Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Appalachian Poetry

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, April 29th, 2013. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, poetry from a forgotten Place. When Americans, not from Appalachia, think about Appalachia at all, it usually involves decrepit mining towns or very poor white people living isolated lives, and rundown houses, and mobile homes. Culturally, though, the image is a little better. There's the great Appalachian traditions of old-time country and bluegrass music. If you're a poetry reader, there's James Wright, who with dread, despair, and gallows humor wrote about the mining region in eastern Ohio on the West Virginia border, where he grew up. Like James Wright, Idra Novey is also a poet, translator, and teacher who grew up in Appalachia. She's been on the program before, and she recently came back and read a few James Wright poems, and she brought with her a poem by another poet from Appalachia who puts a more positive spin on her native region, Irene McKinney. Idra, welcome back to the podcast.

Idra Novey: Thank you. I'm delighted to be back.

Curtis Fox: We're going to start with a poem or two by James Wright, who's a very celebrated poet known for his bleak evocations of what's become known as the post-industrial Midwest, and for his epic struggles with depression and alcoholism. And the two things often seem bound up in the same poem with James Wright. Can you tell us a little bit about him and why you like his poetry?

Idra Novey: Well, I've been reading James Wright since high school, and he's one of the poets that I never fell out of love with. I think in a way, his interest in translating Latin American poets, and coming from a mining town, and his work was radically transformed after he translated Vallejo and Neruda, and Trakl as well. And his best books came after his years of translation. So, I was very interested, once I started translating myself, to see how this poet from Appalachia went and sought out the voices and the aesthetics of Latin American poetry and how it transformed his own poetry and brought this strangeness and this mysterious restraint into his ability to see the region I came from.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, he started off as a kind of a formal, very formal poet. And then, when he found Vallejo and Neruda and people like that, he loosened it up and only then he kind of adopted a surrealism that was popular in Latin America at that time. Am I right?

Idra Novey: Absolutely. But no one had applied that kind of surrealism that comes in and out. There's a moment of realism and surrealism and this kind of slippery to Appalachia, or to the mining towns in the US. And, so, I think he allowed us to see that culture anew. And through the Vallejolization of his poems, we got to see the American mining town in a new way because I think we had lost our ability to see it until he took some of what he learned from translating Vallejo and made us say it again.

Curtis Fox: And the first poem you're going to read has a surrealistic element to it. It's the things that happen that aren't quite clear. It's called “In Response To a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned,” which is a wonderfully long and evocative title. Is there anything that you want to say about this poem to prepare us to hear it before you read it?

Idra Novey: Well, for listeners who are familiar with Cesar Vallejo's “Blackstone Lying On A White Stone,” if you think about that poem, I think you'll hear it when while you're listening to this. I'll just read a little quote from the Vallejo poem: “I will die in Paris - and I don't step aside - perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday." So, I think that cadence, the strangeness of predicting the sad end to one's own life, I think there's a real shadow of that poem over this one.

Curtis Fox: OK. So go ahead and read the poem. I'm not going to say the title again because it's so long.

Idra Novey:

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

Curtis Fox: He had a low opinion of Bridgeport, Ohio, and probably Wheeling, West Virginia I would think.

Idra Novey: Yes. And but there's this amazing move that happens from a very realistic depiction of the vinegar works and the doors and Twenty-third and Water Streets is this place that he knew so intimately. And then all of a sudden these women drying their wings and drowning and then back to American cynicism of being like, Who the hell would commit suicide from Bridgeport, Ohio” And he slips in and out of it.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And the humor is very surprising because it starts rather bleakly.

Idra Novey: Rather bleakly.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. I will grieve alone. Something has happened. Something, something bad, has happened to the speaker in this poem, and he kind of becomes a peeping tom or something like that. He's like hanging out above the river, above upstream from the sewer main. So, it's not a, it's an unpleasant kind of hard place that he's hanging out and pondering and gazing. But what do you make of the women who poured down the long street to the river and into the river? That's the point where the poem takes a leap into surrealism.

Idra Novey: Well, I think that James Wright's poems often posit another, and he looks at something, and then he becomes the other. I think a lot of poets do. I think he's really good at that. So, he has this image of the women who are far away, but by the end, he's thinking about the possibility of himself committing suicide to ask the question nobody would commit suicide. He's thinking, well, I would never do that just to get to Bridgeport, Ohio. So, first, these women seem these sort of mystical beings and then they also just seem like one more person in a river that maybe he himself had considered is sort of like a dangerous, dirty place.

Curtis Fox: When things are Lethe, in the river of death. And that's definitely a part. But it's odd, his choice of words. I do not know how it was they could drown every evening. So, the women repeatedly drowned.

Idra Novey: Well, they were whores every night.

Curtis Fox: And that's a wonderful, wonderful image of the degradation and the horror of what they had to do to earn their living.

Idra Novey: In that whorehouse.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, but they climb out like angels practically on the other side because they're drying their wings.

Idra Novey: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Which is…it's almost a sentimental image.

