The New New South in Poetry: Daniel Cross Turner’s Southern Crossings

REVIEW-ESSAY JOHN BURT Brandeis University The New New South in Poetry: Daniel Cross Turner’s Southern Crossings Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South, by Daniel Cross Turner. University of Tennessee Press, 2012. $43.00 cloth. DANIEL CROSS TURNER’S SOUTHERN CROSSINGS: POETRY, MEMORY, AND the Transcultural South is a wide-ranging, insightful survey into the poetry of the broadly-defined South since the 1960s. Prior to this era it was the common assumption of Southern writers, black and white, that their region was culturally distinct from the rest of the Union and that that cultural distinctness would register itself both thematically and formally in the poetry written there. Thematically, this poetry would turn on racism and the class conflict among whites, on the legacy of the Civil War, and on a sense of defeat and guilt that would put it at odds with what was assumed to be the prevailing national story of success, innocence, and prosperity. Formally, this poetry would be characterized by an attraction to narrative, to a modernist-tinged formality haunted not by the sonority of nineteenth-century lyric but by the ironies of seventeenth-century poetics, or alternatively to such folk forms as ballads and tales. Understanding the ways in which this model was always a simplification, and sometimes even a self-parody, Turner asks how Southern poetry hangs together in an age of globalization and hybridity. Turner provides several answers to this question, no one of them definitive but collectively accounting for his sense (and my sense) that the poets he examines have something to do with each other. The first answer is that although the South since the Civil Rights era claims to be politically transformed and reborn (as it had also claimed in the era of the “New South”), racial inequality and racist oppression continue to haunt the Southern imagination, and have not been as deeply eradicated as the South’s contemporary political and cultural leaders proclaim them 614 John Burt to be. Jim Crow and lynch law may be things of the past, but Southern poets still feel a special responsibility to face down questions of race, still feel themselves required to acknowledge the history of racism and take a stance about it, in ways that other poets in the United States may feel themselves exempted from. Also, Southern politics may no longer turn on the angry confrontation between Bourbon and Populist whites, but even in the world of Shoney’s and Wal-Mart the ways in which the white underclass is shoved to the corner are still live subjects for poetry. The second answer is that although the traditional ways of doing Southern poetry no longer dictate the forms it is expected to take, contemporarySouthernpoetsneverthelessoftenfindthemselvesinsome contact, perhaps ironic, with the expectations of narrative form or of blues lyricism. What is more, these poets also share a common sense of whom they are in conversation with—with each other, first of all, but also with particular poets of the previous couple of generations whose legacy they test and contest, whose measure they take and against whom they seek to be measured. Inevitably, the repeated foil in Southern Crossings is the poetry of the Nashville Fugitives—Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Donald Davidson most especially. Turner’s treatment is distinctive in separating Robert Penn Warren from the Fugitive/Agrarian group, partly because the concerns of the text he focuses on, his 1969 Audubon: A Vision, seem at odds with those of Warren’s mentors, and partly because Warren’s greatest fame as a poet came decades after the passing of the Agrarian movement. The section about the Fugitive/Agrarians themselves is the only section of the book that strikes me as weak, first, because Turner sees them as reincarnations of the Plantation school, whose moonlight-and-magnolias romanticism, for all of their hostility to modernity and neo-Confederate piety, they in fact detested; second, because he sees the political agendas of all of them as essentially the same; and third, because he does not distinguish between the Hardy-influenced poetics of Ransom and the Eliot-influenced poetics of Tate. Treating the Fugitives and the Agrarians as straw men can...