Another South: Experimental Writing in the South

Poetry Scouting Mission: At the Intersection of Southern and Experimental, by Hank Lazer

Hank Lazer Poetry Scouting Mission: At the Intersection of Southern and Experimental You might consider thinking of Another South: ExperimentalWriting in the South as a testing ground, presenting the complex, multifaceted experimentation in poetry in one particular part of the country. This anthology, then, becomes a means of exploring the relationship between “regional” and “experimental,” a means of inquiring into and exhibiting the plausible relations of these two terms at a time when both terms are greeted with significant degrees of skepticism. Each term contains within it significant differences, including race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and even duration of residence in the region, all leading toward different experiences and expressions of “the South.” Within the experimental, the anthology contains a wide range of relations to voice, to cross-genre activity, to the visual, to the surreal, to states of possession, and a wide range of expressions of musical affinities (particularly with the blues and jazz). Think of this anthology as an exploration of the meaning and nature of place at a time in cultural and literary history when we experience the contradictory impulses of a digitally accelerated movement toward globalism simultaneously with a renewed emphasis on the highly particularized and intensely localized circumstances of poetic expression. As Thomas Meyer’s statement in the Contributors section of this book reminds us, the poem itself constitutes a place— and perhaps a place that is put in place to reflect and embody the multiple nature of place itself:“Poetry celebrates not only presence but the multiplicity of presence and the infinite possibilities of there.The poem has the power of location, it is a place— an actual (not metaphorical) spatial event of language that begins in the mouth and lungs and moves outward into time, the mind, the body” (271). Each and every poem is (and makes) a place; each poem, as in Robert Duncan’s “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” is “a made place,” a specific incarnation, but also a reincarnation and the marking of a return to a place “near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought.”1 But what we have here, in this new anthology, is a series of such places. The series constitutes an inquiry. Here, we might learn whether “experimental” means something different “here” (in the South) than elsewhere.We might also discover the particular meaning(s) of experimental here. Whatever we find here, it is not and will not be singular. As Bill Lavender notes in his Introduction, this anthology does not constitute a monolithic replacement version for “Southern Lit.” Nor is Another South a stopping point nor a culmination of a process—this anthology deliberately exists in motion. The anthology is a gathering place and a work-in-progress. It is the third attempt at such an iteration— the earlier versions being the New Orleans Review, The Other South: Experimental Writing in the South 21, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 37–78 (19 poets); and the New Orleans Review,An Other South: ExperimentalWriting in the South, Part II 25, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring 1999): 8–150 (44 poets)—and it does not propose to be a newly hegemonic, 1 Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: Grove, 1960; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1973), 7. singularly axiomatic movement. Another South represents a moment (or an extended decade-as-moment) and a place (“the South”) as a time and place that has been and is happening. Indeed, many of the poets in the anthology make explicit this sense of time, place, and poem in motion. Sandy Baldwin thinks of the “Poem as Zip Gun or Graphic Acceleration Projector” and claims that “in the beginning there is kinetics, speed, moving structures” (261–62). )ohn Lowther reminds us that “poetry is not a thing. . . . poetry is a thing that happens is happening” (119). His own talk-poemimprovisation “is a sort of talk investigation a poetry scouting mission” (120), as is the entire anthology (though “talk” and “voice” are by no means the exclusive or even dominant modes of expression).2 The poetry in motion in this anthology is deliberately on edge, both locating that edge and moving away from it. As Lowther notes,“that there is an edge beyond what is fixed that makes it interesting that gives you something to work with” (127). One such edge, raised explicitly by Mark Prejsnar, is the page itself, with many of the poets in this anthology exploring ways— through performance, multimedia...