do not enjoy staring at a poem in despair and calling that revision. Then it's time to get up and get out of the house, take a walk, listen to loud music, or do something with the hands, maybe knead bread, dig in the garden. Anything to let the poem lie in the darkness and do what it will with your imagination. Good revision brings the initial excitement of the draft back each time one returns to work on the poem. I don't enjoy editing. Write with fire, edit with ice, as a friend once said. One must be cold-hearted in the editing process, and frankly I don't like putting on ice-glasses to read my own work. It scares me. What if what I thought was brilliant turns out to be full of holes? Poetry readings can produce a real high, if they go well, if I feel a connection with the audience. And it's my job as a reader to make that connection, to sense where the audience is and bring my work to that place. I enjoy reading poetry aloud, whether mine or someone else's. Actually, I prefer reading someone else's. Readings, if done well, do so much to re-vitalize that connection with language, and I've had people come up after a reading to say, "I didn't think I liked poetry but I really could see what was happening in..." and what follows is some connection made with that listener's own experience.

3. When and how did you realize you wanted to delve into poetry?

I began with writing fiction, no doubt because the women models before me were women--Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, for example. Of course there was Emily Dickinson but I just couldn't feel much connection with her, being a New Englander, so terse, so, well, tight-lipped. I didn't know of any Southern women poets as I headed out. My first stories were derivative and to be honest, I really didn't enjoy writing them. I just thought I was supposed to be writing them. Fortunately I had a professor my senior year in college who introduced me to some poets who made me want to write poetry, including some John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren; he urged me to begin to draw on my own experience, my own landscape and memories, and that opened the way into poetry for me.

4. Do you use poetry more as a medium for personal expression or a way to address deeper issues? Poems begin for most of us as personal expression, because one must begin where one is, after all, but from that beginning the poem moves by the sheer nature of poetry itself into the deeper issues. The currents beneath the shimmering "personal" surface lead the imagination downward to the riverbed where the treasures lie--the music and imagery of our inner lives that never stops unfolding, no matter what is going on above the surface. I have difficulty splitting hairs here, because the personal leads to those deeper currents, if we are attentive and heed what is going on around us. There's no way I can avoid the depths if I let the flow of the poem carry me, no matter what triggered it.

Listening to Home: The Poetry of Lisa Parker

I met Lisa Parker several years back, when I came to Hindman Settlement School to direct the poetry workshop during the summer writing conference. I was the one being directed, though, as I soon realized. Young poets like Lisa, and not so young ones like Steve Holt and Jane Hicks, were doing most of the directing, bringing me their poems day after day in the workshop and convincing me that in the coal country of Kentucky there was a powerful lot of good writing going on. Top on that list was a young poet named Lisa Parker!

Since then, Lisa has won her share of literary awards, been published in national journals, worked in New York and Washington, DC. No matter where she goes, however, she carries her mountain landscape and its voices with her. Not to mention her mountain language. A people's language does seem to rise up from the leafmold, the rocks, and the moss, as Seamus Heaney claimed. The poems I've chosen illuminate that truth.

Lisa's first book, This Gone Place, published last year by Motes Books, received the Weatherford award in poetry.

Backslid North

I.

I am filled with words like drowned bodies.
Just beneath the water’s surface, they bloat
indignantly. I see their watchful eyes -
pine and mud-colored like mine.
I hear the soft gurgle I’ve reduced them to.


II.

Granddaddy told me once,
Don’t get above your raising.
I call him often to practice my self,
to remember that I am all about
holler and giggin, heared tell of and sigodlin.

I am taking steps.
I talk of craving pork rinds.
I drawl hard.
I write this poem out of spite.

III.

I am full of poems that lie
the language right out of me.
I’ve whitewashed my South Appalachian
to an understandable hue, put those regional words
in jars with lace lids and waited, breath held,
for the scholarly nods. That approval
is almost enough to tolerate knowing
that between what I am and what I write,
something is rotting.

Penitence Enough

If I thought it was penitence enough
for turning my back,
for this fraudulence I wear
like a pond film over my skin,
I’d return home,
and lay deep
in that Old Dominion soil.
I’d pull the hollyhocks close,
sprout pennyroyal - pungent mint
and purple bloom - from my teeth,
my eyes full of nothing
but the backs of Blue Ridge steeps,
ears tipped with corn tassels
and calamus root and nothing
but the roll of the Shenandoah,
the ring of a banjo carried down
on mountain wind.
I would stand still and long
as August heat
till the kudzu took me over,
wound itself through me,
anchored me to that land
I can still see under my nails
after months of scrubbing.
I’d press my face to the cool damp
of the cannery walls,
my knees against the porch boards.
I’d open veins and spill
against the sycamore roots,
give myself over,
give myself back,
and lay me down
in that red Virginia clay -
if I thought it would have me.

Body And Earth

for Clyde Whitt

When I was small, I slept
in Granddaddy's arms, my head
against his chest, dozing
to the rhythmic wheezing
my mama called Black Lung.

He muscled his pickaxe and shovel
into the black guts of the mountains
for twenty-five years, stooped ten inches
beneath the safety timbers
that held the earth.

We sit on the porchswing,
whittling twigs into smaller twigs
while Grandma hums "Over In The Gloryland,"
dips old cornshucks into a mason jar of water,
soaking out the dry age, their brittle edges softening.
She bends them, pliant and fresh again with water,
twisting them into bright, yellow dolls.

I look at Granddaddy’s fingers, knuckled deep and bent
around his knife, lean against the sagging point of his shoulder
and listen to the steady huff and whistle of his breath – a sound
like mud daubers buzzing,
encased in their tunnels of dried earth.

Fear And A Country Breakfast

Chicken feed
swirls crazy in autumn wind,
buckshot of cornseed and gravel
in my eyes.
Grandma’s feet,
heavy in plastic-soled slippers,
crunch on feed and pebbles.
Her pastel flowered robe
brushes the ground,
swings into a squall of feathers.
My fingers,
nails full of hickory bark
from my desperate tree-clutch,
shove against my eardrums,
against the final snap -
like a maple twig in deep winter.
Grandma yawns her way
to the shed,
white feathers dangling from her hand -
twitching, still clucking insanely,
one finger around the axe handle, two,
one more yawn on the downswing.
After the dull thump of the axe,
the scratching claws
run over feed and gravel,
and where I run,
the spastic death legs
point, propel the blood-
soaked body in a staggering
chase, so close
to dancing, these
intricate circles
toward each other,
and always
Grandma kicks the head
to the cats
before I can see
if the eyes follow me.

First Southern Love, Done Right

First Southern love, when it’s with the raised-right,
still boy enough not to wanna wait,
man enough to do it right,
that’s the kind not suited to backseats.
No vinyl for this sweet zinnia,
no Lynrd Skynrd on the stereo or radio commercials
for A&P and Booth Feed; not when she can have
the sway and sway of a wheatfield
or the quiet of a hayloft. Mountains and valleys
can sneak her into coves of wild fieldgrass,
or overhangs of tulip poplars and sycamores
that blow across her skin and cool the sweat
where it stands.

It’s not about, I’ll call you some time.
It’s about the rounded rock he’ll pull,
smooth and cold from the riverbed, and wrap
in cattail fluff to hold against her
until the bleeding stops.
When it’s right, he won’t sit too close in church
or blush in front of her daddy.
They’ll wait, on slow simmer, until they can put
a valley or two between themselves and everyone,
find sun against their skin,
an audience of bluejays and cardinals,
and a river to swim in when being naked
is the only way to be.