Poets and Poems: John Martin Finlay and “Dense Poems & Socratic Light”

Reading the poems of John Martin Finlay is like meeting someone you should have known, figuratively and literally. 

Finlay (1941-1991) received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Alabama. For his Ph.D., he chose Louisiana State University because of Donald Stanford, then-editor of LSU’s Southern Review. He enrolled in 1970 – when I was a sophomore at LSU. We never met, but we likely came close a few times. I was a journalism major, taking two courses in English literature – the ones the English majors took. And I read the Southern Review. 

 

But I moved in undergraduate journalism and campus political circles; Finlay moved in English, literary and graduate school circles. We likely passed each other in Allen Hall, the building where most of the English classes were taught and where the professors had their offices. But we never met.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“A Year in the South 1865” by Stephen Ash

I found this book because I was interested in an ancestor. It’s not about my ancestor and contains no reference to him, but it gave me insights in what he might have experienced in what was likely the most significant year of his life.

The year 1865 was a year of phenomenal upheaval in the states that comprised the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in early April. By the end of the month, all other Confederate forces had surrendered. The region was economically devastated – inflation had already been destroying the value of Confederate money, and now Confederate government bonds (and debts owed) were worthless.

More significantly, the social structure, already changing because of the demands of the war, teetered into collapse. Railroads had been destroyed in war, and roads, never a priority in the pre-war South, had been left to deteriorate. The old society, with larger planters at the top, was swept away. The labor force, largely composed of slaves, had already been melting toward Union lines. Hunger stalked many areas. Law and order was breaking down, with groups of Confederate deserters, people left homeless, and people with old scores to settle roaming the countryside. Livestock, often critical to plant and harvest, had been confiscated by both Confederate government agents and invading Union troops. And after the surrender of Confederate armies, soldiers had to make their way home across a scarred and devastated landscape.

This is the context for a fascinating account of the year 1865 by historian Stephen Ash. Published in 2004, A Year in the South 1865 details the lives of four people in different parts of the South, how they lived, what they experienced, and how they survived. Each of the four kept detailed journals of their experiences and lives before, during, and after the Civil War, and Ash uses those journals and extensive research about the history of the regions where they lived to create a remarkable account.

Louis Hughes was a slave for a plantation owner in northern Mississippi. He occupied a privileged place in the slave hierarchy – the butler at the big house. Late in the war, he and his wife Matilda, the family cook, were “leased” to the Alabama Salt Works some 65 miles north of Mobile. Salt had become the most prized commodity in the South, with the Union blockade having stopped the usual imports. Salt was desperately needed, and the state of Alabama had organized one of the most industrialized operations in North America. He didn’t work in mining operations; his skills were such that he was moved immediately into administration.

Cornelia McDonald was a widow. Her husband Angus, a Confederate officer, had died in late 1864 outside of Richmond. They had lived in Winchester, Virginia, in the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley. But the valley was repeatedly attacked, looted, and devastated by Union troops, and before her husband’s death, Cornelia had moved herself and seven children to Lexington, in the southwest part of the state and away from the main theaters of the war. There she found herself, once the mistress of a plantation, having to live almost hand to mouth and dependent upon the charity of friends and strangers.

John Robertson was a young man from eastern Tennessee, who joined Confederate forces even though his region of the state was strongly pro-Union. He was captured after battel and imprisoned, and released after taking the loyalty oath to the Union. He returned to eastern Tennessee, where received the call to become a minister. But he had also been part of a Confederate group that hunted and terrorized Union sympathizers, and there were former victims looking for payback. That year, he would find himself moving with family members to Iowa.

And Samuel Agnew was a minister who lived with his wife on his father’s plantation in Panola County, Mississippi, some 60 or so miles south of Memphis. His accounts of the year (he wrote journals all of his life, and at his death there were some 45 volumes in all) are filled with rumors of Yankee troop incursions, increasing problems with the slaves working the fields, his Sunday worship services at neighboring farms, and trying to hold family and faith together as conditions in their local society deteriorated.

Stephen Ash

They were four ordinary people, but Ash’s narrative treatment of their lives provides more insight into what was happening in the South than any number of biographies of more famous people. He has a knack for telling an engaging story, and follows each of the four through the seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall of 1865 to illustrate their lives, their fears, and their hopes. After reading the accounts of each, the reader is glad that Ash includes an epilogue that explains what happened to each of the four after 1865 – and they all lived into the first decade of the 20^th century.

Ash is professor emeritus of American history at the University of Tennessee. He received a B.S. in education degree from Gettysburg College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from the University of Tennessee. He is the author of numerous books about the history of the Civil War period, including Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (1988); Secessionists and Other Scoundrels: Selections from Parson Brownlow's Book (1999); When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (1999); Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (2008); The Black Experience in the Civil War South (2010); and A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War (2013).