Idra Novey: It is. And, you know, he's been accused of being a sentimental poet, but I think what he actually does is risk emotion. I mean, I think it's a question of semantics. Is he sentimental risking? Because there is something about that. But there's also something wonderful that I think he got from Vallejo because I think Latin American poets don't have an American phobia of the sentimental right to risk exposing some genuine emotion in a poem.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, I think that's what a lot of American poets like James Wright got from maybe some Polish poets, and from Latin America, is a fearlessness about expressing emotion. Now, he was from Ohio. He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio...

Idra Novey: In the late ’20s.

Curtis Fox: In the late 1920s. This is before the total industrial decline of the Midwest. So he saw, of course, if he was born in the late 1920s, the Depression happen and World War II happen. And there's a bleakness about the landscape that may well be James Wright's own bleakness, am I right?

Idra Novey: Absolutely. But I think in the other poem that we're going to talk about today, that he just talks about how the mining town culture, the stasis of it and the enclosure of it, how nobody goes and nobody comes can be bleak for everybody in it. There's just not that many options. You work at the mine or you don't work.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, and we're going to hear that very intensely in this next poem. It's “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” It's one of his more famous poems. This poem takes place when the speaker is in a football stadium, he's watching a football game. And these are his thoughts as he's watching this game. Here's “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.”

Idra Novey:
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

Curtis Fox: So here we are with suicide again.

Idra Novey: I think in Appalachia, there's a sense of bleakness to the culture. It's a forgotten corner of America. I mean, I think that we, there's a real separatist tendency in Appalachia, this region. People take the coal out, but there's no real resources poured in. And I think that sense of the country's resignation and lack of interest is pervasive to living there.

Curtis Fox: So, he's at the speakers at the football stadium, and he's thinking of the Polacks nursing long beers and Tiltonsville, that's presumably a town close by. The gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood.

Idra Novey: Which clearly dates the poem to a certain era.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, by using the word Negroes. Yeah. The ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, dreaming of heroes that ruptured night watchman. It's unexplained and kind of mysterious. We don't know how he's ruptured, but something is seriously wrong with this night watchman.

Idra Novey: Yeah, I think it's a night watchman at Wheeling Steel, the steel mill. And I think that there's these three words that I think stand out in the poem, and ruptured is one of them. And the others are those two killer adverbs, suicidally beautiful and terribly against each other's bodies. I always tell my students that you don't want to use adverbs because you're using them because you don't trust the verb. You haven't found the right verb unless you can match growing suicidally beautiful or galloping terribly. Yeah, because that is an adverb that's been earned. It makes us see growing sons with new eyes, you know, just to grow suicidally beautiful that it's dangerous to grow as a boy in this culture is really provocative and the same thing to see them as these animals and, if you think about it, that's what football players do. I mean this was way before all the reports came out about the sustained problems from football head injuries. We now know that it's, you know, you can have memory loss for the rest of your life. But I think James Wright intuited that ramming your head into somebody's gut over and over again for four years is probably a bad idea.

Curtis Fox: Yet entertaining for the proud fathers who are ashamed to go home.

Idra Novey: And the clucking mothers.

Curtis Fox: The women cluck like starved pullets dying for love. Pullets, of course, are chickens. It's an odd image. If an urban poet were to use that, it probably wouldn't sound that good. But I suspect that James Wright had experience of chickens.

Idra Novey: Yes. And I also think there's some compassion to the image of how desperate they are and that their love might be the love for their sons because they're not getting it from the men.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, but that therefore. The final stanza of this very brief poem begins with, “Therefore, their sons grow suicidally beautiful at the beginning of October, and gallop terribly against each other’s bodies." The first part of the poem is an emotional argument which explains the therefore. What? But what is that argument? Why?

Idra Novey: Well, I think it's playing off of the sonnet. And in the sonnet you always end with this turn, the volta. And, so, I think he's playing off of that here a little bit with these, you know, the closing lines. Like, I've given you this image and now I'm going to say what it means, the consequences of this image is these boys galloping terribly against each other.

Curtis Fox: It's a quick move, and it's an argumentative move that makes you go back over the earlier part of the poem and say, What's wrong with the community here that the sons have to gallop terribly against each other's body?

Idra Novey: But why it's such a brilliant American poem is that there is no indictment. There's nothing strident in this poem. He just lays out the chickens and the rupture, and the question resonates in the reader's mind, as it should.

Curtis Fox: There's a lot of questions that resonate. Why are the proud fathers ashamed to go home? And why aren't they giving their women the love that they crave? And why is the night watchman ruptured at Wheeling Steel? There's a lot of questions.

Idra Novey: There's a lot of questions. And I think that is, this comes from the same book as the poem that we just read. And that was the first book he released after doing all of his Vallejo and Trakl translations. So, I think if you it has the same mysterious feel of the provocative images in those poems. And I think he learned a lot to not lay it out. Not to...

Curtis Fox: Overexplain, not over-contextualize stuff, just to put an image out there and let it sit with you.

Idra Novey: Yeah, Stanley Kunitz is famous for saying, you know, you should end on an image and not explain it. And if you have to explain it, go back to the beginning of the poem and see what you did wrong. And I think, you know, if you have to explain it, something in the poetry is lacking. And I think he does it. If you look at some of his earlier books before he started translating, I think he doesn't trust the mystery of his images quite the same way.

