Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South

Introduction

Introduction “How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad.” This sentiment from one of Charles Wright’s most well-known poems, “The Southern Cross” (1981, World of the Ten Thousand Things 43), allows something of the scope of the ways in which contemporary southern poets—and perhaps, more broadly, those who self-identify as contemporary southerners—view the strands of the past. Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South attempts to make concrete the cultural realities projected through Wright’s evocative notion, beautiful and intact in its abstraction, that the past commingles disparate strains, ranging from sweetness to wrongness to sadness, as the remains of our experience demand response from the present. The title of Wright’s poem most obviously cites the navigational constellation of the southern hemisphere as well as the Christian iconography of the Bible Belt, the poet’s native territory. But it is also suggestive of the famous and infamous battle flag of the Confederate States of America, implying the darker impulses of southern history in the use of the Southern Cross as a symbol for white supremacy and opposition to the civil rights movement. Thus history returns obliquely to the evanescent surface of Wright’s work, which gestures toward other forms of southern crossings, other indications of a time and region in flux, careful to note that absence, like the silences between musical notes, can be as revealing as the remembered presence of the past: “It’s what we forget that defines us, and stays in the same place, / And waits to be rediscovered” (54). Contemporary southern poetry, steeped in memory, both personal and communal , awaits critical rediscovery. Southern Crossings interprets the work of a diversity of poets as responses to cultural modes—political, social, economic, and aesthetic—of the contemporary South. The following chapters incorporate specialized approaches that connect each poet’s use of form to a specific model of social memory. To test the claims Introduction xiv of region and nation on cultural memory, I develop intersections between culturally trenchant forms of poetry and collective remembrance in relation to a particular historical and geographic locus: the changing U.S. South from the early 1950s until the present, a time when what was construed the nation’s most distinct region is in process of becoming increasingly “Americanized,” even globalized . This book therefore encompasses a cultural history that spans the rise of the civil rights movement and federally mandated desegregation, the lasting conflicts of the Cold War and the U.S. war in Vietnam, the spread of industrial and postindustrial forms of capitalism as well as urban and suburban zones, the advent of national and international transportation networks, and the current politics of identity formation. Combining analysis of poetry as a historically responsive medium with developments in the fields of memory work as well as regional studies, Southern Crossings illustrates how the creative range of southern poetics helps to reevaluate theories of collective remembering on regional , national, and transnational levels. It does so while also presenting original perspectives on a spectrum of contemporary southern poets: Betty Adcock, Kate Daniels, James Dickey, Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Donald Justice, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Morgan, Harryette Mullen, George Scarbrough, Dave Smith, Henry Taylor, Natasha Trethewey, Robert Penn Warren, and Charles Wright. Most of these poets have achieved prominence on a national scale, and their considerable reputations are reflected in myriad poetic awards as well as in the fact that six out of these thirteen writers have earned a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, arguably the highest honor given to a U.S. poet. In addition to analyzing regional emanations of trauma and nostalgia, this study offers a more complex, multivalent vision of cultural remembrance by also exploring lesser-known, yet equally compelling uses of the past, such as historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images), primal memory (a hoped-for return to the level of archetypal memory and integration with instinctual nature), cartographic simulation (an abstract vision of memory as pure process through poetic mappings of remembered landscapes), and countermemory (resistant strains of collective memory that disrupt the continuity of the official historical record). This multiplicity of critical paradigms is commensurate to the sheer multitudinousness of contemporary southern culture, its nuances and complications, and parallels the diversity of forms and ideas engaged by the poetries under scrutiny. The variety of critical approaches demonstrates that “southernness” is not a unitary, homogenized essence, but a cultural mode that generates overlapping and conflicting levels of identification.1 The...