Clearing Newground

Clearing Newground Robert Morgan My first contact with Jim Wayne Miller occurred in the fall of 1963 when, a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill, I was editing fiction for The Carolina Quarterly . We published some stories by Jim Wayne Miller that year, including one where two brothers from the country attended school. When the teacher asks the students what they had for breakfast most students lie, telling the teacher what she wants to hear. "They recited: bacon, eggs, toast, milk, cereal, all the lovely approved things." But the younger brother Eugene doesn't understand the game and answers that he had biscuits and sawmill gravy, and then he adds, "and new molasses." The older brother, who narrates the story, says, "A half-mad, hysterical laugh rose to the high ceiling ofthe gym and bounced back before I realized that it was I who had laughed. I cringed down, ashes inside, and looked to see whether anyone on either side of me knew that Eugene was my brother." This scene is also included in Jim Wayne's 1989 novel Newfound, and it illustrates the consistency of his writing from the very beginning. And it illustrates the humor and wit ofhis work, and the complexity ofhis point ofview. Forthoughthe storyistold bythe more sophisticatedolderbrother, the sympathy is clearly with the more honest and confident Eugene. The story is an example ofthe irony that runs though all Jim Wayne's work, for he was fascinated by the paradoxes ofidentity, vanity, honesty. My second contact with Jim Wayne came the next year, in 1964, when a thin crisp volume ofpoems called Copperhead Cane arrived at the office of The Carolina Quarterly. I was just beginning to discover contemporary poetry then, and the poets bright young writers were talking about were Robert Lowell, Berryman, Robert BIy. But here was a collection ofpoems about the mountains where I had grown up. It had never occurred to me one could make poems about the Blue Ridge Mountains. Fiction, yes, but not poems. Not only were Jim Wayne's poems valid and colloquial, they were in rhyme and meter. Many were sonnets. "Endings have a wile, a mountain cunning,/ and only seem to sleep, like groundhogs sunning/ on rocks" a poem called "In a Mountain Pasture" began. RobertMorgan'spoemsandstorieshave appeared in manypublications. He isprofessor ofEnglish in thegraduate school at Cornell University. He has taughtcoursesattheAppalachian Writers' Workshop inHindman, Kentucky, for a number ofyears. His work hasalso appeared inAppalachian Heritage. 24 I was struck at once by a voice, and by the formal mastery. With a shiver of recognition I read: "Catch up the hounds by collar and scruff,/ And drop the cattle gate!/ The fox has holed in Reynolds' Bluff,/ The moon is low, it's late!/ He savors flame and crowds the fire,/ A stubborn leaf in frosty air,/ The wrinkled brown old hunter." And there were other things in the lean volume that grabbed my attention . There were passionate, eerie poems I did not know how to describe. Some were poems concerned with eros and death unlike any I had seen or would see until I later read the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. The sonnet "The Fencepost ?" ends like this: My roots are in your grave, by your own giving, Yet you need me ifyou mount over mold. The dead by giving, gain; the living, gaining, give. The living live and die; the dead by dying live. It was thrilling to see a young poet ring charges on his lines, running the phases through permutations and paradoxes ofbirth and rebirth, surrender and triumph. The poem had a fugai effect, with the combinations, and recombinations creating a hypnotic, epigrammatic explosiveness. Just as spooky was the poem about the ghostly presence ofthe Indians in the mountains, "On Sandy Mush Creek," which begins: Under the bluffby Sandy Mush, forever Wavering, still, I knew he was roving, Haunting Round Bottom, wandering holdover, dim in his myth, moving Unshackled shadow ofmy Indian interval, Offto my left, dim in his myth, moving Like shade ofthunderheads over the ground... But the most memorable poem ofall, and the eeriest, was a tiny poem near the end of the volume called "After Love." Spent wave oflocked love...