Readings: Mary Oliver: "Cold Now"

selection from a photograph of the poet by Rachel Giese Brown

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

"Cold Now" appears in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection American Primitive, first published by Back Bay Books in 1983. The poet was born in Maple Heights, Ohio and currently resides in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Further biography, context, and poems by Mary Oliver can be found at The Poetry Foundation.

Weekly Feed: Rural America Contemporary Art, Poor Kids, The Changing Face of America

Each week we share selections from our Rural Arts and Culture Feed on Facebook and Twitter. What are we missing? Please drop us a line, and we'll add your links and connections to the Feed.

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• Setting a tone of thankfulness, we have this Wendell Berry interview with Diane Rehm via The Boiled Down Juice. "I think people don't take care of things they don't have affection for. And so affection, for me, begins all the arguments."

• Great news: the first issue of Rural America Contemporary Art is now online – art, fiction, essays, and the work of Norwood Creech, artist/painter/printmaker/photographer:

Beans, Corn, and Clouds by Caraway, Arkansas

• Via Harry Smith's Old, Weird America: "The Carter Family recorded twice "Single Girl, Married Girl," the first time at their very first recording session in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, and the second time a few years later, in 1936, in New York City. It's striking to hear the differences between the two 

versions."

• Poor Kids is an unflinching and revealing look at what poverty means to children. It broadcasted last week on FRONTLINE. Full documentary below:

Watch Poor Kids on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

• Seminal art critic Dave Hickey decries the affluence and self-indulgence plaguing much modern art: 

"Art editors and cirtics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time."

Hickey says the art world has acquired the mentality of a tourist. "If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. But I'm interested in Gary Huge and have written about him quite a few times."

If it's a matter of buying long and selling short, then the artists he would sell now include Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan. "It's time to start shorting some of this shit," he added.

• Some thoughts, via The Association of American Cultures (TAAC): "Culture at its best should be about the dialogue by which diverse strands of thought become relevant to diverse people, and that is a matter oc actively connecting art to the realities of people's diverse lives. Right now our cultural sector seems to be failing at that mission, to its own detriment."

• MSNBC has reported tremendous news: "One of the nation's top coal companies, Patriot Coal, has just announced it will stop all of its mountaintop removal mining operations following a historic settlement with activists and environmental groups."

• Sonya Kelliher Combs and her students, in collaboration with the Alaska Native Heritage Center, recently displayed these new multimedia works created at her recent master artist workshop at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center

• From Toner's Bog to the Nobel Prize, Irish poet Seamus Heaney reading his ars poetica of agricultural practice, "Digging." Find more links to Heaney material at the Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine.

On The Map: Preserving Appalachia

Photograph by Giles Ashford

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

In this week’s update from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we wish to turn your attention toward Preserving Appalachia, a branch of Appalachian Mountain Advocates. Through public law and policy, AMA supports Appalachian communities’ health and well-being, and fights the coal industry that has jeopardized same.

As most of AMA’s work occurs in the policy realm, Preserving Appalachia was developed by Dan Radmacher to celebrate and promote the rich heritage, past and present, of the mountains and reveal the beauty of an oft-misunderstood region. Writes Mr. Radmacher:

Preserving Appalachia probably had its origins in the first donor appeal letter I wrote my second week on the job. In that, I said this:

I’m writing to you today to talk about a new focus for the [AMA]. We will continue our successful legal battles that help stop the worst abuses, but we recognize that the fight for Appalachia cannot be won in the courtroom alone. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of this region, and those outside it who enjoy the benefits of cheap electricity without considering the unseen costs. We need to engage in the court of public opinion as well as courts of law.

As I said in my final column in The Roanoke Times before coming to work for the Center, ‘The debate is about coal, climate change, state and federal regulations, the fragile economies of states like Kentucky and West Virginia, and the mountains, rivers and forests of Appalachia. It involves complex, emotionally powerful issues involving people's jobs, their health, their homes and their children.’

