Hillbilly Hotspots

I've had a fascination for anything hillbilly ever since I first dived, head-first, into a Coca-Cola cooler and pulled out a cold glass bottle of Mountain Dew with the outhouse, pig, and gun-toting mountain man logo. Even in the 1980s, bottling companies were still reusing them. My grandmother used to work as a cashier at a gas station/general store out in Woodlawn, Virginia. Oftentimes I would stay with her at the store, walking around the aisles or sitting on the front porch with a bottle of Mountain Dew and a candy bar. Down the mountain from where we lived, in Cana, Virginia, was a produce stand and tourist stop called Mountain Man. Its sign had the same bearded man with a frayed hat. I haven't been there in years, so I don't know if it's still there, but they used to have regular bluegrass music performances from a flatbed trailer.

I later learned that back in the 1960s there was a trend for anything country or hillbilly -- usually for comic effect. This trend gave birth to the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and the Dukes of Hazzard. Advertisers also jumped on the bandwagon, and many businesses in the Appalachian region touted "hillbilly" in their names. I know of several, some I've been to and some I've only seen in postcard pictures. My new favorite is Hill-Billy Village in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. In the midst of the fancy laser tag, bungee jumping, go-cart racing, there is a little oasis of yesteryear. It was the first tourist stop on the whole strip, before anything else was there. Sure, it's run down today, but if you want a coonskin cap, Indian moccasins, or a rebel flag T-shirt this is the place to go. And if you follow the signs to the very back (sorry, no photographs please) you end up on their back lot where they keep a replica of an old cabin and moonshine still. It is oooold, but has a kitschy quality to it. If you are in the area and like kitschy, then you have to go to Hillbilly Golf in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, as well. The whole miniature golf course is built on the side of a hill. You even have to ride a trolly to the top, it's so steep. My wife is rolling her eyes right now. Some people just don't appreciate good hillbilly culture.

(Note: This blog entry is not intended in any way to stereotype, degrade, or trivialize mountain life in the Appalachians or Ozarks. There are many folks that believe the Appalachian American is the last ethnicity that is still safe to make fun of without reprecussion from the politically-correct minded. I feel that if there is to be any fun made of mountain folks, it should be done by mountain folks themselves. This is why Jeff Foxworthy can tell Redneck jokes, because he is one, and why I feel justified in doing the same. And if you come to my house, I'll show you my shotgun to prove it.)

Submitting Poetry -- Aaaarrrrrgh!!

To become a published writer, one has to submit, and submit, and submit. It is good to know the type of poetry a journal or magazine publishes in order to estimate if your style or particular poem might be what they are looking for. More often than not, it's not. So I usually have work sent out to several places at a time. When one comes back rejected, I usually either evaluate why, maybe make some tweaks to them if its been several months since I read them last, and send it back out, or just take the same hard copies out of the returned rejection and into a new envelope ready to send somewhere else. One must not get discouraged.

Recently, however, my work hit a new low. I sent a group of poems to the magazine Now & Then, which is a regional and Appalachian magazine that publishes poetry among other things. I read a few issues of it the last time I was at the library. The upcoming theme was "wildness." I picked several I thought were fitting of the theme. I mailed it on May 10th. I got it back on May 16th with my original cover letter and a small note from the editor at the bottom dated May 13th that stated my poems weren't what she was looking for. Now that may be, but talk about rejection! My poetry spent more time in the mail than it did on her desk waiting to be considered! Well, at least I can now consider sending them elsewhere, instead of waiting months to a year for notification.

Poem

Ham Hocks

While eating a funnel cake I saw him,
walking down from the uphill side of Main
where factory houses are stacked like cards.
That day he must have felt a little out of place
with the starched collars and tourist faces
of the Harland County Apple Festival,
tall, gray hair in a cowlick, wearing work boots
and overalls without a shirt,
looking like he had just awakened
from a third-shift-induced slumber.

I sat on a curb as he crossed the street
to a hippie vendor counting change.
"Where are your ham hocks?" he asked,
clearing sawdust from his throat with a loud hawk,
looking red-eyed and clearly confused.

"We sell hammocks, man – woven by Mayan Indians,"
the vendor replied with a faint smile and a nervous tug
on the shirttail of his sweater.

He spat on the ground beside him.
"I read your sign from my front porch,
walked all the way down the hill...,
aimin' to get me some ham hocks."
Hands in his pockets, the long-haired vendor
only shrugged his shoulders and smiled again.

