Loyal Jones presented these observations and memories for the annual Jim Wayne Miller Lecture at the Appalachian Writers Workshop, Hindman, Kentucky, July 2001.
Alliteration is a literary device which calls us to attention, though it may not convey as much information as we would like. Jim Wayne Miller was from Leicester, North Carolina, pronounced Lee-cester by some natives. A luminist is an artist who studies the effects of light on colored objects. Of course, what is poetry-or any art-but the shedding of light on things? And what is a writer but one who absorbs and uses the stuff of his or her life? I chose this alliteration as part of my hope to shed a little more light on Jim Wayne's career.
Jim Wayne and I were friends and colleagues for a good many years. We both studied English at Berea College (as did Jim's wife Mary Ellen), and we shared a lot of interests in the region. I inveigled Jim Wayne into teaching at the annual workshop in Appalachian Studies at Berea for nearly twenty years, and we worked together on editing Cratis Williams' Southern Mountain Speech and preparing its 63 page "Glossary of Mountain Speech."
While I was working on my book about Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who had also lived in Leicester, Jim volunteered to do some interviews for me with people he knew, and in the process he found out that his father had been sweet on one of Bascom's daughters. Jim used to open some of his poetry talks by singing Bascom's version of the ballad "Little Margaret," and then connecting the ballad tradition with the whole business of poetry.
I also got Jim to do a wonderful talk on Appalachian humor at one of the festivals Billy Edd Wheeler and I hosted, and this talk is included in More Laughter In Appalachia. Over the years, he and I, sometimes with the ultimate raconteur, Cratis Williams, shared some of the world's best jokes, several that would have made Chaucer blush. I appreciated Jim's sense of humor as much as his poetic ability.
But of course these two things are related. Jim, quoting Arthur Koestler, compared humor to poetry. Humor is a "momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices." Poetry is the same thing, and metaphoric thinking is original thinking, Jim observed. And there is playfulness in both, as Jack Higgs, a great advocate of play, has probably told you a couple of times this week.
Jim liked stories that said something about human nature. One of his favorite jokes was of the old man with the shrewish wife:
One day the wife passes on and they prepare the coffin, put her in it, and pallbearers start with her to the church, but when they are going through the yard gate they bump the coffin against a post, and the old lady sits up.
They carry her back in the house and she lives for another ten years. Finally, she passes on for sure. They get out the coffin, put her in it, and again the pallbearers start for the church. When they get near the gate, the old man cautions, "Now boys, watch out for that post."
Another reflection on religion:
A man staggers home from a knife fight, bleeding. He remembers a verse from the Bible, Ezekial 16:6, that's supposed to stop blood. He asks his wife to fetch the Bible, but she says, "Why, Robert, they ain't no Bible on the place." He says, "I've told you and told you to get one." She says, "Well, we never did need one until right now."
Jim loved local language and found a lot of humor and a sort of common sense in overheard comments, such as one he attributed to Cormac McCarthy. Somebody asks McCarthy where a mutual acquaintance is and he replies, "I think he's dead, or maybe he's teaching English."
Here are some misuses, or creative uses, of language which Jim collected: Commenting on a spell of cold weather a man mentions the "windshield factor."
A woman talking of her sick husband, says, "He's real sick. They've got him in the insensitive care unit."
Another woman comments that in school she never learned to "diaphram" sentences.
A preacher, telling the story of Jonah, says "The whale came up under Jonah and engulped him."
And Jim noted Yogi Berra's comment that, "Toots Shores is so crowded that nobody goes there anymore."
Jim probably knew this riddle told by Judge Felix Alley of western North Carolina, where Jim and I grew up. "What's the difference among the Prince of Wales, a bald-headed man, a young monkey, and an orphan child? Answer: the Prince of Wales is the heir apparent, the bald-headed man has no hair apparent, the monkey has a hairy parent, and the orphan child ain't got nary parent."
Jim saw all sorts of poetic and humorous opportunities in the local speech of the region. In The Wisdom of Folk Metaphor: The Briar Conducts a Laboratory Experiment, he has some fun with folk sayings and also with academe. Three sayings, "You might as well have lectured to as many fence posts," or "a stump," or "the side of a barn" lead the Briar to get a grant to do an experiment, the crux of which was this:
He proposed to impart to a stump, some fenceposts, and a barn the same materials his sophomores were to learn, then, at the end of the instructional term, to test both groups, make his inferences, publish, and await the consequences.... He found no attendance-achievement correlation, so dear to some. The barn, the fenceposts and the stump presented the perfect record for two months. The sophomores, thirty-nine in number, were seldom in attendance en-masse; only two attended every class. The mean for absences was twelve per member. Yet, the fenceposts, barn and stump's raw scores averaged only three-tenths of a percent lower than the median for all sophomores.
And there was more. Jim also studied language and wrote about it, for examples, the "Introduction" to Williams' Southern Mountain Speech and an article in North Carolina Folklore (May 1969), "TheVocabulary and Methods of Raising Burley Tobacco in Western North Carolina." The same vocabulary he wrote about in the latter appears in several of his poems, such as, "Hanging Burley," and "Burning Tobacco Beds." This fascination with local speech is evident throughout his poetry. Perhaps the best example is in "Land and Language." He started by saying that people move to new houses in town, and they put on new clothing.
But the country of coves and ridges lives on in their language. Their talk becomes a landscape where words glint like tin-topped barns on September afternoons ... Still at home in their talk, they light a shuck ... Take two rows at a time. Hoping to make it home by the edge of dark. Thunder is still a wagon crossing a bridge. Their latchstring's always out. And if you come early it must be to borrow fire. But light down. If there's not room, they'll hang you on a nail. If George's wife is going to have a baby, his bees are about to swarm ... And in the swirling storm of new sensations words melt-firedog, milkgap, singletree, sundad- like snowflakes on the tips of children's tongues.
Jim and I corresponded over newspaper articles in which young writers had
lost the language of an older generation. A Louisville Courier-Journal reporter,
on horse pulling contests, used the word "towbar" instead of singletree or
doubletree to describe how the horses were hooked to the sled. Another, reporting
on Federal Judge Edward Johnstone's suggestion regarding two ways Kentucky
might reform its prisons, wrote that he had said, "Either way it will be a
hard road to hoe." Johnstone grew up on a farm, had hoed many a hard row and
was fond of saying to obfuscating lawyers, "Come up out of the bushes."
Jim was a long-time friend and traveling companion of James Still, and they
shared a love of local language and expression. He borrowed material from Still's
Wolfpen Notebooks:
- These shoes I'm wearing were so tight when I first bought them I had to wear them a while before I could put them on.
- He's got pretty good sense, but he acts the fool so much you can't tell it.
- Your garden is getting away from you. If you don't hoe it you'll soon have to buy a snake rake.
Jim sometimes taught folklore in his department at Western Kentucky University (Intercultural Studies and Folklore), and he knew all of the old superstitions. In "The Briar Sermon," he wrote,
Feller over close to where I live Wanted some little trees dug up And planted in a row beside his house. Tried to hire the Johnson boys, his neighbors, But they were too scared to do it, didn't believe In digging up cedar trees; they'd always heard You'd die whenever the trees got tall enough For their shadow to cover your grave. Get somebody else, They said. Get old Jim Brown and Tom Brown. They're educated, don't believe in nothin.
Perhaps his best-known poem, and I think his favorite, "Meeting," is from Dialogue With A Dead Man, his remembrance of his dead grandfather, and how they used to "hill up" potatoes, one on each side of the row, and it speaks of another superstition:
My shadow was my partner in the row. He was working the slick-handled shadow of his hoe When out of the patch toward noon there came the sound Of steel on steel two inches underground- As if our hoes had hooked each other on that spot. My shadow's hoe must be of steel, I thought, And where my chopping hoe came down and struck, Memory rushed like water out of rock. "When two strike hoes," I said, "it's always sign They'll work the patch together again sometime. An old man told me that the last time ever We worked this patch and our hoes rang together." Delving there with my hoe, I half-uncovered A plowpoint, worn and rusted over. "The man I hoed with last lies under earth, his plowpoint and his saying of equal worth." My shadow, standing by me in the row, Waited, and while I rested, raised his hoe.
Among the many things I like about Jim's poetry is how much humor is there. Some poets, as you may have noticed, can get pretty dolesome. There isn't a laugh in a carload of their poems. Now, I realize matters that most would find more important than humor, but he managed to put in a humorous turn of phrase or thought anywhere he could, because he knew what the folklorist Alan Dundes has preached, that humor is serious because it is always about serious matters.
