Appalachian Poetics in Four Acts

You can read Michael Dowdy’s related essay, “Race and Radicalism in Appalachian Poetics,” in the January 2022 issue of the magazine. 

 

1. Set to (W)rights

In 1994, when I was a new student at the university in Colonial Williamsburg, that whitewashed epicenter of US empire, another student asked me if I was British, or English—which exact coordinate of that earlier empire I was queried into has since escaped me. Her surprise, even disappointment, when my wobbly reply insisted that I was from this very state, in southwest Virginia, has stuck with me for nearly three decades. In that encounter, I learned that I was Appalachian, that my tongue had smuggled the mountains with me across the commonwealth. Startled by the sound of my own voice when it was played back to me, I frequently forgot this moment in the years to follow, only to be set to rights time and again.

In “Reply to Wang Wei,” from Appalachia (1998), Charles Wright addresses the Tang Dynasty poet by projecting their centuries-spanning meeting onto their shared landscapes: “The mountains are frost and blue/and fellow travelers.” Are their respective mountains “fellow travelers”? Do they travel with their poets? Wright doesn’t say. But it’s clear that Wright believes mountains move within those whom they have moved. Earlier in the book, the east Tennessee poet coordinates language, consciousness, memory, geography, and embodiment:          

Over the Blue Ridge, the whisperer starts to whisper in tongues.

Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
                                                  Hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood, they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.

All forms of landscape are autobiographical.
—From All Landscape Is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself

The first time I read Appalachia, I struggled to find myself, and where I was from, in Wright’s gorgeous lines. The poems were too learned, too light on sociality. I was impressed by Wright’s books, but they didn’t grip me. Years later, immersed in the Marxist geographers, I recoiled at the passive term “landscape,” and Wright’s allure remained elusive. Then I attended a reading, in New York, featuring Wright, Mark Strand, and Charles Simic. When their three wildly different accents were juxtaposed, I heard the mountains I missed on the page. When I returned to his books, I saw that they had always been there. I just needed to locate the proper frequency, tune my ear to “the whisperer,” let my eyes adjust to the dawn’s “untranslatable language.”  

Charles Wright’s east Tennessee accent, his decision to read a muscle car poem there on the Upper East Side: the twang and growl stamped my auditory memory. Although this wasn’t the first time I’d considered the politics in keeping one’s accent—I had labored intermittently since I was eighteen to discard mine—that reading crystallized a set of tensions regarding origin stories, comparative racializations, and language hierarchies. My accent, as a white cishet English speaker, differed in kind, intensity, and danger from speakers of “foreign” languages. When such speakers are requisitioned—Where are you from? No, I mean originally?—the risk is apparent, the question backed by histories of exclusion with real consequences. My hard-to-place English was quaint rather than suspicious. I’d faced a fraternal curiosity, not a territorial interrogation.

So it was that I came, late to the party again, to C.D. Wright (1949-2016). Like the other Wright, she kept her mountain accent, though C.D. Wright was from the Ozarks, not the Appalachians. And like Charles Wright, she worked her accent—shorthand for syntax, grammar, diction, intonation, pitch, verve, and sway—into her lines and sentences. In Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005), Wright relates to the Ozarks through her ears and others’ tongues. Her observation clicked my sense of home into place: “I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues.”

Reading the two Wrights helped set me right. I had fled the mountains seeking poetry. But, like them, I didn’t need to lose my tongue to be licked by others. The poets there—Don West, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan,¹ Ron Rash, Irene McKinney, Frank X. Walker—would show me how the Appalachians could be a proprioceptive tool for reading other mountains and their poets. First, Gary Snyder. Then, most of all, the mountain poets of the Americas. The poets of Mexico City, with its volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. The Boricua poet Victor Hernández Cruz. Poets of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Andean poets from Venezuela to Peru. The Colombian American Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s poems of Bogotá. The Chilean poets Cecilia Vicuña and Raúl Zurita, whose haunting poems are animated by mountains. I love poems with mountains in them, not as stage props for human dramas but as active, autonomous, ambling presences.