The old man walked out into the street
among the crowds of balloons and baby strollers,
squinted his eyes at the vendor's sign above,
and scratched the stubble on the end of his chin.
He walked up to the booth once more,
stooping to get under the canvas awning.
"So you don't sell ham hocks then?"
he asked again in a querulous voice.

"Nope," the vendor answered with finality
and, almost mockingly, asked
"What are ham hocks?"

With a look like a slap in the face,
the old man backed away, bumping clumsily
into a young couple eating candy apples.
I turned to sneeze,
blowing powdered sugar off my paper plate,
but lifted my head in time to observe
the old man slip behind the vendor's booth
unnoticed by others,
hook the toe of his brogan
around a corner pole.
The falling canvas captured
the hippie and two customers
as a cowlick head of hair
sauntered away, disappearing
behind a bee-swarmed dumpster.

in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel 7 (Fall 1999) 26.

Poetry Reading at Malaprops

The date is finally set for SAWC's (Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative) poetry reading at Malaprops in Asheville, NC. After a few changes in schedule from last mention, it will be held on Sunday, July 15 at 3pm. All in all, seven of us will reading, which is a good number for the 45 minutes they are giving us. Our illustrious co-coordinator Frankie gets all the thanks for setting this up for us. Though Asheville is not far from where I live, some folks are driving from as far away as Virginia, Kentucky, and Georgia. I'm excited about going, and it will be great to see old friends that I normally see only once a year. I'm a little anxious as well because public reading has never been my strong suit when it comes to sharing my writing with others. Mainly it's the reading aloud to strangers; I've gotten better about reading in front of people whom I know.

Several of our folks who are reading even have books to promote, seeing Malaprops is a bookstore. Though I don't have one of my own to tout, SAWC's newest edition of our journal Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel is coming out soon, and might possibly be ready to share with our audience. I have a poem that will be in it entitled "A Picture's Worth," that I will probably later post after it is published. Though SAWC may not be a nationally-known group, I feel a part of something larger than just the mountain South. I'm in a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing, Nature, the Appalachians, and who aren't afraid to stand up for social injustices of the region.

For more information on SAWC (like the history, or our mission statement), see the links list on this blog site.

James Still's Poetry Besmirched

A student in my American Literature class was interested in writing his research paper about James Still, an Appalachian author from Kentucky, but couldn't find any poetry of Still's on the internet. "Jack" is a self-proclaimed "good ol' boy" who had no interest in poetry before, but I convinced him to look into poets like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller because they wrote about such things as hunting and the outdoors. That piqued his interest a little, so I brought a copy from home of Still's Wolfpen Poems for him to skim through. After looking through the slim volume of poetry, he gave it back with a page bookmarked for me to photocopy for him. I can't remember the poem right offhand, but I immediately noticed the page edges, especially his bookmarked page, were covered in dirty, greasy thumbprints. I looked at his hands, which were calloused and stained from where he had been working on something in Masonry class before. I was taken aback at first, my out-of-print copy smudged with reddish orange, but I got to thinking how James Still would probably welcome the stains. Whether it was red North Carolina clay or black coal dust from Kentucky, it wouldn't matter. Still' s writing reflects his connection to the earth, as in his novel River of Earth, just as those smudges were inextricable from the pages of my book. He apologized when he realized what he did, but I did the best I could to play it off as not a big deal. Maybe James Still will leave a lasting thumbprint on him.

Poem

Love and Less

Somewhere between Rolling Rocks
and morning light,
between neck and collar bone,
piecemeal tokens of
flowering purple affection,
touched lightly with a morning buzz
and your limp arm over
my wrinkled consciousness.

Somewhere between Sunday morning
and sausage biscuits,
the cashier at Hardee's
with a careful glance,
feigning apathetic eyes
over the rim of her thick glasses,
hands us our tray,
gives away what she really thinks
of missing buttons
and my lipstick collar,
concealing gleanings
of that glaucous night before.

We sit, wondering and knowing
in a window booth,
silently chewing the sobering direction.
Clarity advances
with each church-bell chime
from First Baptist down the street,
like a grandfather clock,
and our seconds together compete
against throbbing temples and
an almost soothing indifference,
telling us our time has been eaten
to tabletop crumbs.

