Cynthia Manick: “Ethel September”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Fish sandwiches after church. Blue hallelujahs. Gossip. Grits on toasted Wonder Bread, never wheat. And tea so sweet, it makes your teeth hurt. I’m a northern transplant but Santee, South Carolina is my original home. People visit there now for its golf courses and to drink at Myrtle Beach. But I miss the paper plant that smelled like sugar when crossing the bridge, my grandfather’s shop that sold boiled turtle eggs and bootleg crab, and the red ants and bullfrogs that followed me around during the summers.
JD DeHart: “Coffee Cans”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am a resident of Tennessee and grew up in West Virginia. My poems come from life in the South.
Mark Windham: “Different Flowers”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born in Mississippi before living in Kentucky, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida (in the South, but not Southern) and settling in Georgia.
It is not 'hot' until above 95, nor humid below 95%. Anything less is 'muggy' at best.
Catfish is only meant to be cooked by frying in cornmeal. Blackened is acceptable if a fryer is not available and you have kin from New Orleans to tell you how.
Sweet potatoes are a vegetable.
Cornbread does not contain flour, only cornmeal, and it is best served for breakfast Monday morning extra crispy with butter and sorghum.
Most parts of every meal can be cooked in a cast iron skillet, possibly the same one. Sometimes at the same time.
Robert West: Six Short Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
The son of a North Carolinian and a South Carolinian, I grew up near the border--in southwest North Carolina, just outside Hendersonville. My childhood neighborhood was bounded by a cornfield, railroad tracks, a cow pasture, U.S. 64., and (on two sides) what we all called "the creek." Except for a college semester in London, I've never lived outside the South. I'm confounded by people who tell me, "You don't have a Southern accent." Maybe I don't talk like a Clampett, but if I'm not Southern, I don't know who is.
Mark Vogel:Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Though I grew up in southern Missouri, twenty miles from Kentucky and Tennessee, I have lived in Boone, North Carolina for the past two decades. Currently I live back in a holler, two miles from Snake Mountain, just off Meat Camp Road, Daniel Boone’s old stomping ground. Two years ago I raised a pet pig, but today I only live with my wife, two horses, three dogs, five cats, and three chickens.
Laura Minor: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My dead Aunt Sheri Lynn (R.I.P.) drank so much sweet tea, when the doctor took her off it, she hid tea bags in the couch cushions. I cracked pecans with great aunts Sissie, Tricie, Virgie, Jewel (married to Rule), Bobbie, Nanny, ... I forgot the rest of their names. I used to live across the street from 'Skynyrd's summer home on the river. I've dated a Molly Hatchet Roadie. Uncle Eddie (also R.I.P.) had the 'Hatchet gold record on his wall centered perfectly between two buck heads that he picked up in a pawn shop after a twenty year + dispute with the band over pulling the plug on one of their early shows ("Loulou, I'm the only man to ever pull the plug on Hatchet!") If none of this works, I have a rope swing scar.
Sandra Ervin Adams: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Although I lost my real house years ago and now live in a mobile home, I consider it my right to be a dreamer. I am proud to be southern, and if I had my way, I would own a renovated, two-story house that once weathered hurricanes, as well as The War Between the States. My books would be properly arranged on shelves in my library. The porch would extend all the way around the house, and sometimes I would sit there in the swing and watch the sunset. My cats would traipse up and down the wooden staircase. My whole family and I would gather around a tall Christmas tree, and we would enjoy big dinners like my grandmothers made.
H. Edgar Hix: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Am I not the descendant of a woman who packed up her children and fled Atlanta as Sherman approached? Am I not the heir of a Texas traveling salesman? Didn’t my grandparents survive the Galveston flood? Wasn’t my father a Fundamentalist minister in Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt? Didn’t I catch crawdads in the drainage ditch, wear a gray felt hat and play the Rebel? Haven’t I had a tornado come close enough to my mobile home to move the porch and didn’t I just miss that tornado because I had to run back into the house to get my favorite ball cap?
I have lived in Minnesota these 15 years, but ask me if I am not Southern. Ask my Northern wife if I am not Southern. Ask my black cowboy hat.
John Davis Jr.: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
In college, my Rhode Island roommate had regular nightmares that I was running Robert E. Lee’s battle saber through the top bunk, and consequently, him, from beneath. Seriously. The dreams may have had something to do with my insistence he keep my six-foot-by-ten-foot stars-and-bars tacked above his side of the room. Yeah, I was THAT guy.
Other than that, I guess I’ll have to rely on genealogy: I’m a sixth-generation Florida Cracker. My great-grandfather made the whips that Florida’s cowboys were nicknamed for. My family members, great-granddaddy’s descendants, have resided in the same pine farmhouse smack dab in the middle of Hardee County since 1901. That ought to about do it.
Denise Dix Leonard: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
It was quite a while before I realized you could say “yankee” without the appropriate adjective. If you could have only 2 books, they should be the Holy Bible (KJV) and Gone with the Wind. You NEVER measure when you sweeten a pitcher of sweet tea. The most beautiful accent I ever heard was that of my paternal grandfather Milton’s first cousin’s wife, Avis (also called Clifford) who was from an exotic country pronounced Jawjah. Daddy’s mantra: “The South Will Rise Again.” Nannie, my paternal grandmother, God rest her sweet soul, always sent me back to college with 2 fried chicken breasts, 2 rolls, and 2 pieces of homemade pound cake wrapped in tin foil in a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box. When I lived in Atlanta, I discovered Lewis Grizzard, one of the greats of southern literature. When I wrote a story in a writing class at UVa about “Grit Trees” some damn yankee thought it was serious…
Will Garland: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I used to stand in the woods and peer through ripped hole in a kudzu-covered fence to watch high school football games.
Meghan Brewer: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I'm from the depths of 'bama, a friendly bay community called Daphne you've probably passed through to get to more exciting things. We say our yes sir's and yes ma'am's as part of our manners and high school football, well... football in general is a considered a form of religion. When I escaped the confines of high school, I chased after the flow of music notes throughout the US, but always found myself truckin' back to this place, to this home-- to Momma, who by the grace of God, always takes me in.
M. M. Jarrell: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Over twenty-five years ago the folks in Mobile, Alabama welcomed my mid-western ways and dialect. I decided to stay. The suffocating summer heat, piles of fire ants and house-flooding hurricanes have not chased me away. Nor is it the azaleas, the pecan pies, and the setting sun that seems to sizzle into Mobile Bay that keep me here. Rather, it’s those relatives and loving friends. Then, there are those “golden-rule” strangers who rush to help when tough times hit. Like the chameleons that inhabit this area, I have learned to change. The southern experience is my reward.
Poetry
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