Writing that, I realized that one of my main goals needed to be helping those outside of Appalachia understand what is so special about Appalachia – to see both why it's worth saving and why moving away from it is simply not an option for so many residents. 

The notion [of Preserving Appalachia] is to supplement our work opposing mountaintop removal mining with educational and entertaining videos highlighting Appalachian art and artists as part of an effort to show why Appalachia is so worth preserving.

Mr. Radmacher has added to our videos to the map that feature the old-time music of the Black Twig Pickers and the fiery poetry of Crystal Good. As the project is still in its beginning stages, he also is eager to receive names of others whose work aligns with that of Preserving Appalachia and AMA. Much more is to come, and the artistry Preserving Appalachia is curating is fortifying a strong, and far more understood, Appalachian voice.

Course on Midwest Culture: Big Ten

Ohio State preseason open practice, 2012; Ohio StateBuckeyes.com

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor

I was at a party filled with English PhD students and I was asking a Cajun girl about New Orleans. When she showed amusement at my curiosity, another student piped up. “Kenny is a regionalist!” 

Out of the closet. So I proceeded on to research, asking students from various parts of the country what they thought of the Midwest as a regional entity. Intelligent interlocutors pointed to history, to contemporary cultural analysis, to literature, to socio-economics. I turned to the only fellow Iowan in the room— who also happened to be one of the few who wasn’t a student—and asked him what he considered to be the Midwest. Matter-of-factly, he responded “The Big Ten.”

A damn good point. And one I in all my scholarly wisdom had never thought of.

The rise of collegial and professional sports as billion-dollar industries have likewise led to a rise in regionalist spectacle. Game days become liturgical and individuals spend hundreds on vestments to display allegiance. America has always loved sports and has always been regionally diverse. Now, though, it’s harder to pinpoint regional identity based on accent, food, or ethnicity; instead, we buy our jerseys and caps. 

On NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Frank Deford recently spoke of “Southern Pride and the Southeastern Conference:” 

But, of course, it's impossible to ignore the pride the South feels for its football. As no other section of the country remains so closely connected — "Save your Confederate money, boys!" — so does no other section of the country boast of a regional predominance in any sport. Just because the Yankees have won all these years, the Northeast has never said, "Hey, we got the best baseball up here." It's impossible not to sense that because the South usually brings up the rear in important things like health, education and income, it looks to college football to enhance its national standing. We're No. 1, well, in something else besides beauty pageants.

Deford continues:

I don't know when exactly the SEC took over America. I know this is hard to believe, but the epicenter of college football used to be in the Midwest. I'm so old, I can remember when Notre Dame actually mattered, and the real tough players were supposed to come from Western Pennsylvania and Ohio.

One can’t argue with the tremendous success—and dollar value—of the SEC in recent years. But I quote Deford not to proffer a competing Midwestern narrative of football supremacy (for that, I’ll give James Wright’s beautiful football poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”. Instead, I quote Deford simply to illustrate the incredible intertwining of sports and regional identity, both influencing each other within terribly market-driven forces.

I push a simple formula with my own conclusion: Sports are good. Regionalist identity is good.  Money isn’t bad. But money can turn sports from regionalist narratives rich with history of stadiums and heroes into the shallow spectacle of a game-day beer commercial. Kick back with some buds and some Buds® and don’t forget to carefully craft your self-image with NFL Network, Our Proud Sponsors, and jerseys, available online.

Again, cash isn’t bad. In fact, owners may find more money to be made precisely by acknowledging old regional identities rather than peddling shallow party image. Sports fans like a good time, but they are becoming more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more aware of history. History and the regional identities it shapes will continue to be a guiding factor in sports narrative. Do our new stadiums do justice to the old? Do our mascots make sense given our place? Do we preserve the stories of old heroes or simply peddle the merchandise of the new?