A Year in the South 1865 is a wonderful story of four ordinary people who lived in an extraordinary time. My own ancestor, another ordinary person in an extraordinary time, was a messenger boy in the Civil War on the Confederate side. When the war ended, he had to make his way home to Brookhaven, Mississippi. And when he arrived, he found his family gone. He was able to track them down and find them in east Texas.

He would have likely recognized the stories in A Year in the South 1865.

Top photograph: Lexington, Virginia, circa 1865. This scene would have been everyday familiar to Cornelia McDonald.

Poets and Poems: Frank Stanford and “The Light the Dead See”

Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi in 1948, and adopted the day he was born. Four years later, his mother married A.F. Stanford, a much older contractor in Memphis. Until his death eight years later, Stanford raised the young boy as his own. When he was 21, Frank discovered that his mother had adopted him – he had always believed, or been led to believe, that she was his birth mother.

We can smile at William Wordsworth’s line “The Child is father of the Man,” but poet Frank Stanford embodied it in both his life and his poetry.

I discovered Stanford while reading poet Leon Stokesbury’s most recent collection You are Here. Stokesbury, who teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University, received his M.A. and MFA degrees from the University of Arkansas, and there is his connection to Stanford. Stanford and his mother moved to Arkansas after his stepfather’s death, and in 1966 he entered the University of Arkansas. He was enrolled in the graduate poetry workshop at the university at the same time Stokesbury was in the MFA program.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Fred Chappell’s “River”

It was in the 1980s that a colleague at work who loved Southern writing introduced me to writer and poet Fred Chappell (born in 1936). She recommended, and I read, one of his novels, I Am One of You Forever. I went on to read two of his other novels, Brighten the Corner Where You Are and Look Back All the Green Valley, and one of his collections of short stories, Farewell I’m Bound to Leave You. 

What I had not read was his poetry, and Chappell first established his literary reputation as a poet. He was an English professor at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro for 40 years, retiring in 2004. In 1997, he was appointed North Carolina’s first poet laureate. 

I love Chappell’s stories. They are Southern, yes, but they are about family and history and all the things that used to define Southern culture. When I read his stories, I read my own family history – the characters and places seem real because they are real. 

I stumbled over a copy of one of his poetry collections, River: A Poem, first published in 1975. My copy is a reprint by LSU Press in 2000; I bought it used and it’s certainly been read many times.  

It’s subtitled “A Poem,” and it should be – River is actually one poem with 11 divisions. It is about family, and specifically his grandparents. It was first published when Chappell was 39, so it is something of a middle-aged memory from the 1940s and early 1950s. 

To write these memories down is important; it helps your own children and grandchildren understand where you and they came from, and how those who came before were as much a part of that river as you and they are now. 

The individual poems that form River are too long to cite in full here, but here is an excerpt of one, entitled “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet,” recounting a conversation between Chappell and his grandmother as she was doing exactly that: 

I see her still, unsteadily riding the edge

Of the clawfoot tub, mumbling to her feet,

Musing bloodrust water about her ankles.

Cotton skirt pulled up, displaying bony

Bruised patchy calves that would make you weep. 

Rinds of her soles had darkened, crust-colored—

Not yellow now—like the tough outer belly

Of an adder/ In fourteen hours the most refreshment

She’d given herself was dabbling her feet in the water. 

“You mightn’t’ve liked John-Giles. Everybody knew

He was a mean one, galloping whiskey and bad women

All night. Tried to testify dead drunk

In church one time. That was a ruckus. Later

Came back a War Hero, and all the young men

Took to doing the things he did. And failed.

Finally one of his women’s men shot him.”

“What for?” 

        “Stealing milk through fences…That part

Of Family nobody wants to speak of.

They’d rather talk about fine men, brick houses,

Money. Maybe you ought to know, teach you

Something.” 

       “What do they talk about?” 

                                                 “Generals,

And the damn Civil War, and marriages.

Things you brag about in the front of Bibles…” 

Fred Chapell

Should I say that I have the family Bible from the 19^th century. And there’s this family stuff in the font of it, the “kind of stuff you like to brag about,” and I have a photograph of my great-grandparents, which has a Civil War story behind it? 

The other scenes from River include the poet as a child being lowered down the well by his grandfather, to give it its periodic scrubbing; what it’s like for that young boy to discover one day he’s a grandfather himself; and his grandfather’s river baptism (a Methodist getting baptized like a Baptist, for goodness sakes), among others. 

Reading River is wading and then swimming in that river of family and memory that each of us flows from, becoming and being that river ourselves. 

Photograph of the French Broad River in western North Carolina courtesy of the Visit North Carolina.

Saturday Good Reads: Reading Southern

I grew up in the South at a time when change had arrived, and was overtaking nearly a century of a particular way of life, a particular kind of culture. Many people outside the South associated it with backwardness, ignorance, and racism, and all there were certainly there. But so were major academic scholarship and a distinct and world-recognized literature.

I attended LSU at what was likely the zenith of its highly regarded history department, led by T. Harry Williams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography Huey Long (I read the fat paperback version in 1969, the year I entered LSU). What Williams was known on campus for, however, was his class on the history of the Civil War. It was one of the few classes that always had a waiting list; he kept it small and it was almost always inhabited by seniors (rank mattered in class selection).

