Dale Wisely: “The Woods Unbounded”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have eaten fried squirrel, instructed by my parents to be careful to avoid the lead shot.
I can detect a phony Southern accent on TV or in movies in three-quarters of a second. Shockingly, almost no non-Southern actor can master one. Not even DeNiro or Streep.
Melissa Dickson: Five Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the South, raised in the South, left the South, and came on back to the South. I capitalize South. Margaret Mitchell grew up playing on land her great-grandparents bought from my great-great grandparents. If you go back far enough the Dickson's and the Dixon's are the same dang folk. My first book was half-about the Civil War. I know how to make cornbread without looking at a recipe and it doesn't have sugar in it. I think that's a Yankee thang. At least I know a Yankee who puts sugar in his cornbread.
Paul Corman Roberts: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Does the Southwest count? My grandfather was one of the original dust bowl Oakies who found a home for himself, and eventually his family in Los Angeles where I was born in 1967 before moving to Northern California at age 4, and then later as an young adult I lived in Las Vegas NV for five years. Otherwise I spent six weeks at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas and four weeks at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi. I know what it is to be hot and swarmed by bugs the size of mice. I understand the pointlessness of drying off after a shower in the Gulf Coast region during summer. And to this day, I can't turn down the biscuits and gravy on any menu anywhere, especially if the gravy has alligator sausage.
Jane Andrews: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
A daughter and granddaughter of women christened “Dixie” I was called Dixie by my father for three days, until my mother came out of the anesthesia and said, “Bless her little heart, I can’t do that to her.” Both my parents were born in Raleigh, NC. Their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so on back into the humid mists of time were Tarheels. We know how to suck the sweet from honeysuckles, how to soothe a bee sting with tobacco, when to flip a pillow to sleep on the cool side, and the charm of talc-soft red dirt stirred into a dust devil by a Chevy Impala on an unpaved road. Unlike the colonists from above the Mason-Dixon Line, I know “ma’am” is not just for addressing the elderly and that “barbeque” is a noun, not a verb. I also know that your mama’s sister’s husband’s children’s offspring are your cousins. And that you and I are also probably cousins of some degree. Who are your people?
Robert E. Wood: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I married into the South, have in-laws named Bibba and Boots, prefer Waffle House to Eggs Benedict and never use y'all as a singular form of address. That's about the best a Brooklyn boy has to bring to the table (and I will show up at that table for greens and fried okra).
M. S. Palmer: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My grandmother used to talk about Louisiana and the heat and the humidity and how her brother would take his boat into the swamps and pull catfish the size of dogs right up out of the water with his bare hands and when she married my grandfather born in Chicago they spent a miserable year down there before moving away never going back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Howie Good – Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I lived in Charlotte, NC, where I worked as the assistant national editor on the Charlotte Observer.
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.
Richard Shiers Jr. – “Violet” – A Poem
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Someone in my family says 'yonder.' Need I say more?
Poetry
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