Heath Jones Carpenter: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have spent the majority of my life in small-town Arkansas, with small stints in Europe and Florida. In that time I have experienced the glorious and the grit that encompass Southern living: Mint juleps and front porch sitting mixed with dirt roads and mosquito swatting. In the end, I am more Southern Gothic than Southern Gentry; give me Oxford American over Garden and Gun—O'Connor, Faulkner, and Percy are my champions.
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Rita Quillen: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My husband and I, whose families have lived in Scott County, Virginia for generations, raise Angus cattle on a southwest Virginia farm just over the mountain from the little community of Hilton, Virginia, where I grew up. I play oldtime music with the Rockhouse Stringband, following a long family tradition. My husband has not followed in the footsteps of his grandfather, who was at one time a moonshiner.
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Kathy Ferrell: Two Poems and a Haiku
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
A native and mostly life-long resident of West Virginia, I am descended from several generations of Irish stone masons and English sea-farers. When I discovered that my great grandfather arrived here from Limerick, I immediately understood why I so often think in rhyming verse, and why my father was more comfortable telling stories from his head than from a book.
Possessed of such a strong Appalachian accent that fellow West Virginians dismiss me as a congenital idiot, I’ve learned to use it for my own entertainment. I am adept at forelock tugging and “shining on”. My dream is to see drastic change in what passes for “Patrons of the Arts” in West Virginia, in that I would like to see fewer hors-d’oeuvres and more books and actual paintings in their homes.
I throw rocks with remarkable accuracy for an old woman, and once came jailhouse close to bludgeoning some fool to death with my cast-iron skillet. While he slept off my fried potatoes.
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Curtis Dunlap: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement #7:
These things I learned as a small boy living in the south: 1) A penny placed on a railroad track becomes a highly prized possession after it’s flattened by a train. 2) A dead snake draped across the branch of a tree will end a summer drought and bring rain. 3) Swapping a flattened copper penny for a flattened copperhead is an equitable trade. 4) Draping said snake onto the top of a withered tobacco plant will make it rain, too...leaving an eleven year-old boy with the distinct impression that he’s solely responsible for saving the family farm and the occurrence of Hurricane Abby.
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Peter Sragher: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
southing with the sun. sun never has south. at dawn it drags its red face from east through the cold water, a beauty in its coolness, as if it were blood trying to warm up for the flow through the body. the sun at dusk glows down in the west, far away from our eyes, loosing it’s body in the night mysteries. in midday sun is a yellow sphere you cannot look at, cause you would burn your eyes and wouldn’t see the incandescent raging sun any longer. his face lifts the north, rises the north feeling into the air. i’m though always southing. the sun cannot ever turn south. the stubborn sun cannot get to earth, down, down, to feel my smooth south soul. I will once teach the sun to south, to put his heart on the earth and glide on the feeling.
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Michelle Hartman: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement
Michelle Hartman was left on a doorstep in Fort Worth lo these many years ago by a band of post-reactionary, Pagan Gypsies. After a grueling four years at the Martha Stewart School for Exceptional Females she took her rightful place beside the lucky man who won her in the county "Ho Down". She's taking a break today from polishing silver, planning a week of gourmet meals, buffing the handcuffs nicks off the headboard, and building one hundred and twenty rabbit figures from various sizes of marshmallows, to share her poetry and short thoughts on a complete life.
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Hal J. Daniel III: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Except for a 2 year post doctoral fellow stint at the University of Zurich and a 2 year visiting scholar appointment at the University of Washington, I have lived my entire 69 years in the South including Tennessee, Mississippi and North Carolina.
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Glenn Halak: Two poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up with my great-grandmother half the time and she inspired me to paint and write. She left Georgia in a covered wagon sometime after 1867 - when she was born - to live on a Texas farm near Texarkana and to marry a musician/composer who taught high school bands all his life. When I was two I remember a tornado coming to the farm, a wagon, and then pitch black outside. But I spent most of my growing up time in Wisconsin. My great-grandmother became bedridden when a drunk hit the car my grandmother was driving killing my great-grandfather in 1943. I often lived in their house with its many paintings of southern landscapes and darkly genteel poetry and all the stories of cousins and tornadoes. My grandmother never lost her Texas accent and didn't want to. My great=grandmother was terrified she would wake up in her coffin. She died in bed at the age of 97. I for felt her pulse because my grandmother was afraid to. There was none.
