New Poems by Four Appalachian Masters

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS—REVIEW ESSAY New Poems by Four Appalachian Masters George Garrett Fred Chappell. Backsass: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 54 pages. $24.95 in cloth. $16.95 in trade paperback. I will not mention the Roman School of Poets which flourished in the 1970s in Rome Georgia nor the Culinary Movement which declared poetry should contain no raw ingredients such substances lacking sophistication —Fred Chappell, "The Nothing Which Is Not Poetry" THROUGH HIS VARIOUS AND INNOVATIVE FICTION, his intelligent and sensitive criticism, and, above all, more than a dozen books of poems, Fred Chappell has earned an enviable place in the permanent contemporary literary hall of fame. He has done it all, speaking to us in many voices, some wildly funny and some deeply sad, and all fluently at ease. He is easy with the elaborate and intricate verse forms of English and of several other languages, living and dead; and he can just as well do the jumpdown and jive of today's barnyard and sidewalk argot. All of this virtuosity is practiced by Chappell without losing the pitch and timbre of his hometown Appalachian accent. Ole Fred's dedicated readers—and count me as one of them ever since the beginning when he brought out The World Between the Eyes (1971)—tend not merely to delight in his art, but to rejoice in it. Backsass is brand spanking new and no exception to the rule. No exception, either, to another rule—that with each collection Chappell is always trying something new, testing and teasing himself with new challenges. Bracketed by two hard-edged, funny poems, "Hello" and "Hello Once More," ostensibly spoken by Chappell's smartmouth answering machine, the thirty-six other poems are colloquial, utterly contemporary. As poet and critic R. S. Gwynn has noted, the heart of Backsass is to be found in two superb imitations of satires by Juvenal: the seventh, "The 74 Sorrows of Intellectual Life," and the eleventh, "A Thanksgiving Invitation." The other shorter poems are equally satirical and jokey, anecdotal, sometimes boldly bawdy and sometimes riddled with sorrow. To try to describe them would be as hopeless and embarrassing as trying to explain a joke. Reader, let these poems happen to you. Nobody needs to tell you when to laugh and when to cheer. What a critic might do without interfering with the experience is to point out that for a very long time American poets have been trying to find a way to include and incorporate the ordinary, often "unpoetic" spoken language and the ordinary things of our troubled times under the umbrella of poetry. There are many poets who can summon up the high style, the poetry of eloquence and elegance (and Chappell is one of them). Far fewer who can flash and seize the present moment like a candid snapshot. Berryman, for instance, tried his dead level best in Dream Songs and so did Lowell with late sonnets and confessions, and you can go back more and point to Sandburg, Masters, William Carlos Williams, Merrill Moore, even e. e. cummings. Because the language is constantly changing and the materials are evanescent, ifnot expendable, it has to be done over and over again, at least by each generation if not every decade of American poets. It is especially a problem for Southern poets whose tradition for a long time favored formal and poetic utterance, leaving to prose the territory of narrative and the vernacular. Chappell has many times demonstrated his mastery of the eloquent and high style. He has also proved his perfect ear for our spoken rhythms and lingo. Here in Backsass he pushes the vernacular envelope giving us poems about such untouchable subjects as (among many other things): politics ("Down With Democracy," "Losing It," "Deep in the Heart of Texas," "I Suppose War Is Okay"); religion ("No, Said St. Peter," "My Reinvention of the Peach," "Lazarus"); pornography ("Well Hung," "A Thanksgiving Invitation," "Clothing Eunices"); with a few salvos fired at literary critics, real estate developers, the pain of a hangover and the poetry of John Ashbery. Where else will you ever find poet and poems able to contain a multitude of things like...