James R. Stokely Jr.

James R. Stokely Jr. was an American poet—not only because he wrote poetry, but because he lived a purposefully unique life meant to highlight values other than the mainstream devotion to money, power, and practicality. One might ask why this was so. The forces that drove him away from the mainstream were in place by the time he was sixteen. The forces that attracted him elsewhere took hold of him during his twenties—the decade of the Great Depression—and showed him a way to carve out an authentic life in the southern mountains.

My father was born in 1913 in Newport, Tennessee. He was the second son of the co-founder and first general manager of Stokely Brothers Canning Company. James R. Stokely Sr. had been the driving force behind the turn-of-the-century formation and early success of the company. His dream was that “the South should feed the South,” and he began to build a network of local canning factories, lease arrangements with farmers, sales arrangements with brokers, and distribution via river and rail. Unfortunately, James R. Stokely Sr. died of a heart attack in 1922, when his namesake was eight years old. Seven years later, an older first cousin consolidated control of the company unto himself by using a bankrupt company called Fame Canning to buy the common stock of Stokely Company. My father, as well as two brothers and a sister, was left without any practical control of the company’s fortune or direction.

In 1934, James graduated from the University of Tennessee with a B.S. in Commerce. His first cousin tried to convince him to work for Stokely’s, but in the end James refused to work as a hired hand for the very person who had grabbed the company from his own extended family. Following graduation, my father was discovering books, philosophy and music. Here’s a 1934 extract from the journals of the budding philosopher:

Philosophy has been brought down from heaven to earth, but it has been left groveling at the feet of business efficiency and success, has become a broker knowing where one’s soul can be invested at ten per cent. We are condemned for any but a very temporary devotion to metaphysical abstractions. Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is ridiculed. It is demanded that all thinking should be focused finally on the real concerns of life.

Another extract from the ambitious artist:

The aim of writing poems and books in the case of myself who loves books, is the joy of creating for myself, out of my own words and thoughts, the same sort of artistic structure which I have so enjoyed contemplating and admiring and which has moved me so strangely, in the pages of beloved writers. Will I ever influence the world on a large scale?

And a third, prophetic, fragment from the young searcher:

A life of meditation, thought, reading, writing, and worship even if I ne’er print any of my stuff—Care not for the opinion and approval of the world but look to God and my own conscience a wife—home—kids—and my books and a life devoted to the pursuit of literature.

Because he had known his own father for so few years—and now idolized his memory—James was particularly drawn to the father-haunted writings of Thomas Wolfe. He looked up Wolfe in New York and was befriended by the famous man. When Wolfe wanted to spend a summer back in the southern mountains, James drove him to East Tennessee and showed him a cabin in the English Mountains of Cocke County. But Wolfe chose a cabin just to the east of Asheville, the town he had made notorious as Altamont in Look Homeward, Angel.

It was through Wolfe’s family that James found his life partner and cemented his life’s way. In August of 1940, Wolfe’s sister Mabel Wolfe Wheaton wrote James a post card that changed his life. It read:

Dear James, I have 2 lovely friends—girls whom I’d like you to know. One...