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Michael Evan Parker : if it rains
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Raised and fed by a Southern lady from Chattanooga, who taught me good eating and good manners.
When I die and go to heaven, I’m praying the heavenly banquet will include:
Fried Livermush
Pintos (with pork in them)
Green beans (with pork in them)
Collards (with pork in them)
Corn bread (with pork cracklins in it)
If there is no livermush or pigs in heaven, then–if I have my ‘druthers–I reckon I’ll have to stay right here in North Carolina.
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Daniel Pravda: Sanctuary
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in Norfolk, VA and raised in Virginia Beach. I have danced on Jefferson Davis' grave in Richmond and smoked his eagle-claw pipe in Hampton. I live in Norfolk today and teach at Norfolk State University. I say "y'all" every day.
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Shelby Stephenson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Here are 4 pieces from Shub's Cooking. (One of my nicknames is Shub.)
These (poems) are "real" recipes, or based in things I grew up eating, mostly cooked by my mother. And I learned something, after I got toward the end of running out of food to write about: my mother did not use a recipe for anything other than something she did not grow up cooking.
In other words: if we did not kill it, the food, we did not eat. Or: if the chickens didn't lay we didn't eat eggs. Pigs, small game and so on--same.
The recipes I found in her box with the tin eagle tacked on the front--that little box is filled with recipes for desserts.
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K.C. Bosch: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My dating website is YesterdaysTractor.com. My truck is known as Red. My dog is named Dog. I have three girlfriends named Anne: Sue-Anne, Betty-Anne, and LuAnne; my hunting buddies are Wilmer and his brother Ennis. My sister is a teetotalin' non-smokin' monogamous vegetarian, but she's from Boston. The Rapp News covers national and international news on one page, but has 5 pages of high school sports, NASCAR, and local gossip.
Redneck is a noun and a verb. My keys stay in my truck my house ain’t ever been locked. Town is OK as long as it's ten miles away from here. Tea is sweet and gravy is what you put your eggs over. Black-eyed peas and corn bread are more than a New Year’s Day novelty snack. Living in Huntly, I know that Virginia is not the south; it is the middle, the middle of everything.
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David Wiseman: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Hillbilly bibliomancer, unindicted co-conspirator, instigator of bad habits, and occasional stone-mason, has met the devil a couple of times and come away from it with no more than a few bad habits and a prescription. I am fond of whiskey, hound dogs, and pork. I claim to have lived in Virginia for 225 years, and am older than I looks. I write poems because the universe is falling apart like a toilet paper submarine and someone must point at it and laugh. My recent work has appeared in a number of online and print journals.
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Gary Carter: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Growing up in the North Carolina, where you’re Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred and when you die you’re Tar Heel dead, I believe—no, am downright certain—that ghosts and monsters surround us, seen and unseen—and sometimes the living ones are more frightening than the ones lingering in the darkness, as in any down-South member of the Republican Party. But still I keep circling back like some broke-nose Faulkner character and lingering, this last time around to Asheville, where I was purportedly conceived, and which seems to be a slightly crazed place where pushing words around until they make sense seems to make sense—for now. And where you can just escape up into the mountains and find some peace.
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Michael Lee Johnson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I'm not southern as such, having lived most of my life in the Midwest United States, and 10 years in Canada; however, I did live in Florida for three years under humid, stressful times and a divorce. I'm not sure if Florida even qualifies as the South with so many “Florida Snowbirds" coming and going. In Florida while walking near a cypress swamp along a water canal area I was about a half-mile down the trail when I saw at least five cottonmouth snakes on the other side of the bank or my side, with their white mouths wide open. I had foolishly purchased a 22 caliber pistol a few days earlier thinking I was going to shoot at some birds or anything else that moved. At that moment, a cottonmouth snake slithered across my tennis shoes, startling me, and I fired, almost shooting my own foot off. I ran faster than any rabbit back to my car, to my sheltered life. Does that qualify as southern?
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Poetry
Essays
