The Southern Review articles from September 1994

The Southern Review archives from September 1994

Notes on an unpublished Robert Penn Warren essay.
September 22, 1994... On March 21, 1990, while in the King Library at the University of Kentucky looking at the manuscripts of Robert Penn Warren's two early, unpublished novels, I opened folder 129 in box 16 and found myself staring at 15 pages (10 pages of...

Episode in the dime store. (essay)
September 22, 1994... I have just seen in a magazine(*) three photographs - three stages of an action. In the first a young white man is taking his seat at a lunch counter where Negro students are staging a sit-down protest. In the second the young white man is...

The gathering of the Fugitives: a recollection.
September 22, 1994... "I have a friend who says that the age of the printed book is over. He says he's already given it a name - he says the Gutenberg period is finished. [laughter] Television is taking over. On the other hand, if he is right, and there is perhaps a...

Contemporary Southern poetry and critical practice.
September 22, 1994... Contrasts between recent southern poetry and verse associated with the major contemporary poetic movements - Beat, Confessional, Deep Image, Black Mountain, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, and others - are particularly relevant to the debate about poetry and...

Katydids sewanee. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Some night this rasping of green wings will metamorphose to propellers pluck this village off the mountain peeling peeling topsoil rhododendrons from ravines lift the slowly waking deer and echo fawn peeling pulling plucking up the...

The diary. (poem)
September 22, 1994... 1. Too much like myself, it listens critically. Edits, though seldom rereads. In the margins: here incoherent. Like me, it mumbles. The more I "Speak up, girl!" the less it says outright, wants in fact not to say. 2. ...

Homecoming. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Was it the tree or the wind that said something, a clatter of leaves and water as the gate shut, a rush of explanations? The walk listened flatly, hardening its heart; at the front door deadlock stiffed the key, no shower of words, and the...

Last hours. (poem)
September 22, 1994... for Tom Not Stonewall Not Longstreet commanders of your endless enlistment on both Sides of the Civil War but mostly South I have come to tell yoU, Tom, That Longstreet has failed and, as well, Melville, Who feared him, has failed, even...

Lines to a past love. (poem)
September 22, 1994... These are dead: the otter of our thaws, the later and dangerous badger, the arboreal cat in the snowy branches of silence. Even the soul's mouse, hesitant with its stanzas of footprints, is a scatter of transparent bones. The hawk flies with...

The widow speaking. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Morning comes in on strings of light, the white, empty bodies of dream flapping noiselessly, the years scrubbed and nameless as garments at a yard sale. I know about the coffee cups: it matters which one I choose. Everything matters. I can...

Shaving my legs with Ockham's razor. (poem)
September 22, 1994... From the dream world of paradigms I took the water slide: a decade of realism Brings me back to William, his steady truth that the world proceeds case by case. Take my legs-winter pale, glowing like white neon. The long bone an arctic...

Midsummer. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Now I see this field of potato vine and asphodel is not as secret as I thought last night when we spread the white blanket under the blanket of stars, when we made love, made sex, made love, made the ground furrow under us as though ready for...

So long. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Pets of my childhood and our white house with the dandelioned yard, bordered by locust trees, sassafras, and wild cherry always swaying in the wind of our hill - of course lilacs and of course forsythia in spring, wild strawberries in summer,...

Pledge. (poem)
September 22, 1994... I pledge to resist the forces that seek to starve my body, to force my feet into shoes too narrow for anyone to walk in, refuse to hobble in skirts that hem and hold too tightly, rejecting the seductive whispers of cosmetics I...

First job: the Southern Sweets Sandwich Shop and Bakery. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Lillie Mae glows, she hates the word sweat, as she balances a platter of baked sweets over her head, showing me how to walk with grace even under the weight of minimum wage and a mountain of cookies, turnovers, and tarts that she blames for her...

The ornament. (poem)
September 22, 1994... I hated to think of her throwing that old shawl Over her shoulders and pulling her gum boots on To venture beneath the lackluster moon, Stooping out under her low lintel To search with a weak torch up the Galway road, Knocking on every cottage...