Readings: The Egg And The Machine

Food Security; larger, high resolution images available at The Lexicon for Sustainability

Today we offer a Readings selection from Robert Frost: his 1923 poem "The Egg And The Machine."

This work anticipates a perspective that would gain even greater momentum after World War II, as American citizens -- many who benefitted the comforts of industrial Empire -- began to lament a lost connection with the land, and with agricultural tradition.

As Thomas Hardy would also register, the railroad at once eroded local culture while also allowing for easier commerce (economic, intellectual) with urban areas. To view rural place, or rural traditions, as a "better" or "more honest" than urban life was to engage in a distorting pastoral vision that ignored the intricate links between city and country. This compulsion, still alive and well today, damns the rural to "the past," and allows people to pick and choose which elements of rural life to celebrate.

Robert Frost, a master of ambiguity and layers of meaning, seems to allude to much of this in his poem (he would no doubt love how The Lexicon of Sustainability illuminates these levels of knowledge) -- even the perfectly-rhymed couplets suggest a harmonious pairing that the poem's narrative sets out to complicate. "I am armed for war," the speaker concludes. But, Frost leaves us to consider, at what cost?

The Egg And The Machine

He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.
From far away there came an answering tick
And then another tick. He knew the code:
His hate had roused an engine up the road.
He wished when he had had the track alone
He had attacked it with a club or stone
And bent some rail wide open like switch
So as to wreck the engine in the ditch.
Too late though, now, he had himself to thank.
Its click was rising to a nearer clank.
Here it came breasting like a horse in skirts.
(He stood well back for fear of scalding squirts.)
Then for a moment all there was was size
Confusion and a roar that drowned the cries
He raised against the gods in the machine.
Then once again the sandbank lay serene.
The traveler's eye picked up a turtle train,
between the dotted feet a streak of tail,
And followed it to where he made out vague
But certain signs of buried turtle's egg;
And probing with one finger not too rough,
He found suspicious sand, and sure enough,
The pocket of a little turtle mine.
If there was one egg in it there were nine,
Torpedo-like, with shell of gritty leather
All packed in sand to wait the trump together.
'You'd better not disturb any more,'
He told the distance, 'I am armed for war.
The next machine that has the power to pass
Will get this plasm in it goggle glass.'

Poetry, Place, And The Problems Of Community

Back Road Chalkies to Hurricane Irene; Bob Arnold

We return this week with an update from poet, editor, and stonemason Bob Arnold. As we wrote last year, Mr. Arnold and his wife Susan --  publishers of the internationally-respected Longhouse Press -- have endured the destruction and aftermath of Hurricane Irene from their home in rural Vermont. 

Bob Arnold recently published an update on the state of his region's environmental (and cultural) recovery in his excellent blog A Longhouse Birdhouse. What's striking about his essay is what it reveals about how this disaster and its disruptions have opened up a window through which to view decades-long social transformation in Vermont. These lessons, as he eloquently writes, reveal elements of a larger cultural malaise, but also speak volumes about a kind of Vermonter that is passing from view, and the newcomers who have very different senses of entitlement in regards to history, place, and community life. 

"Community" is often a gilded word, a kind of academic-pastoral term we use to analyze, and in some cases romanticize, the real workings of people in a place. In a kind of honest and clear-eyed perspective that we find in Mr. Arnold's poetry, we learn how the elements of "community" can also be both ignorant and menacing, a far cry from our more idyllic conceptions of the word.

Below is a brief excerpt from Mr. Arnold's essay; his reflections are bolstered by the encounters and anecdotes preceding it. If folks have been following the media's coverage of the one-year anniversary of Irene, I encourage a full read of the scene on the ground from this poet's perspective:

We are now in a world that can be easily driven out of hand. There are no more wise and wily grandmothers and grandfathers pivoting in a neighborhood their sound tidings and ample advice. No matter how we turned out ourselves, we had our grandparents, or someone's, to show us the difference between good and evil.

