Introduction





Felicia Mitchell

( Virginia )

In “They’re Giving Me a Hint with Hemlock,” Rita Sizemore Riddle wrote, “I feel old and Appalachian, sprawling and rough and grey” (All There Is to Keep, Iris Press, 2008). Like so much of Riddle’s writing, this line is a double-edged maxim. Riddle, who died in 2006, may have been talking in the poem about what it feels like to be out of place in a writers’ colony, but she was also talking about what it means to insinuate your presence in a larger world that does not always know what to do with the symbolism and wit of Appalachia.

Thank goodness we keep writing, talking equally well about coal oil and Giotto, whatever comes to mind, whatever needs to be said. There is a relationship with language redolent of those sprawling, rough, grey mountains that remind us that “old” can mean “Appalachian” just as “Appalachian” can mean grounded in a perspective that calls into question easy categories of identity. While it can be tempting for writers to retreat into clichés of personae, the very best of our contemporary Appalachian writers illustrate a range of identities and concerns.

As Kathryn Stripling Byer suggests in an interview conducted by Nicole Cartwright Denison for us, writing can draw on intimately personal landscapes or history and wide-ranging influences. Byer comments that “every new poem is a journey into the mystery of language and imagination, which can take you in all sorts of directions.”

Appalachian writing is, at its most interesting, as diverse as the landscape, with hills and valleys, hollows and rivers. It is as hopeful as the first settlers and as variable as an Appalachian spring. Outside Appalachia, however you pronounce the word, people who haven’t read widely in our literature sometimes tend to expect quaint poems tied up in neat packages. Think of the biggest seed catalog you can imagine, though, and how diverse the growth promised. That’s Appalachia.

Our goal with this issue of Blue Fifth, which Sam Rasnake kindly invited me to edit, is to share a small sampling of contemporary Appalachian poetry with a wider audience to illustrate the kinds of directions language has taken some contemporary poets from Appalachia. I have to say that it is no easy task to sample Appalachian poetry. There are as many styles as there are ways to prepare corn, as many subjects as there are starlings, those recent emigrants to the area.

I almost want to apologize in advance for not including every single poet writing today in or out of Appalachia. There’s Diane Gilliam Fisher, for example, in West Virginia, and Frank X Walker in Kentucky. There’s Ron Rash in North Carolina. In Virginia, there’s Rita Sims Quillen, whose just released Her Secret Dream (Wind Press, 2008) follows through on the promise of her earlier collections. (And, to be fair, there’s Sam, and there’s me, and more.) Find poems by these writers and read them, and find some more writers. Start making a list, and keep adding to it.

It is an honor to see the online publication of poems by Affrilachia-associated poet doris davenport, from Georgia, whose work came to my attention when I was doing research for Her Words. Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (UT Press, 2002). You’ll find a voice that resonates with an autonomy birthed by davenport’s roots, and this is a voice that connects us with philosophical lessons we don’t mind hearing. “Get directions to your own reality,” davenport directs in “The Columbus, Mississippi Riverwalk.” I like how davenport says “i . . . want my / body and mind to be one / not one in subconscious hostage to / the other.”

Nicole Cartwright Denison of North Carolina gives us poems with rich images and memories that show how past and present can be bridged by language. Her “Planting by the Signs” is a poem about, well, planting by the signs. It’s also metaphorically ambiguous, inviting you to make connections that are most meaningful to you. It could be about global warming; it could be about the craft of poetry. “old medicine poem” does double duty too, cataloging wildflowers and herbs in much the same way the old song catchers went around and wrote down songs passed from generation to generation. Natural imagery connects the three poems presented here, as it does many of the others, and makes me think of the commitment to the environment that Appalachian writers tend to have.

Libby Falk Jones, who lives in Kentucky, has shared poems that evoke pictures of her Appalachia. “Lake Lyrics” reminds us why we need to seek nature to push us to think about more than just the natural world, from our own mortality to family roots. Jones’ other two poems share ironies that arise with the contemplation of culture clashes right within one’s own proverbial backyard. Appalachia, like the world at large, is realistically witnessed as a place with tensions and challenges that feed its soul.

