Category: Poetry

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Harding Stedler: Three Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Having retired from teaching at a university in Ohio in 1995, Harding Stedler moved to Arkansas to spend retirement. Besides writing poetry, he volunteers at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Ellen Summers: Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: When I first crossed the North Carolina state line in August, 1980, my radio sang, “We love you, North Carolina.” I was driving my first car, an AMC Gremlin, one of the worst cars ever built, hauling all my possessions from my childhood home in St. Louis to Chapel Hill, where I would spend the next eight years. That jingle on the radio surprised me because I never heard anyone sing, “We love you, Missouri.” The southern half of Missouri is in many ways a colonial outpost of the South, and growing up there can induce a derivative sense of identity. I now live in Greensboro, North Carolina and like it very well. It’s almost as if I belong here.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Clint Brewer – Three Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have lived in Tennessee my entire life—born in Memphis, raised up and educated in and around Knoxville and worked most of my adult life in the Nashville area. There were many stops at small towns on the way, which taught me more about life than my time spent in the halls of academia or power. There are some basic things I understand being a Southerner. It is possible to say a great deal while actually speaking very little. A man’s clothes and car do not really tell you how much money he has in the bank. Simple things are the best—fresh eggs, having the time to paint your own porch, your children playing barefoot in the yard, an extra sunny day in late fall and plain whiskey over cold ice. Being Southern is something you feel in your bones. You are tied to the land, your spirit grafted to the communities of mamas, daddies, granddaddies, grandmas, aunts, uncles, cousins, preachers, teachers friends and enemies that help raise and shape you. When I cross the Cumberland Plateau on Interstate 40 headed to East Tennessee, I feel the pull of all those places that gave birth to me deep down inside. I am not afraid to say, as a Southerner, that I get angry – viscerally so in some cases—when the South is the butt of the joke. Basically, folks, we don’t give a damn how you did it up North.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Helen Vitoria – Two poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent years vacationing in the South, visiting friends, relatives, and have always been taken by it’s unique charm and history. In the recent past, I spent countless hours as a disaster relief volunteer in Louisiana and Mississippi, my work in shelters after hurricane Katrina has left me to feel that the South will always be part of my life.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Sylvie Galloway – Two Acrostic Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am certainly what you would call a southern woman. I grew up in East Tennessee, married then moved to the Western North Carolina mountains then moved even further south to the upstate of South Carolina. Now divorced, I attend a small southern woman’s college while wading hip deep through the world of perm rods, hair spray and tease combs. Hairdressing keeps the mortgage payments current, and my asthma doctor's budget in the black. I live in a world where ya'll is a token word in most conversations, ice tea is strong and harmful to one's pancreas and grits is considered one of the four essential food groups. I also live in a world, that although I've been called a southern gal all my life, I don't always feel like I fit in. Maybe that's from being nerdy, somewhat bookish, and exhibiting no real talent or interest for sports of any kind, fishing, hunting, beauty contesting, baton twirling, clogging, shagging, or the baking or the frying of southern culinary delights. I also couldn't tell you who is in the running for this year's NASCAR driver of the year award if my life depended on it. But where else but here in the south can you get peaches and strawberries picked fresh that morning? Where else does the hint of snow send two thirds of the county scrambling to the grocery for a week of supplies? Where else can one spend the summer partaking in the battle of trying to get something to grow in your backyard besides fire ant colonies? What I am is woman who lives in a place I can't imagine ever leaving. I raised my kids here, my grand-kids were born here. My four cats were deposited upon my doorstep here. I'm a southern woman, and quite content with the label. Now can someone pass me a glass of that iced tea? I'm rather parched.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

William Cullen Jr.: “A Long Good bye”

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Petersburg, VA during the Korean War and lived there for the first few years of my life. Later on during the mid-seventies, I lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was stationed for a while in the army at Fort Benning, GA. My wife was born and raised in Savannah. My parents and several of my siblings live in Florida and Virginia. My best memory of the South was a week-long camping trip I made to the Smoky Mountains in the seventies.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Will H. Blackwell, Jr. – Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Native of Mississippi (the first 21 years), I eventually wound up teaching in Ohio—but it was, after all, in the southern part of the state (Miami University). After retiring from Miami of Ohio, I returned to Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama—where I had, many years before, obtained one of my degrees. And, yes, I enjoy southeastern football as much as the next person (Roll Tide!). I continue to live in Tuscaloosa, where I maintain an adjunct position at UA (in Biological Sciences), and try to stay active in research. Both my research and writings usually find an outdoor emphasis (I had almost always rather be outside than in). I am interested in surreal aspects of nature, as well as its wonderfully abundant, real aspects. The human condition (and what may befall any of us as human beings) also gets my attention. In writing poetry, I have found a narrative, free-verse approach the most effective means to communicate my particular experiences. It has seemed to me, more often than not, that the southern stories in my life are the ones that come to mind to tell.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Brooke Salisbury – Four Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: So I’m not sure if being from Kentucky counts as the South, since it borders on the Mason Dixon line and all, but I have always felt southern and associated myself with ‘southernness’. And now that I live in the Northwest and no one seems to know where Kentucky is and thinks that I’m “from the Midwest” I become infuriated and can only now constantly think of moving to North Carolina and romanticize even the southern bits that I used to not like so much. But alas…I do love grits. And Hoppin John. And biscuits and gravy. And I know what a Paw paw tree is. Does a lover of southern food count as being legitimately southern. I hope so.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

David Matthews – Three Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I never thought of myself as Southern, not even as a boy growing up in the house where my mother and uncles grew up on what was in their youth a small, not very successful farm in Irmo, South Carolina. Well, not in Irmo. Out toward Lake Murray back before the countryside was engulfed by suburbs. My grandfather, Mr. Dave Haltiwanger, was a schoolteacher who took over the family farm when his father died because it was his responsibility to do so. My grandmother, Mrs. Sue, some ten years younger, had been his pupil. They married soon after she graduated high school. My uncle once told me that my grandfather was not much of a farmer, woefully ill-suited to the lot that fell his way. My grandmother could saw a board or hammer a nail straighter than he ever could. I was named after my grandfather and people often remarked on my resemblance to him. Like my namesake I am not a man of practical bent and skills. While I no more think myself Southern now than I did then, I figure I shelled enough butterbeans, husked enough corn, and stepped in enough cow manure as a kid to stake some claim to Southern legitimacy if it comes to that. Even today, so many years passed and so much gone, I still think of it as home and get a little weepy when I see Granny bent over in the garden, her flowerbeds, the hog pasture, the bottoms, the pine trees my brother put out for a 4-H project, the little elementary school where four of my teachers had taught my mother, the little Lutheran church on the hill where those who mean so much to me now lie.
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