For the forty years I've lived here, I've run into much more dicier and heated problems and disturbances on this road with neighbors and others with differing minds. The difference is they were country folk who walk with an ethic and almost a code as to manners and outcome. The majority don't wish to cause trouble. The majority know conservation and conversation; they work with tools, land, wood, stone, and principles. Animals. It stands to reason to listen to reason. So I've always been able to talk together with others and smooth things through, often compromising an idea or a plan.

No longer. The new rural country is filling fast with know-it-alls and big talkers behind your back. They take sides. They move only with their self-appointed desires.

Readings: Rural Traditions Sunk Into Eternal Oblivion

from The Farmer's Year: A Calendar of Animal Husbandry; Clare Leighton, 1935

In our Readings series, we offer selections from visual and printed texts that offer perspectives, expand dialogues, and challenge assumptions. Today we feature the response of Thomas Hardy to a query by Sir Rider Haggard, who, at the turn of the last century, was working on Rural England, the first study of its kind.

A poet, novelist, and architect, Thomas Hardy chose to spend his life in his home region of Dorset, an area mythologized in his work as "Wessex." Hardy witnessed in this lifetime the erosion of a rural culture that had been relatively stable for five hundred years. By the 1840s, the Corn Laws removed protections on English agriculture, which changed farming, its labor force, and the population of rural England. As fields turned to pastures, and as laborers fled for better paying jobs in the industrial centers (and those lures of entertainment and cosmopolitan culture), Hardy's Dorset became a ghosted, alien place in his late poetry. 

As a counterpoint, "A Sheep Fair" is also included below.

••••••••••

For one thing, village tradition--a vast mass of unwritten folk-lore, local chronicle, local topography, and nomenclature--is absolutely sinking, has nearly sunk, into eternal oblivion. I cannot recall a single instance of a labourer who still lives on the farm where he was born, and I can only recall a few who have been five years on their present farms. Thus, you see, there being no continuity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories, and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next. For example, if you ask one of the workfolk (they always used to be called 'workfolk' hereabout--'labourers' is an imported word) the names of surrounding hills, streams; the character and circumstances of people buried in particular graves; at what spots parish personages lie interred; questions on local fairies, ghosts, herbs, etc., they can give no answer: yet I can recollect the time when the places of burial even of the poor and tombless were all remembered, and the history of the parish and squire's family for 150 years back known. Such and such ballads appertained to such and such locality, ghost tales were attached to particular sites, and nooks wherein wild herbs grew for the cure of divers maladies were pointed out readily.

••••••••••

A Sheep Fair

The day arrives for the autumn fair,

            And torrents fall,

Though sheep in throngs are gathered there,

            Ten thousand all,

Sodden, with hurdles round them reared:

And, lot by lot, the pens are cleared,

And the auctioneer wrings out his beard,

And wipes his book, bedrenched and smeared,

And rakes the rain from his face with the edge of his hand,

                                    As torrents fall.

The wool of the ewes is like a sponge

            With the daylong rain:

Jammed tight, to turn, or lie, or lunge,

            They strive in vain.

Their horns are soft as finger-nails,

Their shepherds reek against the rails,

The tied dogs soak with tucked-in tails,

The buyers hat-brims fill like pails,

Which spill small cascades when they shift their stand

                                    In the daylong rain.

Postscript:
 

Those panting thousands in their wet

            And wooly wear:

And every flock long since has bled,

And all the dripping buyers have sped,

And the hoarse auctioneer is dead,

Who "Going--going!" so often said,

As he consigned to doom each meek, mewed band

                        At Pummery Fair.

The Tree That Bursts Through The Silo

Tree In Silo; Ken Wolf

Many thanks to María Arambula for sharing on our Arts and Culture Feed A.G. Sulzberger's latest rural dispatch for The New York Times, "Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos." The image of these trees bursting from disused farm structures unifies an arc of how the last century has dealt with rural place as an aesthetic ideal.