Delta funeral. (poem)
September 22, 1994... 1. Starbursts, bouquets, wreaths of browning daisies, gaudy chrysanthemums in October's hues - pumpkin, winesap, mottled maize-yellow - and a few wilted roses propped against the walls; nobody sitting on dozens of folding chairs;...

"...and tell the girls to pray for me." (poem)
September 22, 1994... I:1933-1944 My mother wanted to give me to You while I was still a child, and we went to church. Maybe she thought it was the only place you could be found. I had no opinion then, but liked the singing, and Anita Jean would be there,...

Sadness, an improvisation. (poem)
September 22, 1994... i Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents, Why were you so sad on porches, whispering? What great melancholies were loosed among our swings! As before a storm one hears the leaves whispering And marks each small change in the...

Narrative and lyric: structural corruption.
September 22, 1994... Stephen Dobyns has said that every lyric poem implies a narrative. What he means is a sequence of past events, left out of the poem, that brought the speaker to the present, intensified moment in the poem. Assuming the speaker is the poet,...

Homage to the thin man.
September 22, 1994... The Thin Man I indulge myself In rich refusals. Nothing suffices. I hone myself to This edge. Asleep, I Am a horizon. I don't know much about southern poetry as a genre, but there are a couple of southern poets whose work I have...

At home and abroad: Southern poets with passports and memory.
September 22, 1994... Today most poets support themselves by holding positions at colleges and universities. Origin plays second fiddle to opportunity; thus southern poets have left home to teach at Cornell, Utah, Oregon, Michigan, Hopkins, Harvard, Iowa, Irvine,...

James Dickey's poetry.
September 22, 1994... Let me enter the biographical mode, very briefly, to tell what I can remember about my first acquaintance with James Dickey. After four years in the military, I returned from France and was discharged in April of 1946. I had just turned thirty....

On Mobile Bay. (poem)
September 22, 1994... As I said, one could see pelicans at morning, trimming the water's edge, and smoothing out the sleep from my face with their sostenuto flight - a flock of six or seven, once, then a dozen, dipping down along a seam of algae and the buckling...

Tulips. (poem)
September 22, 1994... In winter, flowers in the window, mauve and cream and deep vermilion, heralding a mildness riding in with March, while winds deny it - tulips, amaryllis, palms in pots, as from some island of the mind assuming shape. Now in a mute surprise, ...

My wife: an ode. (poem)
September 22, 1994... My wife informs the dog, "He's written you a love poem. He won't write one for me." But Honey, you won't fetch tennis balls or bark at the effrontery of the refrigerator when it cycles on. And seldom do you freeze in a classic pointer's pose,...

Grandmomma's toenails. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Why do they curl like that? Shush, boy - you're not supposed to notice such things. Why not? It's rude. Why? It just is - that's why. And so I simply looked from the comer of my eye. Beneath her huge distended legs; beneath her even huger...

Lies. (poem)
September 22, 1994... In the real world of the fourth grade When we all marched into an empty room, One by one, next door, the second grade's Room taken over by the county nurse, Where the boys dropped their blue-overall Suspenders around their spindly legs And we...

Free grace at Rose Hill. (poem)
September 22, 1994... My uncle found it in a crater on Bloody Ridge and stepped off a troopship into Riverdale Baptist. I heard it off his tongue crackling like an open fire, Love is fire. And once in remote mountains at the church of a cousin, I heard that sizzle...

Heron blues. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Across the night clouds a wash of purple light, a sheen on the pavement and the brick storefronts turning pink -- Frontier Drugs, Zoo City Herbs, the painted windows of the Stockman's Bar. The whole town looks asleep. But say a stranger,...

Sleepless nights. (poem)
September 22, 1994... One night, wasted, I went back and climbed the fence, walked around the yard, pretending to mow the grass. I sang old songs, got loud, then afraid, and fell down under the willow beside the pond. The rock I'd fished off was there, and the gouge...

Even swap. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Between Ida and Inez, NC, we stopped to picnic on big continental rocks and water falling between wet trees, and it pleased me just to sit there, my hand around the wine bottle, my thinking Ida and Inez and Gretna Green! - and you perpetuating...

Keeping peace. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Three years, love, and the winds scatter you - those brothers their old mother kept in a bag - the burly north and charmed south, a piquant west and the strange east with his long pigtail and eyes like resplendent tilted moons, like the old...

