Appalachian Heritage - New Poems by Four Appalachian Masters

REVIEW ESSAY
New Poems by Four Appalachian Masters

By George Garrett

Fred Chappell. Backsass: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 54 pages. $24.95 in cloth. $16.95 in trade paperback.

I will not mention the Roman School of Poets
which flourished in the 1970s in Rome,
Georgia,
nor the Culinary Movement
which declared poetry should contain
no raw ingredients
such substances lacking sophistication
-- Fred Chappell, “The Nothing Which Is Not Poetry”

THROUGH HIS VARIOUS AND INNOVATIVE FICTION, his intelligent and sensitive criticism, and, above all, more than a dozen books of poems, Fred Chappell has earned an enviable place in the permanent contemporary literary hall of fame. He has done it all, speaking to us in many voices, some wildly funny and some deeply sad, and all fluently at ease. He is easy with the elaborate and intricate verse forms of English and of several other languages, living and dead; and he can just as well do the jumpdown and jive of today’s barnyard and sidewalk argot. All of this virtuosity is practiced by Chappell without losing the pitch and timbre of his hometown Appalachian accent. Ole Fred’s dedicated readers--and count me as one of them ever since the beginning when he brought out The World Between the Eyes (1971)--tend not merely to delight in his art, but to rejoice in it. Backsass is brand spanking new and no exception to the rule. No exception, either, to another rule--that with each collection Chappell is always trying something new, testing and teasing himself with new challenges.

Bracketed by two hard-edged, funny poems, “Hello” and “Hello Once More,” ostensibly spoken by Chappell’s smartmouth answering machine, the thirty-six other poems are colloquial, utterly contemporary. As poet and critic R. S. Gwynn has noted, the heart of Backsass is to be found in two superb imitations of satires by Juvenal: the seventh, “The Sorrows of Intellectual Life,” and the eleventh, “A Thanksgiving Invitation.” The other shorter poems are equally satirical and jokey, anecdotal, sometimes boldly bawdy and sometimes riddled with sorrow. To try to describe them would be as hopeless and embarrassing as trying to explain a joke. Reader, let these poems happen to you. Nobody needs to tell you when to laugh and when to cheer.

What a critic might do without interfering with the experience is to point out that for a very long time American poets have been trying to find a way to include and incorporate the ordinary, often “unpoetic” spoken language and the ordinary things of our troubled times under the umbrella of poetry. There are many poets who can summon up the high style, the poetry of eloquence and elegance (and Chappell is one of them). Far fewer who can flash and seize the present moment like a candid snapshot. Berryman, for instance, tried his dead level best in Dream Songs and so did Lowell with late sonnets and confessions, and you can go back more and point to Sandburg, Masters, William Carlos Williams, Merrill Moore, even e. e. cummings. Because the language is constantly changing and the materials are evanescent, if not expendable, it has to be done over and over again, at least by each generation if not every decade of American poets. It is especially a problem for Southern poets whose tradition for a long time favored formal and poetic utterance, leaving to prose the territory of narrative and the vernacular. Chappell has many times demonstrated his mastery of the eloquent and high style. He has also proved his perfect ear for our spoken rhythms and lingo. Here in Backsass he pushes the vernacular envelope giving us poems about such untouchable subjects as (among many other things): politics (“Down With Democracy,” “Losing It,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “I Suppose War Is Okay”); religion (“No, Said St. Peter,” “My Reinvention of the Peach,” “Lazarus”); pornography (“Well Hung,” “A Thanksgiving Invitation,” “Clothing Eunices”); with a few salvos fired at literary critics, real estate developers, the pain of a hangover and the poetry of John Ashbery. Where else will you ever find poet and poems able to contain a multitude of things like answering machines, cell phones, TV, Earl Grey tea, Priority Mail, checkbooks and credit cards, Gomer Pile, Brooks Brothers, John Gotti and the Supreme Court, not to mention the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and don’t forget a “double cheese whopper hold the pickles.” All these cheek by jowl with Biblical and classical figures, including the Delphic Oracle “who is the Mother of all answering machines.”

Fred Chappell is a true magician. He has a wand that allows him to turn anything, be it ever so humble, into poetry. Readers will be charmed and delighted. Other poets will say thank you, Fred, for pointing out new directions and giving us a helpful shove.

David Huddle. Grayscale: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 56 pages. $24.95 in cloth. $16.95 in trade paperback.

