New River, New Verse: The Shifting Nature of David Huddle’s Poetry

Much as that mountain culture along the New River near a village called Ivanhoe in southwest Virginia has and does trouble(d) him, David Huddle can’t seem to help but return to it again and again in his poetry, repeatedly conjuring up that small portion of hilly rural Virginia in print using a number of fictionalized names.

“Professor Nelson can’t get free of Stevens Creek, Virginia,” declares the first line of Huddle’s second novel, La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl, ascribing yet another name to the same basic region, while also suggesting the protagonist’s binding fate—debilitating psychological prison sentence at its worst, muse’s blessing at best—is true enough for Professor Nelson’s creator as well. And is this not as it should be, especially for writers? Much as we yearn to escape our formative places, occasionally fooling ourselves into believing we have succeeded, they surface from time to time, or, to regionalize a cliché, come back to haint us in ways so subtle we frequently fail to understand or even discern them. Fortunately, however, the relationships between formative places and artists remain a little easier to ponder and trace as a result of those created bodies of work which possess the capacity to serve as conduits or translators between the two. Paradoxically then, many of the qualities David Huddle and writers of similar upbringings—self included—tend to shut out, lament with embarrassment and/or outright despise concerning their parochial points of origin—meanness, savagery, patriarchy, violence, countless manifestations of numbing small-mindedness, a smothering overriding xenophobia—often function as or among the most powerful catalytic variables in the workings of a writer’s craft. After all, our bodies have digested and continue to carry the trace elements of the soil, fauna, air, animals—as well as the often unconscious psychological impacts of sound, weather, topography, and human interaction—long after we have departed. A connection remains, some of the dimensions of which tend to make our places almost indistinguishable from ourselves: to the extent we might even be known to others and ourselves by the same names. It is no fiction at all, for instance, that about five miles northwest of Ivanhoe—in the shadow of Raven Cliff, just off state route 619, along Cripple Creek—there is a place on the map consisting of little more than a scattering of homes called “Huddle.”

In 2007, while participating on a panel of writers entitled “The Perils of Regionalism: Labels and Their Limitations,” Huddle explicitly addressed how his ongoing uneasy relationship with his home region continues to benefit his art: “There’s a whole lot about southwestern Virginia that I don’t get along with, at all, and I think that’s a good thing for my writing. I think I need that friction, that being at odds with Appalachian culture in the way that I am.” Huddle’s choice of the word “need” in this context seems especially meaningful. His perpetual artistic tug of war with Glory River/Stevens Creek/Rosemary/Ivanhoe—that imaginary landscape of his formative past, whatever he or we might call it—is not simply nice or good or troubling or burdensome for his art; it may embody some or all of those things but it most definitely is “needed.” In other words, it is necessary.

There lies below the idea of artistic necessity an additional, deeper layer—sometimes troubling and painful, though also often very productive—which informs the relationship between writer and place, and which we might best approach by way of a comment Huddle makes near the end of his introduction to a collection of much of his best work up through 1994 entitled A David Huddle Reader. Comparing the process of writing to participating in a sport, Huddle emphasizes, “[W]hat matters is that I’m there [his italics]—as completely as I possibly can be.” Functioning in his composition process is an implied duality of being, of action, in which Huddle is both there as the man sitting before a computer and as an...