I left you my phone number
and you left me no choice
but to leave you, back turned,
at the steps to your apartment.
Neither one of us knew
where it would go, or end,
from free beer and an invitation.
After a week of turning away,
my memories turn a lighter hue
in compliment with the
blood-shade bruises in the mirror.
You fade to pallid skin in my mind.

in The Broad River Review 35 (Spring 2003) 30.

I Love My Job (Sometimes)

I love my job, but sometimes it can suck the life out of me. I love to teach, but sometimes it is hard to be inspiring when I am faced with the uninspirable. Some teachers say they feel like they are throwing pearls before swine, or that teaching high school students these days is like polishing a turd -- no matter how you try to make it shine, you just get shit on you. Personally, I would like to give more credit to the teenagers of today, but sometimes it is hard. I remember having good teachers and not-so-good teachers, but I always found something in what I had to learn each day to take interest in. If I didn't, that is when I lost touch with what I should be learning, and my grades suffered as a result. Many teenagers today, as I see it, are so used to instant entertainment and instant gratification that they seem to not care about something if it means they have to put forth effort to pay attention. I'm sure some may think it is the teacher's job to be entertaining, but I could wear a clown suit and juggle dictionaries and students would still be unimpressed. For example, I read a poem the other day by James Dickey entitled "Cherrylog Road", about a man who waited in a rusty, kudzu-covered junkyard for his lover to meet him, that I was hoping they'd catch the sexual innuendo in the lines:

I held her and held her and held her
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us
So the blacksnake, stiff
With inaction, curved back
Into life, and hunted the mouse

Since most of the time their conversations somehow revolved around sex, I was hoping to catch their interest, to give them something they could go, "Aha, I know what he's talking about there (wink, wink)!" Istead, I get the pat answer that I get almost every time, "I don't get it." I didn't even get a Beavis and Butt-head response of, "Uh, Huh, Huh. He said 'stiff'."

Maybe it's just me, that I'm an ineffectual teacher. I want students to use their brain and think about the meanings of stories and poems, but so many times I find all they want is for me to tell them what it means. They don't have the patience, don't care about the discovery, that Eureka moment when a story, a poem becomes their own because they make meaning of it on their own. Well, tomorrow's another day.

Poem

Yelling Into the Mouth of a Cave

Hello
Sound
waiting to arrive
back around
down into the cracks
where the limestone
yawns great gulps
of ancient air underground
previously accustomed
to drops whispering
from mineral tongues
touching kissing
for a thousand years
in darkness crystalline
Sound
Echo

in Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review 33:3-4 (Spring/Summer 2006) 265.

Stoneman's Raid

It's official. I've been to my first Civil War reenactment. Like many people, I was skeptical at first, wondering if it would be historically accurate and legit or just a bunch of boys running around in confederate uniforms waving the stars and bars, pretending to shoot each other. Instead, I got an informative lesson in the history of my county. Stoneman's raid was a campaign lead by Union Calvary Commander, Major General George Stoneman. In the town of Morganton, NC, where I reside, this raid consisted mainly of burning records at the courthouse and plundering homes for staples, but they did encounter confederate troops, and a skirmish occured. That's about all I know, without offending some stoic Civil War buff with my inaccuracies.

I planned this outing with my whole family, but my wife didn't want to take our newborn son where loud cannons and muzzle loading rifle fire would scare him, so I took my four-year-old daughter. It was difficult explaining what we were going to see, but she got the idea. "Like the Dollywood shows where they pretend on stage, but it's outside?" She asked for confirmation. We didn't go for the full day's festivities, where they demonstrate how to cook over a campfire or how to pitch a Civil-War era tent, but got there just in time to watch the main show. The audience congregated on a hill overlooking farmland and pasture of the historic Bellevue Plantation. Men in blue uniforms emerged from a grove of trees and met some men in gray uniforms, and the shooting ensued. My daughter wasn't too impressed until a large cannon was wheeled onto the battlefield pulled by two horses. Before I could even warn her, she had her fingers in her ears. Boom!! Black powder smoke billowed in the breeze. "Who is the good guys and who are the bad guys?" A classic question she asks whenever we watch a movie together. I told her as diplomatically as I could that there wasn't a good or bad side, but that people from North Carolina would probably be in gray uniforms. Then I got to thinking, I wasn't sure which side I would be on. I definitely would not be pro-slavery, so donning a gray uniform would be out of the question. Most mountain farmers were too poor to afford slaves, anyway. However, I wouldn't want some Union battalion of troops ransacking my house and property for food and valuables, either. Did they have conscientious objectors back then? I wondered.

