Another South; Experimental Writing in the South
Edited by Bill Lavender.
The University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Paperback, 277 pages.

I’ve always been a fan of Thomas Holley Chivers (1809–1858), the eccentric Georgian doctor whose poetic experiments resulted in some of the worst, as well as some of the most interesting poems of the antebellum American South. Chivers reads like a Gerard Manly Hopkins gone sour; a Swinburne turned Baptist tent-meeting preacher. Poe saw the well-off plantation owner as the perfect mark for repeated requests for money, although it appears that he did have a certain respect for his writing. In fact, many of Poe’s most famous poems seem to be patterned after Chivers’ earlier, humbler, efforts. (If we look close enough perhaps we can see a poetic ecology at work here: Chivers, the not-so-good poet, rewritten and revised by the more poetically gifted Poe, whose work, in turn, is translated ((and transfigured in the process)) by the supremely gifted Baudelaire.) What I like about Chivers is that he was a Blake-like visionary, attempting in his sonic effects to replicate the vowel-laden palaver he allegedly heard among the angels in Heaven. For Chivers, poetry was a means of communicating a very real SOMETHING which he seems to have been able to witness, or at least to have heard, aided perhaps by some patent medicine opium mixture that he concocted himself. Wherever his language came from, it is distinctly HIS as in this much-reprinted stanza from “The Poet of Love”:

With the white lightnings of his still small voice,
Deep as the thunders of the azure Silence–
He makes dumb the oracular Cymbals with their noise,
Till BEAUTY flourish Amaranthine on the Islands
Of all the loud tumultuous Sea
Of the vast immensity,
Echoing the music of the Morns,
Blown through the Chrysomelian Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!

Eonchs of Ruby (1851) and Virginalia (1853) are both packed with examples of bold acoustic and verbal experiments, many of them quite successful, I believe. For his time, Chivers was a kind of language-poet.

Now let us fast-forward to the American South of the early 21st century and consider the offerings in this University of Alabama Press anthology. Please allow me a moment to digress. In my earlier incarnations I worked construction jobs in and around Baltimore city. One of the jobs I enjoyed was spackling sheet-rock after it was nailed in place. One applied the spackling compound, allowed it to dry, and then sanded over the spots, so that nail holes were completely covered before painting. The spackling compound was a kind of universal agent, good for any kind of cosmetic application to sheet rock. One of its great advantages was that it was quick and easy to use, and kind of fun. It also had a pleasant smell.

After reading through Another South, I do believe that many of the poets included in its pages have discovered a verbal equivalent to spackling compound. It’s easy to spread, fragment, twist and tear, but it guarantees that a “poem” results if it’s used in whatever shape, size or form one chooses. Though the poets use the stuff throughout this anthology, none of them have named it in their “statement of poetics” included at the end, so please allow me to do so. I’ll call it the All-Purpose Universal Poetry Compound, or AUPC, for short.

What is the make-up of AUPC? A few examples will suffice. Here are several lines from Jim Leftwich’s “Eluesis”:

reasonable antigen, doubt, penetrate therein each other still beneath the cult of references, Horus, Herakles, assailed by salient gowns, sown in the bracketed eyes of words, other scholastic chieftans, linear butterfly cult of Demeter, but in antithesis…sensations as presentations, ostentation uncovered as profundity, scenario of numbers….

and a few from Marla Jernigan’s “Past Qualm of Hours”

plus the lust pardonable, these says anon
otherwise that potted monument deceived
my mouth’s by mouths born away
by pardon by beam that such permisiveness
which is all it ever tends to sing, those
***

and a few from Joel Daily’s “S’what Up”

Hitherto gungho (”Chowtime!) or alternately blotto dependent
Largely upon pinpoint oxford drove sputnik me & my sister (I
favor the informal “Sis”) so like crazy in a padded facility
Pine surround (peripheral tv) or brassiere underwear desire
***

and a few from Mark Prejsnar’s “Government and Binding”

Rule of law was more often an ideal than a practice
of the wilted trees it shone out like
law stymied by the eyefuls over spring day read
was this a quick wink where things break?
more a quake at the center of private amounts
***

and I’ll end the sampling with a few lines by Seth Young’s “from river we are carried by”

All says a glass doorknob Parabola ghost
I float the living evenly in the then dusks
The brown recluse reels down It is only you
coming toward me An angel with tattooed
eyelids flicker nevertheless Nor do my red
you the wild quiet forms of mushrooms Nor
***

and we can go on and on and on. Leftwich neatly covers the page with single-spaced AUPC from left to right, margin to margin. Jernigan, Daily, Prejsnar, and Young impose line breaks upon it, to give it a jagged left edge. If we follow Unarmed’s lead and take the names from the poems to “demystify” the process, we would be hard put to see anything at all that would distinguish Leftwich’s use of AUPC from Jernigan’s or Daily’s or Prejsnar’s or Young’s. In fact, this doughy concoction can probably be shaped into almost any form with no noticable effect on the reading or the public performance of the resulting work, or on our understanding of just what the poet and his or her “text” is up to. My selections are rather brief. To get the full impact one should take a look at the complete texts. AUPC has an accumulative effect, a bit like taking a visual jog through molasses to no where in particular.

APUC is the default mode of most of the writers in this anthology. We see it in A di Michele’s selections, Alex Rawls, David Thomas Roberts, Stephanie Williams, Jerry McGuire, Camille Martin, Dana Lustig, Brett Evans.

This is not experimental writing: it appears to me to be a kind of collective group-think. Though Chivers is bad, he’s at least interesting in his awfulness. His language is HIS. APUC=YAWN is my experimental conclusion, PART 1. AUPEC=TRITE & been there (in my spackling days), & definitely done that.

Some writers in this anthology take another tack. We’ll consider them in a future posting.

As of this date, Thomas Holley Chivers remains the most impressive experimental writer of the South. I recommend his books.