To begin, here's Mr. Sulzberger discussing this phenomenon across Kansas and Missouri:

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas. 

Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles. 

“It just struck me as, I don’t know, a symbol of something,” said Ken Wolf, who has spent many days of his retirement searching the area for what he calls, simply, silo trees, photographing dozens along the way. “I see it as a kind of passing.” 

Mr. Wolf's photographs present these tree-silos are a kind of vernacular architecture, not consciously assembled structures -- though they suggest this aesthetic through neglect and abandonment. As the photographer surmises, we're in the presence of a symbol heavy with historical and cultural weight.

It's jarring, then, to consider the image of this tree just one hundred year's ago, in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. In "Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation," Yeats laments the passing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency who even, before the Easter Rising, were seeing their large estates broken up into smaller holdings and dispersed to local farmers. Yeats's position on the matter would be akin to many modernists, who envisioned their art free from the demands of (or condescensions to) popular audiences; the Nobel laureate saw in the destruction of an estate's "big house" a metaphor for the loss of what he would call (in another poem featuring a tree-symbol): "custom and ceremony." After decades connecting rural folklore to national literature, Yeats displays the anxieties of his class and his cultural standing -- worrying if these same people, so often portrayed by him as the spirit of the nation, would really be careful stewards of the land and its culture. He laments what is lost by allowing a tree to flourish in the place of a symbol of high cultural wealth. 

In Mr. Wolf's phtography we find a drastically different situation but, nonetheless, a structure in ruin and a landscape in transition. What is contested is what narrative we ascribe to the branches breaking free from the silo's concrete hold; is this a reclamation or a commentary on industrial agriculture, a scene of "rural decay" or something that transcends economics and cultural cliches? Is this a preface or a postscript?

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

How should the world be luckier if this house, 
Where passion and precision have been one 
Time out of mind, became too ruinous 
To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun? 
And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow        
Where wings have memory of wings, and all 
That comes of the best knit to the best?
Although  Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,
How should their luck run high enough to reach
The gifts that govern men, and after these 
To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech 
Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

Silo With Tree; Ken Wolf

Wendell Berry's Jefferson Lecture: "It All Turns On Affection"

On Monday night Wendell Berry delivered "It All Turns on Affection," the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center. Each year the National Endowment for the Humanities offers this lectureship, "the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities." 

Mr. Berry's talk covers an extraordinary amount of ground -- from an epigraph from Howards End, to memories of his grandfather's struggles with the economies set in place by the American Tobacco Company, and to many locales and texts in between. Well-versed readers of Mr. Berry's prose and poetry will no doubt share my sense that this essay revisits (and re-contextualizes) many of the concerns of his work -- closing some circles, but opening up new ones as well. 

There is much to quote and discuss within "It All Turns on Affection," yet, in this brief piece, I'll include these two paragraphs, moving in how they call on all citizens -- rural and urban -- to return to first principles to find their relationship to place and practice:

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

Folks can find a transcription of the lecture here, along with an interview and further information on past Jefferson Lectures. Below we will offer video of Mr. Berry's talk, which is preceded by remarks by Jim Leach, the chairman of the NEH, and Bobbie Ann Mason, who reads from Mr. Berry's poem "Leavings." If the embedded video does not properly play on your browser, please find the permanent link here:

[video removed due to formatting problems; please visit the link above]

Also, as a fitting epilogue to the lecture, Mark Bittman has written an extraordinary piece today in The New York Times about his recent visit with Mr. Berry in Port Royal. Mr. Bittman receives a call three hours after leaving the farm from Mr. Berry, with this addendum:

“Mark,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.”

Rural Arts From The Rustbelt To The Artist Belt

Later this week, The Art of the Rural will take part in the fourth Rustbelt to Artist Belt conference, which is meeting this year in Saint Louis, Missouri -- which is also home to Washington University, the headquarters of AOTR.