Not all outstanding biographies and histories were written by Southerners; A.J. Leibling, a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1960, published a biography of Huey Long’s brother, Earl Long, that was published in its entirety in the New Yorker in 1960. It was called The Earl of Louisiana.

Earl was governor, and while he was never indicted, convicted and imprisoned like a governor before him in the early 1940s and one after him (Edwin Edwards), he did have one dubious distinction held by no other Louisiana governor. I was 8 when I saw on television the men in the white coats removing the governor from the state capital, and taking him to an asylum in Texas. He did manage to talk his way out, and he got even. One of the actions that convinced his wife Blancher and some cronies to have him “put away” was his well publicized national tour accompanied by Blaze Starr, a stripper in New Orleans.

Today, politics in Louisiana seems rather tame. The state now elects governors like Bobby Jindal. For entertainment purposes, we now have to go to the state capital in Illinois to find something comparable to what Louisiana was in its heyday.

In fiction, too, the South has produced some distinctive writers. William Faulkner is still hard to read, but he changed literature forever. Flannery O’Connor is still widely read and admired today.

Three Southern authors that I’ve always enjoyed reading are Walker Percy, Fred Chappell and Donald Harington.

Walker Percy (another native Louisianian; he grew up in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, the setting for his novel The Moviegoer, write a number of novels, the most memorable for me being Love in the Ruins. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Southern city (obviously New Orleans), and part of the story is about a sniper who gets on the roof of a Holiday Inn and starts indiscriminately shooting people. Almost exactly the same thing happened in downtown New Orleans in 1972 – and the hotel was a Holiday Inn. A copy of Love in the Ruins was found in the sniper’s apartment in Oklahoma.

Fred Chappell, a North Carolinian, is another distinctly Southern writer. I was introduced to his fiction in the early 1990s by a friend a work. My two favorites are Farewell I’m Bound to Leave You and I Am One of You Forever.

And then there’s Donald Harington, who lived and taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas until his death not long ago. He’s written several novels, but his most famous one is The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. In the early 1980s, a speechwriting colleague of mine urged everyone she met to read it. But it was out of print and hard to find. While attending a seminar in New York, I actually discovered a copy in a used bookstore and bought it. It is one of the most naturally funny novels I’ve ever read.

There are other writers, too, but these are the ones that stand out. And these are the ones who helped me understand and make sense of my own region and history.

Rainy Days at School

On rainy days the classroom

smells like mud from the swamp

the school is built upon. We stand

in an alphabetical line for lunch,

the mud from our shoes gradually

shading the floor with a grayish

patina. We walk/march in lined

unison to the cafeteria four our feast

of mystery meat in gravy, boiled

spinach with a slice of boiled egg,

beets and other delicacies to affront

the childish palate. I wasn’t Catholic

but I loved Fridays because it was

always fish on Fridays. At recess

we have Polar Bars or Fudgcicles or

Dreamcicles, to wash away

the taste of beets, the smell of mud.

Lunch is a quarter, ice cream

a nickel and much the better

value for the money.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visited the site. Links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time.

This is also one on a series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback. We didn’t have boiled spinach and beets every day in our school cafeteria, but those are the foods that have lingered in memory. (Our cafeteria workers also never looked as cheerful as those in the photograph.)

Photograph courtesy Grand Island Pictures from the Past.

From what he chose

A small line of sweat

washing his upper lip,

he lay on a single bed

in a room with pale green walls,

searching through the catalog

for some sign of a future,

as if a course listing could

suddenly leap from the page

and encircle his imagination

or at least suggest what

to register for in the fall but

nothing suggested itself, and

the choice remained what

it had been all along, really:

theology or words, ministry or

writing, God business or news

business, both a priesthood,

both jostling each other

for his soul. From what

he chose he made a life.

This poem is submitted for today’s history (personal or otherwise) prompt at dVerse Poets. To see more poems submitted for the prompt, please visit dVerse Poets.

This is also a poem in the series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback.

Photograph: “Which Way?” by Mike Coates via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Hot Medicinal Pink

At the YMCA, grunting

in between exercises called

forties and cat-and-camel,

after left bridge – right bridge

and ball toss and squats, and

the stretching and contortions

designed to improve flexibility

and determine if I have any

muscles left to tear, I see it

sitting rather forlorn and alone

in a corner, a pink chair,

the shade of Pepto-Bismol

that my parents believed

cured all stomach ailments,

a medicinal hot pink, my mind

traveling from chair to medicine

to that stomach ache when I

was five which wasn’t as bad

as the scarlet fever when I

was three or the croup when I

was six and my father fixed me

hot tea and homemade waffles

and I wonder what it is about

pink that always reminds me

of illness.

This poem is submitted to dVerse Poets for Open Link Night. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time.

Without my intending it, it also became another in the series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback.