Southern Appalachian Poetry, Take two

This new anthology, edited by Marita Garin, who has been a friend to us for several years, is published by McFarland. Thirty Seven poets are represented, most of them fairly well known. Others, though are not so familiar to us here in WNC, and I've enjoyed getting to know their backgrounds and voices. I don't feel that they are speaking from the bottom of a TVA lake, by any means. Quite a few are up front about the dangers they see coming from over-development and environmental degradation, and more than one writes with an eye to the future, insinuating, if not speaking overtly about, the challenges the future will bring to this section. I was reminded of the Chinese character for "future," as told by Li Young Lee some years back--a human figure walking forward with his head turned back toward the past.

Hilda Downer from Bandanna, says "Perhaps the most important element of my poetry is place--what place and childhood I came from. Much of my life is trying to realize all that I knew as a child, such a sensory overload that I still cull certain smells, sounds, and images from that deep spiritual well. ...If I can dive deeply enough into its well to rise again clutching a few pebbles, then I have gone to the depth that exists in us all--a common ground or place--and through these pebbles we can understand each other."

BUS PERCHED ON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN LIKE A SKULL ON A WEDDING CAKE

My city walks are secrets with the moon,
tongue tipped with fox-desire
of gliding beneath budded trees.
Poncho drags lizard tail behind me
until thrown into a blanket on concrete,
hamburger and coke before me.
Knights dot darkness
like dandelions in a field.
Cars drone constant as a creek.
I am a secret to the city,
but I can kick a building and watch it crumble.
I can change poems into frogs.

----Hilda Downer

Stephen Knauth comments: " For the last few years I've been living in Charlotte with my wife and kids and working as an educational and technical writer. The mountains are not too far, and I head that way when my spirit flags, a good tonic for urban distress. Though when I see where developers have set their latest money trap, I wonder how long it will take them to pave and degrade what little remains of this paradise. I sadly envision the tourist of the not-so distant future gazing out over a broad vista of Weyerhouser saplings, mechanical bears, and drive-through waterfalls, exclaiming, "Ah, wilderness."

FROM THE CHEROKEE

Rivers may flow easily northward
that were laid before the mountains broke.
The ancient Teays

was there, bubbling through the earth's hair.
A nation drank this water,
went away to die in Oklahoma.

The new faces are different: strong
but vaguely wounded, kind of stabbed,
kind of bleeding...

"Water!" one of them cries out to tonight.

A child brings the pitcher & stands
the way any child stands
near the end of her father's life.

In so many years, all the words spoken
have not spoken the word
that tells where a man can live
& never die.

"Say it, daughter, with me--
Sah-ka-na-ga,

Sahkanaga,

The Great Blue Hills of God."

Stephen Knauth

ISABEL ZUBER

"So I'm from Appalachia, am of the mountains, qualify as an Appalachian writer. But what does that mean? I confess I don't know. The argument seems endless as to whether Appalachian is a distinct and isolated culture or is really like all the rest of the country, at least like the south, with a few, not too significant, colorful characteristics exaggerated in print and other media. I'm not trying here to settle this issue or to give evidence for either side."


YOUR OLD WAYS


How would i know
if your old ways
work? is there more
promise, less risk, the right
among of danger?

What are you waiting
to tell me? I raise
beds in the garden, graft
a bud, root my cuttings uneasily.

What is it I don't know
that might save us all?

--Isabel Zuber