2. Books of the Dead

I’m not saying you need an accent to write an Appalachian poem, or that my (fading) accent authenticated my poems as properly Appalachian, or that being from one mountain region gave me special insight into the languages and lifeways of other mountain regions. After all, where Appalachia is is contested. (The Appalachian Regional Commission has the specious official take.) What’s not disputed is that West Virginia is the only state totally in Appalachia. Which brings me to the idea, also subject to disagreement, that the most influential Appalachian poem was composed by a New Yorker who spent a few days in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in the aftermath of the Union Carbide silicosis scandal in the early thirties. More than the metaphysics of Charles Wright’s “Appalachian Book of the Dead” (1997), the dialectical materialism of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938) has been central to my writing and teaching.

Most years for the past fifteen, nine in New York, then six in South Carolina, I have taught The Book of the Dead to undergraduate and graduate students. It can be hard to enliven the poem’s historical geography. I often struggle to describe the Depression era’s utopian electrification dreams for fear of minimizing the nightmares of dispossession required to realize them. In addition, dramatizing the poem’s current relevance can be tough. This task has been eased by Catherine Venable Moore’s essay, which situates the poem in the present. Moore’s piece first appeared in Oxford American. It now opens the long-awaited stand-alone edition of The Book of the Dead (2018), eighty years after it appeared in Rukeyser’s US 1. West Virginia University Press’s publication of the poem underscores its significance to Appalachian literary history.

Teaching The Book of the Dead has produced memorable encounters. Because Rukeyser folds the Gauley Tunnel disaster into nested geographic scales—moving from the New River, to West Virginia, to the Appalachians (which she depicts as the US’s “first frontier”), to her “tall central city,” to the nation dependent on the region’s resource extraction, to global capital and world war—it equally bewilders and invites readers. When I taught at Hunter College, I often had two or three elder auditors from the neighborhood in my 20th Century US Poetry class. Most had come for Frost, Stevens, or Bishop; many were surprised (though polite enough to hide their consternation) when I hit them with the documentary tradition.

Once, after our first day on The Book of the Dead, during which I identify the key players in the silicosis scandal, one of those auditors (who was indeed an excellent listener) approached me. Visibly shaken, she composed herself enough to tell me that her father had been in-house counsel for Rinehart and Dennis, the company based in Richmond, Virginia, which had subcontracted the deadly tunnel drilling operation on behalf of Union Carbide. As she told it, her lawyer father had delivered, door to door, the (paltry) compensation to families of deceased miners, dispensing checks (of drastically different values) for white and Black workers. She had grown up thinking her father was one of the good guys; under CUNY’s flickering institutional lighting, she learned that he was on the wrong side of history. Distraught, she didn’t return to class for weeks.

3. Fabulously Black

Whereas Rukeyser transcribed (or used extant transcriptions of) Appalachian Vernacular English (AVE), when I first started writing poems I endeavored to get on the page the spoken language I was aching to lose. Now that I have lived away from Appalachia for so long, my ear struggles to find the frequency. (Every time my parents pronounce the breakfast food GRAN-o-la, with an outsize stress on the first syllable, I find myself strangely surprised.) Folks in Appalachia have endured centuries of denigration, mockery, and name-calling, due in part to AVE’s particular tilt. In response, its artists, myself included, have invented their own names:

Affrilachia

Expatalachia               Appodlachia

Crapalachia                                                      Rappalachia

Mexilachia                               Nina Simone                               Halfalachia

 

The supreme flex belongs to Eunice Waymon, whose sonorous stage name combined her nickname with the name of a French actress (Simone Signoret) she admired: Nina Simone (1933-2003), the best Appalachian poet of all. As Jeff Biggers reports, Simone learned the traditional mountain ballad “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” in Tryon, North Carolina, where she was born and raised. Of the performances Waymon gave as a child, Biggers concludes:

The mere fact that these concerts occurred shattered the monolithic façade of Southern Appalachia as a remote cultural wasteland: an African American child prodigy, under the guidance of an immigrant English patrician (married to a Russian), performing Bach for an extremely rural and forest-bound community in the 1940s.