Lingo. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Herodotus, embroiled in his story, tells how the Phoenicians lent war fleets to Greece & Egypt, how a flotilla eased like salmon in birth water & sailed the Red Sea, hoping to circumnavigate Africa around the Cape of Good Hope & along...

Chiaroscuro. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The leaves are so damn crimson here. Carnaval in my head... Robert Schumann calling for Clara. Am I really in Dusseldorf? Thinking of The saint of the inner light, I see the brownshirts searching Paul Klee's house, confiscating letters to his...

Watson & the shark. (poem)
September 22, 1994... We can see the old know-how in the shark's left eye. Maybe she followed schooners a lifetime, waiting for human bait to be tossed overboard, & found herself in Havana Harbor when Watson dove in. How long...

Ransom. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Thirty years after the first breakdown she's still alive, still angry, still blaming whatever comes to hand. We gave up trying to fix her a long time ago, let her go, paid professionals to look after her, bought her a room in a house with other...

The gesture. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Tonight my father could be standing here with me, appealing in a soft voice for forgiveness. He could be trying to explain the inescapable mistakes, the slight shifts in attention, bungled deliveries, how he knelt in the dark companionway trying...

Battle day. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The paunchy patriots gather to enact a minor slaughter. I can see the hill they died on, far from home, a few New Hampshire, mostly Hessian mercenaries, buried all in our first churchyard, Molly Stark no widow that night, and our small supplies...

Atlanta. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Atlanta lies hot and almost tropical after summer rains. Inside the tall cold slabs of buildings air-conditioned glaze paints out the ghosts on the asphalt, rising up each afternoon from the steaming puddles. In our lingerings between the...

Sensing winter. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Four narcissus blooms, browning paper-whites forced for Christmas, assert their scents like skunks on the cold night parkway. In a small apartment there's no doubt what wins among the senses. The silent telephone smells like plastic when the...

Song for elder sisters. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Those surviving sisters born to farms over the tracks or backs of towns, the southern poverty belt, coming up chopping cotton, planting potatoes. "She went to the river couldn't get across. She paid three dollars ...

On my block. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The milkman sells dream books and nickel bets once a week. Never pay much mind, never pay much mind. Chicken wire fences keep out stray cats and kids. Pecan tree branches hold clotheslines, wrinkled sheds, and army blankets...

Reading Ta'o chien. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Often I go out year-early to the caterpillars' tents hardly aweb enough in the branches to notice, and plunge a stick into the core-squirm and, twisting it, dip out a knapsack bolus and chucking stick and worms over the hedge say well,...

Permanent enchantments.
September 22, 1994... In her essay "The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma," Eavan Boland has articulated some of what I have felt in my own life as a writer. The place in which I have encountered the dilemma is in many ways like the Ireland Boland sketches as she speaks of...

Provisional remarks on being/ a poet/ of Arkansas.
September 22, 1994... I consider my background, my upbringing, relevant to every line I lay down. None of the adjectives that can be applied before the noun poet can do more than crib, crab, and contain it. Usually these adjectives go further - they dwarf and...

An interview with Brenda Marie Osbey. (Interview)
September 22, 1994... Brenda Marie Osbey attended Dillard University, Universite Paul Valery at Montpellier, France, and earned an M.A. from the University of Kentucky. She has taught at Dillard University, U.C.L.A., and teaches currently at Loyola University in New...

A visitor's guide to the blue planet. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Welcome to what we kill and take and lose and tell and mark and make. But time will be a confusion till you see parents and friends fall to their separate ends. With neither will be nor was, you'll live in the present tense. You're stuffed...

Elegy to a sculptor. (poem)
September 22, 1994... When you are dead, John Spencer, dwelling in the turning rind of Cuernavaca's tierra firma, part stone and marl and branching root, I will not be content to remember meeting you within the wall you made around the churchyard at Los Reyes, in a...

God speaks to Emily Dickinson about her dreams. (poem)
September 22, 1994... What do you think it means that you dream of your father's house flooding, that solid brick lifted from its moorings, the whole house floating east, toward the center of Amherst? I know it puzzles you that sometimes you are inside looking down...

God speaks to Emily Dickinson about her absent father. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Now your mother sleeps while you gather the minutes between one form of tending and another to write prayers. Your father away again, she is all yours, burden and pleasure, like a garden. You wonder how men imagine the world - the invisible...

Mother Catherine. (poem)
September 22, 1994... my name is catherine. some call me mother some saint. and do you claim sainthood? do you admit to having duped these poor ignorant negroes into believing you are holy? into building your likeness into a statue and then closeting this statue...

Waterford. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Lifted down from the guest parlor's shelf, Mrs. Lane's pitcher is light and ice, a gleam of cut facets that makes me tremble. Not the leafy Lismore pattern, nor Aisling's lotus frond, it is the simpler Clare, upswept wheat recalling the...

Before the breakup. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Those evenings in Lahinch with the black cliffs visible and the steel sea ripping white, we saw autumn coming on, the legend of Satan's spit turning blackberries insipid, the fuchsia's cape fading. The wind was too much even for the gulls,...

Appalachian Spring. (poem)
September 22, 1994... To begin, be Independent of the old Self, As a seed breaking up; Glad tidings pollinate and sift Invisibly in the thinnest air, Finer than stardust, freer Tessellate, brief; Thought turns and turns among Our blind synaptic swirling,...

Plates. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Surfacings draw always the unmistakable trace of their lost repression an aroma, a color's ghost washing the eye; gone once inward, it's almost their desire for time again that brings them up unbidden, sequence and consequence shaled, drifting:...

The Tapawera Raspberry Festival. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The open grasses braise in the thick light. None of the trout in the Motueka River rises to the heat hovering above the surface, another river spreading over the wide fields. The sun disperses. A would-be barker calls the rare young women...

In the spirit of Lionel Hardin. (poem)
September 22, 1994... This morning some bald and wiry spirit Wreathed in smoke and shedding dark peals Of laughter has come down from the stand Of cedars to hold forth to my father and me Before retreating back into that soldery mist That has just lifted above the...

Indian turnip. (poem)
September 22, 1994... I wish the May apple would tell me what happened to Carl Peterson, For it is supposed to be magical as it comes up from the swamp And opens a green umbrella from the stalk of its toxic root, Which looks like a root my father gave me once in 1971...

The troubles that women start are men. (poem)
September 22, 1994... On the porch, unbreeched shotgun languishing Across one arm, just after the killing, The murderer, Billy Winkles, made polite Small talk with my father while we waited For the sheriff to come. The reek of cordite Still loomed the sheeted corpse,...

Perfection. (poem)
September 22, 1994... In the unmade world I cannot see you, As you might have been anyone else In another time with another husband. How could you exist apart from me? There is just the one life, and anyway I have come to see that, even for those Singly gifted or...

311 Mataro Court North Port, Florida. (poem)
September 22, 1994... Sold, my parents' house already recedes. The white facade with green shutters fades As do the remnants of my father's yard, The gnarled grapefruit and orange trees That once shone emerald in tropical sun And downpour. While he lived no brown leaf...

Tidal rivers. (poem)
September 22, 1994... When the black snake came calling today, easing into the yard from the woods, tentative, barely free from the ice Of winter, I hesitated, then took it as a sign. There was after all the stark beauty of appetite, the slight bulge of bird egg or...

Girl friend poem #5. (poem)
September 22, 1994... The brunette is boarding a train with too many bundles The pockets are sewn shut on her rayon jacket The world tapers away The day slips through the straw whole as an egg We use Gregg's shorthand so the men won't understand The...

Girl friend poem #7. (poem)
September 22, 1994... we make our own chairs and shoes and fix hair every other wednesday staticky sheets get snatched from the dryer and the children want to know who invented talking the children want to know if one earthworm heart stops do all five stop the ant...

Sabbaths 1992. (poem)
September 22, 1994... I. The winter world of loss And grief is gone. The night Is past. Along the whole Length of the river, birds Are singing in the trees. Again, hope dreams itself Awake. The year's first lambs Cry in the morning dark. And, after all, we have A...

Is there a Southern poetry?
September 22, 1994... I. "Only the Poet's Voice" The answer to the question that is the title of this essay is yes, although southern poetry may not be what you think it is - certainly it is not the poetic equivalent of southern fiction. A second question...