We're pleased to welcome a phenomenal panel of artists, writers and cultural workers for the Re-Thinking The Rural Arts discussion at the Rustbelt to Artist Belt conference: Mary Stewart Atwell, writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013); Brian Frink, artist, professor, and founder of the Rural America Contemporary Art Institute; Rachel Reynolds Luster, folkorist, AOTR Contributing Editor, and founder of HomeCorps; and Richard Saxton, artist, professor, and founder of the M12 interdisciplinary art collective. AOTR Editor Matthew Fluharty will moderate the discussion.

In light of conference preparations and events, new articles will appear again on The Art of the Rural next week -- though we will be updating the Arts and Culture Feed during this time.

Please find the introduction to the Re-Thinking The Rural Arts panel discussion below: 

Rural America is undergoing a period of dramatic cultural and demographic change. Its people are poised to take agency over their own narrative, as new media is allowing for the open and decentralized sharing of stories – from next door to across the continent. In concert with this, interest in sustainable and local food systems has leant a visibility, and a cultural and economic force, to a rural landscape often relegated to distorting pastoral clichés.

These dynamic possibilities offer a moving and multi-layered metaphor for the kinds of work to be created in rural America, as artists and community members are working across disciplines to re-think and re-imagine rural America – and to make connections to their partners in urban and international locales.

This panel presents the work of four artists and community leaders who are offering a new vision for the role of the arts in rural America. By connecting across disciplines and across geographic regions, these practitioners are examples of how serious aesthetic work can also function as an engine for social change and community development.

Idiom and Assimilation: Miles Davis & C.D. Wright

John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans, recording in 1958

If there is any particular affinity I have for poetry associated with the South, it is with idiom. I credit hill people and African Americans for keeping the language distinct. Poetry should repulse assimilation. Each poet's task is to fight their own language's assimilation. Miles Davis said, "The symphony, man, they got seventy guys all playing one note." He also said, "Those dark Arkansas roads, that is the sound I am after." He had his own sound. He recommended we get ours.

      - C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

Related Articles:
Rural Poetry Series: C.D. Wright

Rural Poetry Series: C.D. Wright

I’m country but sophisticated. I’m particular and concrete, but I’m probing another plane. . . . There are many times when I want to hammer the head. Other times I want to sleep on the hammer.

     - C. D. Wright

C.D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and her experience within the Ozarks and her native region have left an unshakable mark on a career that's seen the poet and her work meet with audiences across the country.

Wright is the daughter of a judge and a court reporter; this biographical note helps to provide a familial and regional context for poems which can stun and dizzy readers in their abilities to transcend normal temporal and spatial expectations. In books such as Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems (2007) or the much-loved Deepstep Come Shining (1998), Wright utilizes a one-of-a-kind amalgam of narrative, collage, and lyrical techniques - yet, unlike a great many of her contemporaries, this stylistic DNA is not an end in itself, but a way of telling stories deeply rooted in local experience. 

Her most recent book, One With Others, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry. Dan Chiasson, writing in The New Yorker, offers this excellent introduction to both the book and Wright's poetics:

In August, 1969, a Memphis man known as Sweet Willie Wine led a group of black men on a four-day March Against Fear, from West Memphis to Little Rock, passing through the small towns of the Arkansas delta. One with Others the Arkansas-born poet C. D. Wright’s new, book-length poem, tells the story of the march, and of the only outsider to join it, a small-town white woman, Margaret Kaelin McHugh, whom Wright calls V. The gnomic title suggests the bargain that V made: the act that momentarily unified her with others permanently singled her out. Becoming “one with others,” she ended up a pariah—one with others. The book is foremost an elegy for McHugh, whom Wright, in interviews, has described as “a giant of my imagination, an autodidact, deeply literary, an outraged citizen, a killingly funny, irresistible human.” 