Biggers hastens to note that though Waymon’s performances admitted white and Black residents, the seating was segregated. Here is the exultant, if stilted, poem-advertisement that appeared in the Tryon Daily Bulletin, on April 24, 1943, when Waymon was ten years old (scroll down in the Nina Simone archive to where it reads “Tryon Daily Bulletin.24 April 1943 issue” and click to view).

Compare that exuberant invitation to this subdued, solicitous call to “white friends” that appeared less than a month later, on May 15, 1943, again in the Tryon Daily Bulletin (scroll down in the archive to where it reads “Tryon Daily Bulletin.15 May 1943 issue” and click to view).

It is notable that Nina Simone would come to reject equally these tonalities of joviality and acquiescence. Instead, graceful contempt for the white world defined her virtuosic performances.

A stunning 1969 version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” has been viewed over eight million times on YouTube. As is often the case, the comments section stages old dramas. The top comment—“This is an old Irish ballad. As an Irishman I can say I have never, ever, heard a more beautiful rendition”—has eight-two replies sparring over the song’s origins. Many claim the song is Scottish. No, Scots-Irish. No, Gaelic. One commenter says that it’s Appalachian, for that’s where the song was first transcribed and recorded. Another seems to concur, adding that they first heard the song in Alan Lomax’s documentary Appalachian Journey (1991). Yet the quest for origins diminishes the encounters, conflicts, and numerous tongues that “licked” Simone’s version. She was of African, Cherokee, and Scots-Irish descent. Millennia ago, the Appalachians were part of the Scottish Highlands. “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” is a mountain song. No, it’s an Affrilachian poem. Another commenter dismisses the origin discussion with a succinct mic drop: “It is fabulously Black now.”

4. Love and Hate

In Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012), bell hooks (R.I.P.) staked her Appalachianness:   

While I do not claim an identity as Appalachian, I do claim a solidarity, a sense of belonging, that makes me one with the Appalachian past of my ancestors: black, Native American, white, all “people of one blood” who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom.

The solidarity and belonging that bell hooks valued are founded less on identitarian grounds than in acts of making, inventing, savoring, and loving—sensory, embodied acts of communal world making. The white Appalachian poets I admire—Melissa Range, Rose McLarney, Doug Van Gundy, Adrian Blevins, Ida Stewart, William Kelley Woolfitt, Maurice Manning—complicate their place claims while tending carefully to the past’s imprints in the present. But they often do so by acknowledging the uneven distribution of opportunities, by race, class, gender, and citizenship status, for such world making. The resultant ambivalence does not typically involve a loosened attachment to place but rather a strain on the legitimacy and legibility of such belonging alongside an urgent need to join the cause of racial justice.

A corollary ambivalence, though one that I feel from a different set of personal coordinates, courses through Savannah Sipple’s WWJD and Other Poems (2019). In the collection’s long poem “What We Tell Ourselves,” this brilliant, queer poet from eastern Kentucky captures the embodied linguistic swirl of mountain belonging:

I know city neighbors won’t never love me
as much I know what the good country
people say I know the good curvy road
I know how my skin tightens
when I have to go home I don’t want to
go home I don’t want to
go home I don’t know where
home is I don’t know if I love
the mountains I don’t know if I hate
the mountains I love to drown
in the mountains I hate the crooked
mountains I love the mountains I hate
the mountains I love the mountains I hate
the mountains I love

The Affrilachian poet Keith S. Wilson hypothesizes that “You can never know a language until you quiet your own.” This task has proven difficult for me, as it has for Sipple. Her reckoning with home here is frenetic and irresolvable: her language’s stubborn, noisy remonstrance runs her lines in circles. And yet the converse of Wilson’s claim has also proven true for me: You can never know (it’s) your own until your ear has been licked by other tongues.

 

^{1 Morgan’s Poetry Foundation biography carries the cumbersome weight (and assumed inferiority) of historical representations of Appalachia. The second paragraph begins—“Although some consider Morgan an Appalachian regional writer (a title he does not find pejorative)”—and ends—“His work avoids condescension or caricature as it portrays the lives of poor families in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”↩︎}