still home

Okay, here I am again, having not blogged for a week. To all avid followers of my bloggy life, I’m sorry I haven’t been a better blogger to you. I know you probably aren’t in the mood for excuses, but I’ve just been busy.

Anyone who knows even a little bit about my daily life knows that I’ve been working hard the past few months, and especially few weeks, on compiling, editing, and writing the introduction for Hub City’s forthcoming poetry anthology, Still Home: The Essential Poetry of Spartanburg. The whole project is finally reaching its conclusion, and I have to say, I’m really excited about the collection. It is teeming with wonderful poems from the full gamut of Spartanburg’s literary elite. We’ve got work from Pushcart winners, an O. Henry award winner, a Hoyns fellow, and more, much of which has appeared in prestigious literary journals all across America.

So you don’t think I’ve been slacking, here are a few excerpts from the introduction, if you feel like reading all that:

“. . . being such a recent transplant to Spartanburg, I wondered if I might lack a certain insight required to marry the individual works of these poets into an eloquent and unified intimation of the essential qualities of Southern life. My anxiety only heightened when, upon sending out a preliminary batch of letters soliciting work, I was repeatedly told that, despite being thrilled about the project, most of these local poets did not feel that Spartanburg was finding its way into their writing.

This in mind, when I found myself nearing the end of all the reading, editing, compiling, and organizing that went into the formation of this collection, I felt somewhat similar, I imagine, to the therapist who succeeds in awakening his patient to some latent issue that has been permeating and affecting the patient’s mental state since the earliest years of childhood. I had – right in front of me, on my very desk – seventy-five or so pages to prove that these poets had, in fact, been writing about Spartanburg all along.

In a recapitulation of, I believe, Deleuze, Jennie Neighbors writes in her poem “Thought”: “Landscapes are a preparation for what will later appear as a set.” How fitting then, that the natural beauty of the Carolinian landscape and its components – rivers, pines, mountains, heat, even kudzu – is such a patent cohesive force among the poems here. Resembling the manner in which most themes of this collection are poetically tackled, the approach through which this landscape is explored is at once historical and neoteric. We are walloped with the plate tectonics of Fred Parrish’s “Water Memory”:

What must it have been like to see
these rivers turned aside?
Cool channels deflected by hot rock.
Moving water is a force in all three tenses
where once all elemental hell broke loose.

Later, in Elizabeth Drewry’s “Thanksgiving on Glassy Mountain,” we are asked to reconcile this Creational explosion with the calmer natural world of the contemporary day:

We are far from the thin air of boardrooms,
spectacle of careers like kiting hawks on thermals:
the dihedral glide, the plummet.

We are left, then, somewhere in the middle near John Lane’s contemplative “Bethesda Road,” groping to find where our current selves fit into such an extensive and elaborate past:

Years ago I wandered here as a boy
lonely among hardwoods, sifting nearby
creek gravel for bird points, pottery.
Now the moon tightens on this outcrop
of soapstone, stemmed where bowls
were chipped loose, fell clean of rock,
in another darkness, 5,000 years ago.

Through sometimes real and sometimes imagined visions of the past, this collection’s exploration of the elements that define a place condenses the cycles of natural history from their grander scope within all of recorded time down to the everyday events of a single life. Here, these Spartanburg poets invite us into their kitchens, their yards, and sometimes, even into the homes of the unknowing next-door neighbor whose hanging blinds have been left ajar. Alex Richardson, among others, welcomes the reader to the sidewalks of Converse Heights in “Paradise Off Main”:

We eat donuts and wrap ourselves in sheets
To topple into the hammock,
Wait for the paper-boy pedaling past,
Wobbling when he reaches for the news,
Then the postman in his wool shorts
And khaki-saucer hat.

With events both fantastic and mundane, the cycles of day-to-day life presented here involve everything from potty training, to parties, to landscaping the yard. Though they are often embedded inside of the sentimentality and reminiscence that inevitably envelop the concept of “home,” these poets are not afraid to admit that family life is often anything but easy, as in Deno Trakas’ “The Smaller House”:

My son flings his things and sonofabitches
his sorryass father, downsized again.
He hurls his own hard rock and wishes
he could split this crib, this shitshack,
this hell where death begins.

Of course, before too long, in any discussion regarding cycles of the natural world the inevitable will surface: death. Upon reading and re-reading the many books and chapbooks of the writers I considered for this anthology, I couldn’t help but notice a not-so-subtle, shared preoccupation with dying. At first it seemed simply the product of common age. After all, a large number of writers whose work is here included are currently planted firmly in that strange space of middle age – a time when, I imagine, it is difficult not to feel bereaved, as one is forced to simultaneously watch children and parents grow old, while somehow retaining a feeling of remaining static. Yet, as I continued to screen more work from an increasingly large pool of poems, I begin to find that Spartanburg’s writers of all ages, ranging from recent college undergraduates to retirees, were writing about the deaths of loved ones, of strangers, and even about their own potential passing on. . . ”

Want to read more? I’ll have more info about the book release (tentatively April 2008) after the New Year!