Here is where they played three thousand
croquet games, some that lasted well beyond
twilight and on into such summer darkness
as arouses a yard full of lightning bugs.
-- David Huddle, “Huddle Brothers; Ivanhoe, Virginia; Circa 1963"

Like Fred Chappell, David Huddle has produced first-rate fiction. Beginning with Paper Boy (1979), he has now published five collections of poems. The essence of Grayscale is in its diversity of forms and subjects. Huddle gives us a richness of verse and stanzaic forms, ranging from (new wine in old bottles) the elaborate and subtle rhymed couplets of “April Saturday, 1960" to what might be called freewheeling sonnets, poems like “1955" and “Inheritance,” through a shuffled deck of forms he has invented, or anyway established as his own--e.g. “Circus,” “Pornography in Hell,” “Curse Poem,” to “concrete” poems, visual pictures like “Serpentine Wall” and some of “The Penguin Sonatas.” Just so, he touches on all sorts of subjects: poems of memory of his youth and family in southwest Virginia and of his immediate family in Vermont where he came to live and to teach, to highly imaginative and complex sequences like “The Poem, The Snow, Jane Goodall, the Vase of Daffodils” (this one a series of quatrains furnished with functional footnotes!) and the elaborate, almost “metaphysical” song and dance of “The Penguin Sonatas.” There are clear and simple poems set side by side with poems that demand the reader’s full attention and focus. In short, Grayscale is a pyrotechnical, virtuoso performance by a poet at the peak of his art and craft.

All the above would be more than enough to recommend Grayscale to any reader who cares about poetry. But there is more than that. Here is a poet who can make you care not just about poetry and these poems, but also, and more important finally, the places, people, things that are summoned up and recorded. How does he do that? How does he bring all that variety together? Partly by magic, sure, the grace beyond the reach of art, but chiefly through the voice and sensibility of the poet. Huddle can handle all kinds of voices; he’s an able ventriloquist, but, like the Mayor of Oz, the man behind the curtain, he has a central voice, an Appalachian voice. Except for moments of earned eloquence, he sticks close to his native speech and speech rhythms. Could he be criticized for being a bit too prosaic? Sure, he could be, but that critic would be wrong. Huddle, as Fred Chappell has noted, writes in a language “as plain and sturdy and grainy as fresh carpentry.” What he makes of it is admirable and memorable. It ends in celebration:

Cancer took Mrs. Stephens
and later Melva,
and eventually even most
of downtown Wytheville, Virginia,

which must have something to do
with why I think you living

strangers need to know about the day
of long ago tawdry glory.
(“Public Place”)

R. T. Smith. Brightwood: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 64 pages. $22.95 in cloth. $15.95 in trade paperback.

Hogs slopped, corn shucked,
the supper dishes swiped
clean with a Dundee cloth,
we gathered in the yard
to gaze where the Starlight

Drive-In’s blank page
faced us. The towel mill’s
shuttles and spools were
almost still, no more linens
to bale or dye to spill.
-- R. T. Smith, “Starlight”

Like Fred Chappell and David Huddle, poet and editor (of Shenandoah) R. T. Smith likes to tell stories in verse and likes to tell them in the clean, clear and subtle music of the language that people we know might use to talk to themselves or each other. How does he lift this level of language into poetry? Like every poet, Smith has acquired and developed some habits. Like the very good poet that he is, he has some very good habits. For one thing, he creates a kind of steady ground bass of monosyllabic music, rich with echoes and every kind of internal rhyme. Into this context he introduces suddenly surprising words and images-- “The sun dandelioned/in the window behind her.” Or: “I could hear the gossip/whisper steady as a cradle.” Or, for example, how, in “Rough Russets,” he identifies the color of “a rabble of rough spuds” as being “red as Etruscan urns.” Or, take this one lifted from “Flat-Footing, Summer Evening, Rockbridge County, VA”: “The banjo man’s picks are flashing split silver/twilight fast on faster water.” He loves the taste of words on the tongue, the titles of old hymns, of country tunes and dances, the names of places, people, plants and products (Keds and Lucky Strikes and Skoal, Kleenex, Tri-x film, his Dell laptop, a Civil War soldier’s Enfield, “souped up Chevys,” Schlitz, “a longneck Sol with lime,” a Bergonzi violin and “the whistle of the southbound Crescent.”) He is free and easy with his Biblical allusions and gracefully manages, along with everything else to sneak in, equally appropriate for his (our) Southern culture, a few classical references. We encounter, among others, Anchises and Aeneas, Tacitus and Heraclitus. The subjects of his art are well described, by the enthusiastic Lee Smith, as coming “from deep country, from things like working in the mill or on a highway crew; flat-footing on a summer evening in Rockbridge County, Virginia; long ago memories of time spent in a country store or on a family vacation in the Smokies; gardening, fishing, cutting down a sweet gum tree. . . .Smith has created a whole world for us here, a real and ordinary world shot through with insight and significance.”

There is one editorial statement on the book jacket that I would question. I know that we aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the flap-copy, for better or worse, is part of the package and can influence our appreciation of a book. “Written in the gothic tradition of James Dickey’s Buckdancer’s Choice, R. T. Smith’s latest volume of poetry. . .” Try as I will, I can’t see much evidence of the example and influence of Dickey. The publisher may think so; even R. T. Smith may think so, and he could do a lot worse in choosing a model of excellence. But, aside from the sharing of country subject matter and narrative power, which they share also with a good many other Southern poets, Dickey and Smith play a very different kind of music. Never mind. Brightwood can stand on its own, in nobody’s shadow. Brightwood is Smith’s twelfth book of poems and stands as his finest work to date. Which is saying something, because, from the outset of his career he was noticed and known as a poet of promising importance. In the thirty-nine new poems that make up Brightwood, he has passed beyond promise and potential and into the honorable status of major achievement.