The era has been so memorably captured in documentaries that, even when you imagine it, you end up drifting into documentary conventions. It turns out that the literary genre least likely to get in the way of this story is poetry, which, despite its reputation for gilt and taffeta, comfortably veers close to “documentary” conventions. It comes especially close in Wright’s angular strain of postmodern poetry, which draws on refractive techniques now a hundred years old: collage, extensive quotation, multiplicity of voice and tone, found material, and, often, a non-authorial, disinterested stance. “One with Others” represents Wright’s most audacious experiment yet in loading up lyric with evidentiary fact.

Here is video of Wright on PBS NewsHour reading a selection from One With Others from her home outside of Providence, Rhode Island; an excerpt from the long poem is also included below:

If white people can ride down the highways

with guns in their trucks

I can walk down the highway unarmed

Scott Bond, born a slave, became

a millionaire. Wouldn’t you like to run wild

run free. The Very Reverend Al Green

hailed from here. Sonny Liston a few miles west,

San Slough. Head hardened

on hickory sticks. A reporter asks a family

of sharecroppers quietly watching the procession,

Does this walk mean anything to you.

The father says, the others nod,

It means that Sweet Willie Wine is walking.

Hiss Golden Messenger: Poor Moon, Rich Harvest

MC Taylor and his son; Paradise of Bachelors

Earlier this month, Hiss Golden Messenger released their fourth record: Poor Moon. It's a meditative and beguiling collection of songs that claims a space within some noticeable traditions, yet stands outside of a full-membership within a rock, country, or folk genre. 

This may speak to the boundary crossing of MC Taylor, an accomplished musician whose path led him out of San Francisco and into the folklore program at the University of North Carolina. Mr. Taylor, who collaborates in HGM with former Court & Spark bandmate Scott Hirsch, has settled in the rural Piedmont town of Pittsboro, North Carolina. Mr. Taylor wrote these songs at the kitchen table of his farmhouse, during spare hours while his son slept. These songs (some of which appear in stripped-down, field-recording form on his previous LP Bad Debt) speak to this context, but also exceed their creation myth in startling ways.

From the songs to their sequence, and even to the material object itself, Poor Moon is a stunningly complete work. The LP (or download) was brought into the world by the Paradise of Bachelors label, the same folks whose first release was one of last year's stand-out records, Said I Had A Vision: The Songs and Labels of David Lee. While the transition from a collection of North Carolina soul to Hiss Golden Messenger would be an unlikely bridge for some record labels, it makes perfect sense here. The Bachelors, Brendan Greaves and Jason Perlmutter, come from a folklore and record-collecting background, and their attention to place and culture expands how we think about southern music and reveals surprising commonalities between local soul 45s and the rooted meditations of Mr. Taylor.

The limited-edition, hand-numbered LP release, which also features illustrations by UK-based visual artist Alex Jako, offers a few things to hold on to while listening. All of this culminates in a physical presence that sets a visual analog for the songs themselves - so clear when reviewing the album art alongside the opening track, "Blue Country Mystic."

David Bowie has called the music of Hiss Golden Messenger "mystical country," "an eerie yellowing photograph," some well-deserved praise that will no doubt be mentioned in many reviews. While such a quote seems to get at the atmosphere of the first side of Poor Moon, even the lines from this opening track suggest this is a "mystical country" with a vertical depth. In just a few lines we understand this mystic may also be a "little wandering one," possessed of a vision leading "from the city into the mountains," and that, by song's end, the singer himself becomes the mystic. Between the "wise one" whose image opens the opening song of Poor Moon, and the "little one" who follows, we discover a powerful metaphor for this collection of songs - a kind of spiritual search that reaches backwards while also reaching forwards to a new generation just beginning to learn their language and understand their place. The singer stands where so many of us stand: in between tradition and change, the past and future, looking for a foothold.

