Mapping Radical Poetic Geographies: The Sonnets of Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson

Countering stereotypical and superficial depictions of contemporary Appalachia, the poets Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson construct innovative sonnets that resist reductive, monolithic notions of place and identity and illuminate a multivalent Appalachian culture informed by the diverse individual family stories and collective traditions that shape the region.

In the American imagination, the poetic voices that highlight the complexities of Appalachia (a geographical distinction that covers 13 states) are too often overshadowed by derogatory stereotypes of the region disseminated through television and film. According to sociologist Rebecca Scott, “Appalachian stereotypes conflate the land and people with dark, trash-filled hollows sheltering isolated incestuous communities.” These images have material consequences to a region that suffers under a legacy of extractivism, environmental degradation, and systemic poverty. The historian Ronald Eller argues that these stereotypes “blame the victim for Appalachia’s problems,” which enables “the rest of America to keep the region at arm’s length, rather than to confront the systemic problems of a dependent economy, environmental decay, and institutional weakness that challenge mountain communities today.”

For poets on the margins of American society, the sonnet can serve as a space to express and enact resistance to dominant discourse, a site to exploit the tension between adhering to literary traditions and rebelling against them. Founder of the Affrilachian Poets collective, Frank X Walker experiments with the sonnet to create what he terms the “Affrilachian sonnet,” a novel poetic form rooted in Black Appalachian history and creative fortitude. Challenging patriarchal conceptualizations of work, Maggie Anderson employs the sonnet to preserve a feminist family lineage of labor in West Virginia. Harkening to literary conventions while also defying them, Walker and Anderson both reinvent the sonnet on their own terms, mapping radical poetic geographies rooted in Appalachian history and culture.

Born in Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is a prolific poet and interdisciplinary artist with an expansive oeuvre of work, tackling a range of themes from the autobiographical to the historical. In 1991, he coined the neologism “Affrilachia,” a portmanteau that gave voice to the intersecting experience of Black and Appalachian identities and laid the groundwork for a powerful movement in the arts that continues to grow and thrive. Building upon Walker’s vision, the collective of Affrilachian Poets “render the invisible visible” by celebrating “a multicultural influence, a spectrum of people who consider Appalachia home and/or identify strongly with the trials and triumphs of being of this region.” In 2000, Walker published the poetry collection Affrilachia, featuring candid lyrical reflections on race, place, and identity. Through subsequent volumes of historically informed poetry including Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), which was awarded the Lillian Smith Book Award, Walker has used the persona poem to foreground figures from African American history, “rescuing muted and silenced voices.” In 2007, Walker and the poet Nikky Finney launched the literary periodical Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, and in 2018, the University Press of Kentucky published the anthology Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets. The history of the Affrilachian Poets has also been documented in the film Coal Black Voices: The History of the Affrilachian Poets, which Walker co-produced.

In 2016, Walker turned to the sonnet in his special edition book The Affrilachian Sonnets, published with Larkspur Press. A unique experiment in style, form, and content, this book inaugurates a new and distinctive form of Walker’s own design in dialogue with wood engravings by the artist Joanne Price. While the sonnets in this collection follow the 14-line structure, they do not conform to conventional patterns of rhyme and meter. In an interview with Bruce Dick and Forrest Yerman, Walker explains how he conceived the structure for these poems: “I felt that I wanted to take something traditional and morph it back toward something useful to me. So to call it an Affrilachian sonnet means that I get to define it, and it doesn’t have to fit the traditional Italian or Shakespearean sonnet forms.” In one poem from this collection entitled “Gunning for Bear,” Walker delineates...