Charles Wright. Buffalo Yoga. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. viii-78 pages. $20.00 in cloth.

I take down the thin book of All I Will Ever Know,
And find them, the one entry,
Three tiny words, three poised and tail-lifted scorpions.
-- Charles Wright, “Buffalo Yoga Coda II”

Divided into five subheads or sections and consisting of some thirty poems, long and short, Buffalo Yoga becomes, as its bits and pieces come together, a meditation on death and resurrection/reincarnation, structured around the long title poem. Set on Wright’s Montana ranch, “Buffalo Yoga” gradually reveals itself to be a classical elegy on the death of a young poet, his former student Tom Andrews (1961-2001):

Chortle, and stuttering half-lilt, of an unknown bird.
They are burying Tom in West Virginia in a couple of days.
Butterfly yo-yoing back and forth above the short flowers.

The other poems, set in past and present, in China and Italy and Charlottesville, Virginia, though various in style and subject, are shadowed by the tone of this poem.

With sixteen collections of poems, two books of translations and two critical works to his credit, and having earned an impressive bouquet of honors and awards (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Translation Award and more) Wright has been the subject of serious critical attention and becomes a special case among this quartet of distinguished Appalachian poets. Or so it at first may seem. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, raised mostly in East Tennessee, educated at Davidson College, living in Virginia since 1983 (he has also been at home in Italy, California, and Montana), Wright is officially and unquestionably a native son. And, in recent years as his poems have become more and more outwardly and visibly autobiographical, the home place, its history and geography, has become more and more an integral part of his complex, nuanced and sophisticated art. Complex? Consider this, the best that Helen Vendler could come up with to describe Wright’s poems: “They cluster, aggregate, radiate; they add layers, like pearls.” And here critic Jay Parini gives it his best shot: “His densely imagistic poems, with their inescapable rhythms and insistent musicality, explore possibilities for a spiritual life in a world overwhelmed by concrete objects.” The poet, himself, tells his own story, announces his credo, just as he should, more simply and directly with images:

As for me,
I’m ringed like a tree, stealthily, year by year, moving outward.

It is true that Wright has, as all poets do, his own pantheon of heroes and influences who helped define his art. Ezra Pound, Dante, Eugenio Montale, Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko, Thomas Chatterton, and a crew of ancient and honorable Chinese poets, are some of his. In interviews he has jokingly called his poems the offspring of the mystical marriage of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Wright discovered, developed, established and exploited his own voice and special form--a long line, at once eloquent, elegant, and allusive, apparently free and easy, yet freighted with intense, closely observed and sometimes surprising images. As here (“There is a Balm in Gilead”): “Cars trundle like glowworms across the bridge, angel-eyed/Silver grilled./The fish in the waters of heaven gleam like knives.”

All the above qualities would seem likely to make Wright odd man out in this group of poets; but, as ever and always, first impressions can fool you. Though his publisher, on the flap jacket, proudly calls him a “Tennessee poet,” he has never been known as only a “regional writer.” (Nor were the other three.) Wright’s regional roots have been mostly ignored by critics or, anyway, deemed irrelevant. But by now, certainly ever since he created “the trilogy of trilogies,” The Appalachian Book of the Dead, it is clear that his home base, facing the Blue Ridge horizon from Charlottesville (and allowing for good, productive times logged at the Montana ranch), has been at once the source and essential center of his poems. Distinct as his work may be, Wright nevertheless shares much in general and particular with the others. Shares, for example, Fred Chappell’s (lightly camouflaged) intellectual and literary sophistication. Shares Huddle’s eager hunger for new and adventurous poetic forms. Shares, sees, and celebrates a common landscape and heritage and a joy in its people, places, things with R. T. Smith. Like Smith, Wright has long been moved by country music, and in this volume his poem, “Arrivederci Kingsport,” is a little celebratory masterwork on that subject.

There are differences, of course. Wright is less concerned with straightforward narrative. It’s there, all right, though most often it is an inward and spiritual story. Wright is not famous for being a funny poet, though chuckles abound in his witty aphorisms and surprising allusions. And who else dares to lay on, especially in the elegiac context of a book like this, off-the-wall titles like “Sun-Saddled, Coke-Copping, Bad Boozing Blues” (an elegy for Tim McIntire), “Little Apocalypse,” “Charles Wright and the 940 Locust Avenue Heraclitean Rhythm Band,” “Little Apokatastasis,” “The Gospel According to St. Someone”?

Make me invisible to critics and scholars
and make them invisible to me

for that is the kingdom of heaven.
-- Fred Chappell, “The Nothing Which is Not Poetry”

Ranking is not the name of the game. Not my game. There is, finally, a democratic equality in the making of poems. Tastes change and the measures of accomplishment change in time, some as quick as the blink of an eye. But having said that, and sincerely believing it, too, I must also allow that by any standards, old or new, these four poets are master artists. I have to announce that this season, one that has given us new work by these four Appalachian poets, is one to be grateful for, one that will be well remembered.

Aren’t we the lucky ones?