He was not above poking fun at his friends. Some of you may not have read "Wendell Berry Comes Up From the Fields In Port Royal, Kentucky." (Wendell, by the way, has a wonderful sense of humor, but he is mostly known as a very serious person.)
Twlce thls day of planting and sowing
His passion for the earth overcame him and he
Has ravished a hollow tree and a wet weather spring.
Being conversant with trees, stones and many
Other mute things, he apologized in both instances.
Toward noon he put his hand into the dark earth
And something responded darkly,
It was another hand
There in the earth that clasped his own and shook it
In a neighborly fashion.
Startled, he withdrew his hand
And walked down to the river.
Looking into the water,
He saw an ancestral face gazing up and with sudden
Recognition, like lightening illuminating the night sky,
He knew the face to be his own ...
[S]eated at a sturdy table [he] gives thanks to the coming
Dark before bending over a supper of country light, on which
He dines thoughtfully, recollecting how, this morning,
When he stood long in one place watching
A flight of heron, his feet had grown to the
Ground and he had torn himself away with great
Difficulty and a snapping of roots.
Like the eyes of a potato, the pores of his skin
Sprout in the dark and so before going to bed he
Trims sprouts from his hands and feet with a pocket knife.
Jim also saw possibilities for poems in everyday happenings, and he liked to glean newspaper headlines for ideas. He knew that poets and headline writers are similar in that they try to encapsulate a story or idea in a minimum of words. He also knew that both sometimes fail to communicate what they intended, because perhaps half of common readers have a literal cast of mind, so that irony, or satire, or whimsy don't work with them. Jim takes this for granted and he kind of turns this phenomenon around to write "Small Farms Disappearing in Tennessee." His "Miss Hattie Mae, Aged 92, Dies in the Quality Extended Care Facility" no doubt came out of an obituary page. Reading about the colorful chair maker Chester Cornett led him to write "The Briar Losing Touch With His Traditions." Seeing John Cohen's film, "The End of An Old Song," about ballad singer Dillard Chandler, inspired "He Sings Ballads"
He guess he knew a hundred of the old songs ... The Knight in the Road, the
Turkish Lady and such like. And when he sang, the scholars gathered round.
They said he was a marvel, a great find. It was hard to believe there was anyone
like him left. But when he'd leave the homeplace down in Madison And go to
Asheville and find work as a gardener At some of the fine houses there, his
neck turned red. When he drank in the bars down on Lexington Avenue, And sang
the country songs right off the jukebox, They saw nothing but white trash.
At Berea College, we talk a lot about liberal education, about the truth setting
you free, and such like. In the 1950s, we had a course that Jim and Mary Ellen
and I took called The Humanities. It was designed to give us a liberal dose
of high culture, and the first section of that course was "Sentient Man" (this
was before political correctness flowered). "Sentient Man" dwelt on our senses
and feeling, the idea that through our ability to sense and appreciate everything
around us we become truly human. Well,they didn't want us to appreciate everything
too much. This was a college with high standards and some fear of the unwashed,
that is the folk. This is a fear at all liberal arts institutions-that the
folks will come over the walls like the Visigoths and dilute the finer things.
Jim knew that liberal arts education is not liberal. It has its canon, and
it ignores a lot of human experience that doesn't fit the canon. Jim Wayne
Miller certainly embraced literary and artistic culture as taught at Berea
and Vanderbilt, where he did his graduate work, but he instinctively knew there
was a lot more to be learned outside cloistered walls. He endorsed, for example,
Indiana University folklorist Richard Dorson's thesis that the liberal arts
cannot be thought of as truly liberal until they include the oral traditions
of the great masses of humanity. Jim Wayne, as I knew him, personally and through
his writings, represented the best of truly liberal education. He was interested
in everything, and he had the ability to bring disparate things together- metamorphical
thinking-to make sense of the sometimes baffling lives that we all live. Jim
was the exact opposite of the school superintendent I heard about who had three
or four master's degrees, an Ed.D. and a Ph.D. When the school board fired
him, a citizen inquired of the board chairman, "How could you fire such a well-educated
feller? "The chairman replied, "He was educated way beyond his intelligence."
Jim Wayne Miller was educated way past the degrees he had earned. And he used
all of what he had learned to make art. He was truly a sentient and a thinking
man.
(With thanks to Mary Ellen Miller and Joyce Dyer for helping to assemble material
for this talk.)