Such complex ideas are punctuated by the expert collaborations of over a dozen musicians. From lap steel to gongs, pump organ to saxophone, their contributions offer a coherent counterpoint to the lyrics. We hear many of these collaborators on "Drummer Down," [the third track locatable in the player above] and their instrumentation alongside Mr. Taylor's voice begs repeat listenings. After a few, though, the lyrics emerge - and the floor falls out from that taut, joyful rhythm:

Well it's alright now, the pain is gone.
It's alright now, little one. 
Riven from my body, as a ghost I dwell,
But my home, O I know I loved well

They drew a hex around my body, a hex around my soul,
called me from a place where I did dwell,
driven by my mind, down roads I didn't know
they were roads that I would never see again.

These cycles of birth and death, child to ghost, recur across Poor Moon - as do certain specific images and end-rhymes - and offer another testament to how complete, and how cyclical, a statement is captured on this LP.

Barring Mr. Bowie's words, and the comparisons to The Greatful Dead (and Canned Heat's "Poor Moon"), perhaps one of the most moving ghosts within this project is that of William Butler Yeats, an amateur folklorist, lifelong student of the occult, and, of course, a Nobel poet laureate. While many rock records get mileage by quoting a few lines from "The Second Coming," Poor Moon lives out a Yeatsian poetics without ever having to talk about slouching to Bethlehem. Beyond a line that may or may not reference Yeats's extraordinary late poem "What Then?" we're left with an overwhelming notion that the poet's ideas on lunar phases and their relationships to time and personality might be lurking beneath these songs. One of the rewards of Poor Moon is how it will send you to other sources, across mediums.



In the context of The Art of the Rural, and our interest in the rural-urban exchange, Hiss Golden Messenger's reading of Yeats offers a context and look forward to how else rural folk tradition could be honored and made new within contemporary music. In correspondence with Mr. Taylor, he confirmed that Yeats was an influence on these songs (along with Wendell Berry and the Bible); the Irish poet's own use of folklore and Biblical reference was a mixture of Victorian antiquarianism and a kind of cultural nationalism where the visions of Irish peasants signified how rural space was un-English, inscrutable, and the anchor of Irishness. In short, it was a pastoral, not that far from the pastorals that still flourish in the American arts today.

While some musicians like Sam Amidon take a more curatorial approach in relation to this complicated inheritance, Hiss Golden Messenger's music finds a deeper source, what Yeats himself found in the vernacular: "a powerful and passionate syntax." This selection from an interview with Emma Brown in Interview magazine, where Mr. Taylor discusses his field recording work in North Carolina, seems to suggest the common philosophical ground of his field work and his music:

Emma Brown: Have you always been interested in folklore?

MC Taylor: I guess I was, if you want to consider just being a really obsessive music fan and listener and collector and reader a folklorist, which it sort of is.  But when I went to graduate school, my definition of folklore both narrowed and deepened. We didn't talk about things like myths, not a single time, that's not what it's about. It's more about expressive and/or vernacular culture and how it's deployed in the public realm. To get a little academic about it! [laughs] I'm not looking for people that are old and possibly the only ones playing a certain type of music, I'm not looking for the last remnants of an old ancient story. If people are interested in a certain kind of cultural expression, whether it be low-riding, or hip-hop, or bluegrass music, that's what I'm interested in documenting. Obviously it's important to that group of people, so the question is how to they interact with that art form, what do they do with it, that sort of thing.

There's a gorgeous confluence of art forms in Poor Moon - poetry, music, and folklore - but not what folks might expect. There are indeed field recordings here, but no instruments, no human voices are heard. In interludes between the songs on the second side we hear cicadas, birds, and a rainstorm, as the rhythm of one subtly shifts into the rhythm of another. As these songs conclude with questions of religion and redemption, these field recordings not only place the singer back in the North Carolina Piedmont but they suggest how the largest, most cosmic cycles are rooted in our local hills. That knowledge is part gift, part revelation, part responsibility. As the LP or CD spins in its cycle, alongside that lush album art, we're reminded of the process inherent in what we create, what we cultivate. And we keep listening.