The outing wasn't complete without a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which my daughter ate like it was cotton candy. The only thing she didn't like about our father/daughter outing was that they didn't have a pink and purple horse with sparkles. I imagined Major General George Stoneman charging on his pink and purple sparkly horse. I told her I agreed. That would definitely have brought new meaning to the term "shock and awe!"

The Zen of Gardening

It’s that time of year to start preparing my garden for planting. When I was growing up, a garden was my mother’s way to get me out of the house. Gardening is still one of my favorite activities to do outside, something I also hope to pass on to my children. I’ve always wanted one of those monster gardens that you see in people’s yards, a half acre and pristinely kept with rows of every garden staple imaginable – corn, tomatoes, squash, okra, and beans. The first year my wife and I had a house with a yard I tried that, but found with a newborn daughter to take care of at the same time the task was too much, especially with the virulent weeds that seem to spring from nowhere. Then I came to realize that those folks that planted the half-acre garden were retired, thus explains the extra time they have to take care of them.
Before my daughter was old enough to walk, I had her out in the garden. I would let her pick cherry tomatoes and gnaw on them with her little half-grown front teeth. Last year I let her plant her own garden and pick the seeds at the hardware store. She chose yellow and red sunflowers and tomatoes. This year, at my wife’s request, I have scaled down my garden further to one patch of ground about 12 feet by 12 feet behind the woodshed, so that my time will not be divided between gardening and our newborn son. My daughter and I are sharing the spot, and have decided to plant nothing but tomatoes – the usual steak and cherry tomatoes, but also some heirloom varieties (one of them grows yellow with green stripes and another turns deep purple when ripe).
There are those moments when parents wonder if anything they are doing to raise their children is working. Then there are those Zen moments, when out of the blue your child does something right without being asked or given instructions. I brought my daughter outside today to help me pull weeds. I expected her to maybe pull a few weeds or scratch around with her red plastic toy rake. Instead, she began loading her little Radio Flyer wheel barrow up with piles of weeds I had previously pulled. “Where do I dump these, Daddy?” She asked. I pointed down to the edge of the woods, and from there she did the rest all herself. Occasionally she would say to me, “This is hard work,” as she hauled off another pile of weeds, but the smile on her face as she did it just filled me with more joy than if I had grown a whole produce market on my own.
Maybe one day she will think I’m old-fashioned, and my taste in music is out of date, and she will want to do everything opposite of what I taught her. But perhaps some things will stick, like the joy of getting your hands dirty, creating life from dirt, or just the enjoyment of doing something with her dad. As long as she likes tomatoes, maybe some things will remain.

Poem

Cemetery

After the wave of pain
rushes through your veins
and out your heavy hands
it is replaced by a feeling
more formal than
black suits and ties
or eulogies in cold blue skies
dirt as stiff as your heart’s
stubborn beat that questions
each day since century’s last week

Walking down
the stillness of the ground
and the air, the road skirting around
the bare-limbed hills
disregards the line of cars
or the growing field of granite stones
rows of mossy weathered scars

Time leads us by
the still hours when we remember
as frozen plastic flowers
become faded, outlived
recollect nothing of the sun’s glow
but only the visiting chill
of those who won’t let go

in The Broad River Review 35 (Spring 2003) 29.

Poetry Reading

There is one venue of sharing my work that I haven't much experience with -- reading my poetry to a public audience. When I first began writing in college at Appalachian State, we would workshop poetry in small circles. That was ten years ago, though. Since then, the only group I have shared my poetry with, other than submitting poems to journals, has been with the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC) at their yearly gatherings. I have read poems to my wife, but that doesn't count. I love her, bless her heart, but she admits that she doesn't "get" poetry. So I didn't marry her for her talent in literature critique.
Recently, I got word from a co-coordinator of SAWC that she has gotten an evening at Malaprops in Asheville, NC, for our group to read their work. How exciting is that!? Now, for those who aren't familiar with the bookstore Malaprops, it is a pretty prestigious center for writers of the region. It's going to be one evening in June sometime between the 22-24th. I'm excited, but also a little intimidated. I mean, who am I to go reading my work in front of audiences who are used to hearing poets like Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, and Ron Rash? I wish I had some credentials, like a chapbook or something to promote with my reading. Still, maybe people will just appreciate a writer sharing their work with other people.