February 2010

Every once in a while, one of our editors does something different—just to mix things up a bit, to keep the Dead Mule fresh, figuratively, if not literally. This month our Poetry Editor, Helen Losse, has reviewed a poetry book, Paternity by Scott Owens. Owens is a regular contributor to the Mule. Losse is a poet herself as well as our Poetry Editor. Her first book, Better With Friends, was published last year by Rank Stranger Press. The Mule may or may not publish other reviews. But if we do, it will be because we have decided to do so and the time is right. Please don’t ask us to review your book. Don’t even hint you would like us to review it.
–the editors of the Dead Mule

Long quotations appear with permission.

The number of poetry submissions at the Mule is rising. We have filled the March and April issues, made plans for May, and are working on accepting poems for the June issue. Truth is, we will still have poems for July from those already submitted. So, while we are NOT closing submissions, we will say, [...]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Much of my childhood was spent hunting for the bobcat ‘Ole Three Toes’ who lived on the farm, fishing for the grandaddy bass ‘Ole Split Lip’ who lived under the stump in the creek, playing shortstop, playing saxophone in a jazz band and being bored with school. Not wanting to interrupt my education, I quit and joined the United States Air Force, which made it possible for me to spend 30+ years overseas, get a Master’s and miss fried chicken, catfish and Cajun cooking. Now 44 years later, back home in my woods maybe 100 miles from where Momma was born, I get the question, “Ya’ll not from ’round here, air ya?” Now I watch baseball, listen to Southern music but I’m still hunting Ole Three Toes and fishing for Ole Split Lip. I’m going to get them, too.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

It is possible to be proud of coming from the South but still give up certain things: 2 cups of sugar in a gallon of tea, biscuits as heavy as vowels in a Southern drawl, houses with wheels. Then again, if you want to pull up a chair and sit a spell I reckon I can give you plenty of reasons I never figure to be too far away from these mountains for too long.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Georgia born, Georgia raised, and Georgia educated. Very proud to be the only son of an only son of the Deep South. I live in Atlanta Georgia and was on Auburn Avenue the day of MLK’s funeral.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Daughter of an Onslow County, NC carpenter, I was born in 1950. Before my birth, my father played a fiddle for country square dances and on a local radio show. When I was a toddler, he made wooden blocks for me and wrote letters on them with crayons. He taught me to love comic books and what we called the funny papers. He encouraged me to draw, and he quoted poems that he learned as a child. My mother was a good speller, wrote poetry, and sang many songs.

As a young girl, I helped Daddy in the garden, planting seeds and picking vegetables, and Mama and I shelled butterbeans. On Saturday evenings the three of us watched the Porter Wagoner Show and The Arthur Smith Show on TV. Fun for me meant sitting on the wooden porch swing singing songs from Daddy’s country music magazines while he accompanied me on his guitar.

Mama made a fresh pan full of homemade biscuits every day for Daddy’s noontime dinner. Some of our favorite foods were fried meat biscuits, peas and snap beans with corn dumplings; country ham, collards, and chicken and pastry. For dessert we broke open biscuits and spooned on plenty of pear preserves, and we sopped molasses that came from a barrel in a store downtown. Fried cornbread and butter always accompanied fried fish and homemade coleslaw.

Stories about my Southern ancestors have been handed down to me by word-of-mouth, including the one about how my great-grandmother Jane stood up to a couple of Yankees who plundered in her personal trunk. I am very proud of my heritage, and every time I hear the song “Dixie,” I cry.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My southern mind just found a grain of memory, and I remember being a reporter in high school one year, writing a few newsworthy stories for the school newspaper that stirred my desire to write. I wrote poetry in my twenties, and put it on the burner for years. I survived working in the secretarial field for over 22 years, operated a one-woman flower shop for 7, and began selling junk at an indoor flea market I own. My creativity runs rampant making something from nothing like red-neck wind chimes from soup cans, beer bottles, bottle caps, etc. I also paint signs, landscapes and write. I love grits and rice with red-eyed gravy, and a hot biscuit. Fried tators or French fries make me drool, but not as much as a filler-up southern meal of black-eyed peas, cabbage, good old slab bacon or a thin pork chop, with sides of fried okra, fresh corn, and lots of fried cornbread. I drink unsweetened tea—not southern at all—I dumped the sugar 20 some years ago and don’t like it any other way, right straight, just like life.

Southern Literary Statement:

Does being a vegetarian disqualify me from being “southern”? I have accepted grits, cornbread, okra, and ridiculously sweet iced tea, but I can’t abide collards in fatback and barbeque. I don’t have loquacious uncles spinning yarns at huge family reunions or eccentric aunties that out-butter Paula Deen. All I have is a developed love of the land as I have lived over half my life now in North Carolina. I have hiked in the Great Smokies and splashed off the Outer Banks. I have gardened in the Piedmont’s red clay and in the flat sand of the coastal plain. Elizabeth City is the fourth NC city for me, trending eastward from High Point. Now on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, I discover a distinct accent here in the northeast corner of the state. I wrote these poems after moving from Raleigh to Elizabeth City, trying to connect a landscape new to me with a war already grown old.

**

Editor’s Note:

According to Martin Luther King Jr., there are three evils of which America must rid herself to be truly great: Racism, poverty and war.