For some cultured southerners, Southern Cultures has published very little when it comes to Arts & Letters. Sure, we’ve shared a story here and there, and we’ve certainly printed author interviews and scholarly analyses, but our forthcoming 21st-century Fiction Issue (available October) marks our first full plunge into the wellspring of creative writing that surrounds »
While researching his 1885 biography of Edgar Allan Poe for Houghton Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series, George E. Woodberry discovered that Poe had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827 under the name of Edgar Perry. As is now well known, Poe was shipped to Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, a barrier island on Charleston »
“The subtle yet significant distance established between the speaker of this persona poem and its author asks us here at the beginning of the 21st century whether much has changed.” Under the flowering chinaberrywe parked and closed our eyesto the warm night, cool enough thenfor scent to claim our senses.
Poetry
Autumn’s Sidereal, November’s a Ball and Chain After the leaves have fallen, the sky turns blue again,Blue as a new translation of Longinus on the sublime.We wink and work back from its edges. We walk aroundUnder its sequence of metaphors,Looking immaculately up for the overlooked.Or looking not so immaculately down for the same thing.If there’s nothing »
“Still, who knows where the soul goes . . . after the light switch is turned off, who knows?” I came to my senses with a pencil in my handAnd a piece of paper in front of me.To the yearsBefore the pencil, O, I was the resurrection.
“a pool, lighted tennis, Jacuzzi, and serene pond . . .” This collage or assemblage of place names, phrases, descriptions, etc.—“found poetry,” as it were—was taken directly from advertising copy scattered throughout a recent issue of Apartment Finder, a guide to rental housing in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. I “wrote” the piece one Sunday afternoon »
Poetry
The South is an enigma,Secret and sacred.
Donald Davidson, a southern poet and leader of the Southern Agrarians, a group of antimodernists who opposed industrial capitalism, conceived of social memory as a “folk-chain,” which binds a people together. The folk-chain transmits tradition, which, Davidson declared, tells southerners “who we are, where we are, where we belong, what we live by, what we »
Poetry
What shadows my happiness? The boy and calf so linked by a rope seem to forget all else. Grass recedes to the horizonand chickens roam free. Hay stacked richly as memory bulges mountainously on the sky.
“‘We sell the world to buy fire . . . our way lighted by burning men.’” The name of Wendell Berry first came to my attention about forty years ago. I was then a student at the University of Virginia and a part-time employee of Noonday Book Shop, where a book called November Twenty-Six Nineteen »
In “The Great Wagon Road,” published in the Spring 1997 issue of Southern Cultures, historian T.H. Breen told of his encounters and adventures while attempting to trace the route of the great migration of German and Scots–Irish settlers from lands north into the Carolinas. Breen’s essay set Michael Chitwood thinking…