Helen Losse of North Carolina has shared poems that are also like paintings with Appalachian icons, poems that invite us to look at or listen to something we’ve witnessed before—a deer, a quail, a plot of “un-fruited fruit trees” (“Thunder and Blue Socks”)—in a new literary setting. Perspective is something Losse depicts well. “Thunder and Blue Socks” leads us, with the final shift to “the daughter who concerns us, / and why she spends // most of her days humming benign melodies,” to associate external objects with internal musings.

Jeff Mann, a native of West Virginia living near Blacksburg, Virginia, has been changing the face of Appalachian poetry for some years now with a philosophy embodied in his collection of essays Loving Mountains, Loving Men (Ohio University Press, 2005). Mann’s poems included here are grounded in the landscape of Appalachia with an edgy invitation to the reader to be mindful of today’s issues. “Greg’s Party,” with a striking image of daylilies burning, reminds us that there is a war on. If you are just learning about “mountaintop removal,” a euphemism for what Mann frankly calls “evisceration” in “Writer’s Tour of Kayford Mountain” for the first time, perhaps you will want to learn more.

Jeff Daniel Marion of Tennessee is currently working on a collection of poems in tribute to people who have passed on, three of which you will find here. These poems sweep me back into a past and remind me that language is, as so many others have remarked, the repository of memory. “Returnable Bottles” is both nostalgic and cautionary, as the best moral tales are. “They’re a vanishing species, everything disposable now,” Marion writes, taking us into a poem-sized memoir about not just bottles but family values, soft drinks, adolescence, and more.

Jim Minick lives in southwest Virginia and helps us to see what it means to be in touch with the natural world, really in touch and not just sightseeing. What I like about his poems is how humans and nature are brought closer by interlocking images and symbols, as in “Ghost Stump, Sun Music,” a poem that uses human imagery, imagery from the material world, to describe a spider web. When you read Minick’s poems, you won’t look at the elements of landscape again in quite the same way, which may perhaps incite a sense of social obligation to this landscape that bears us.

Scott Owens, who hails from South Carolina, composes close studies of people, places, and things, always with a close eye on the natural world. Reading “Brooks” is like being invited into a family story. “March With Your Flowers Burning” plays with words and relationships to remind us of the nuances of human relationships echoed in our relationship with nature. It ends,“ You were the one I dreamed of, / with your mouth full of promises, your cheeks honey-smeared, / your hands around my balls.”

Morgan Richards is a young poet from West Virginia with great promise. Her poems in Blue Fifth, which are set in Italy, bridge cultures and give us a sense of an Appalachian abroad. Abroad, differences seem to be as universal as humanity is personal, as “Foreign Relations” suggests, with its wry humor and play on the word “tongues.” “Transition” contrasts a personal past with the landscape of the present. I especially like the message in “The View from Giotto’s Tower,” which asserts, “You need not climb the 414 steps / to the top of Giotto’s Tower / to achieve this vista.” Richards is right. While “life is no panoramic view,” such an expanse can incite an onlooker to look more closely at what is in front of his or her face, literally and figuratively.

In the poems sampled here, panoramic views are supplanted by close observations of challenging contrasts, from past and present to old and young to natural and human. The integration of these seemingly distinct parts of the fabric of life invites readers into the poems sampled here, and I hope that they will make you want to read more—more by these poets, and more from writers from the region.

Along with these poems, there are photographs by Jason Hibbitts, a native of Virginia who took the photographs during a through hike on the Appalachian Trail. Their ethereal quality captures the light in a way that makes them as figurative or multi-layered as the poems. Next time you are hiking, watch how the light plays itself on the landscape.

I’ve lived in southern Appalachia long enough to know that I want to feel as old and Appalachian as Rita Sizemore Riddle one day. What can be more reassuring than a poetry distinguished by a mountain range as ancient, and therefore wise, as this one? Reviewing the poems included here, I have to say that I have come to feel a little older and wiser. That’s what my association with Appalachia is making me. Maybe you too.