Curtis Fox: Another thing that occurs to me in reading him, not necessarily in the poems we just heard, but in some of his other poems, is there's also a Chinese element about it, a classical Chinese element mixed with this Latin American surrealism. Do you sense that in this poem, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”—do you sense this sort of classically Chinese restraint of presenting the image?

Idra Novey: I think there is in a sense of relating poetry to the seasons and that when you connect a poem to the season that that season then tells you something. About the emotional life of the poem. Yeah, football season is autumn, but it's Autumn begins. You're like, oh, my goodness, these women are going to have to cluck for, you know, all these months. And the father still won't go home. And the boys have just begun galloping against each other. There's the whole season to go.

Curtis Fox: Now, there's another poem that you wanted to read by someone named Irene McKinney. And I had never heard of Irene McKinney before. She is up on our website. But can you tell us just a little bit about her?

Idra Novey: Well, Irene McKinney died recently, and I wasn't aware of her work either. But when I saw some of the quotes that she had said about her life and what it was like to write in Appalachia, I became interested because I've read James Wright so long and because I come from Appalachia. I'm very interested in poets who stay there, which I never could have done. And the poem I picked that was up on the Poetry Foundation website is about visiting the gravesite where she bought her own plot and the gravesite and wasn't close to dying. And I think that's very much an Appalachian thing that you were there, you have been there, and you will continue to be there. It's just a real continuity to that. And I wondered, reading her work, about how that affects how you write. And I think there's something in the way she writes that she's such a part of the land and the animals. She lived on the farm where her family had been for a long time and she continued to live there for most of her life and saw herself continuing to be there. She didn't make moves to leave it, you know, even after she was divorced and so forth. So, she came up with amazing images, I think, from having that close relationship to one place. Like, in one poem I found, she said, “Animals have tongues in their feet and taste the leaves.”

Curtis Fox: That's great.

Idra Novey: That's amazing. I wonder how long you have to live near the same animals and the same place to come up with that.

Curtis Fox: So this one has a delicious title. And I think for me it seemed ironic and funny, but maybe for Irene McKinney it was more literal. It's called “Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia.” Idra, why don't you give this one a read?

Idra Novey:
Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead
at once, I listened to my father’s urgings about “the future”

and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view
of the bare white church, tall old elms, and the creek below.

I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out
in the middle of a big double bed.—But no,

finally, my burial has nothing to do with my marriage, this lying
here
in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine

for who I’ll be then, as real as anything undergone, going
back
and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot

on the earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low
in a little plane and when I looked down at the church,

the trees I’ve felt with my hands, the neighbors’ houses
and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew
was,

it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs
at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted

to reach down and pat it, while letting it know
I wouldn’t interfere for the world, the world being

everything this isn’t, this unknown buried in the know.

Curtis Fox: This poem covers quite a bit of ground. It starts off…

Idra Novey: Literally, she's flying over it.

Curtis Fox: She's flying out. She begins the bomb, "Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead at once." That suggests somebody who's trapped.

Idra Novey: Yes.

Curtis Fox: Secure and dead at once. Yet by the end of the poem...

Idra Novey: She loves where she's trapped.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Idra Novey: She wouldn't be anywhere else. And I think that's sort of the contradiction in the poem in that freedom versus the dead security of being in one place that is boring. But on the other hand, well, if you're not going anywhere, you might as well experiment and feel free where you are because you're not sort of calculating what's going to happen next.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, there's a lot of humor in here because she's dead at once, and I listen to my father's urgings about the future. Normally you think of preparing for your next job or retirement, but this the future here is buying your...

Idra Novey: The future is the end. The future is when you have no future.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Idra Novey: Well, you know, in James Wright's poems, he writes about when you live around the mine. I think that Irene McKinney then writes sort of about life in the mine and in the mining culture. She has a great line in one of her poems and other poems where she talks about the Appalachian marl and sulfur ooze. And in this poem, you know, she talks about the trees she's felt with her hands. There's something really bodily about her relationship to where she lives. James Wright, I think, writes for more of a movie. He's looking at the brothel from a distance. He was a real loner. She's not a loner. She's in the mining culture. She's not looking at it from a distance. And I think that that is just a different way of writing about this region.

Curtis Fox: And James Wright was totally repulsed, ultimately, by the place that he came from. He found the source of a lot of his depression and anxiety and horror.

Idra Novey: But she embraces it.

Curtis Fox: And she embraces it.

Idra Novey: That's it. And it's an interesting thing. I think his repulsion, as it was for me, led him to translate and leave. I was just counting the days to get my passport and get out of there. And I think that James Wright also had that. And Irene McKinney seems at ease in home with the culture that she came from and living on the farm where her family had lived, which as a woman in Appalachia, is really, I think, a really interesting place to get to emotionally.

Curtis Fox: Idra, thanks so much for joining us.

Idra Novey: Thank you for having me.

Curtis Fox: Idra Novey's latest book of poems is Exit, Civilian. Let us know what you think of this program. Email us at [email protected] The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.