Anderson O’Brien: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Biscuits every Sunday morning: Preheat oven to 450. 2 cups flour, ¼ tsp baking soda, 1 TBSP baking powder and 1 tsp salt in the blue pottery bowl Mama gave me. Cut 6 TBSP butter into chunks and cut into flour, add 1 cup buttermilk, easy now, moisten until JUST combined. Turn dough onto the old board, perfectly floured. Gently pat biscuits out and cut into rounds. Bake 10-12 minutes. Serve with salted ham, eggs lightly scrambled, fried apples, and, of course, fresh tomatoes. Every Southern girl knows how to make a Southern breakfast.
Malaika King Albrecht: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I've lived in the South nearly all my life. My crawfish boils will clear your sinuses for a week, and I will put just about anything in my fridge into the pot. Though I don't know about mules, I know that horses make 50 pounds of poop each day, which I have to scoop from their pasture.
Alice Osborn: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born below the Mason-Dixon Line in Washington, D.C., a North/South limbo gumbo to a French mother who hated Southern France and a father who loved Charleston thanks to his long gone Citadel days. My dad’s Beaufort, SC ancestors fought in Petersburg in the War of Northern Aggression and his grandfather has an elementary school named for him on Parris Island. I am a Southern girl because way before I lived in Charleston and Myrtle Beach I knew I had a high humidity tolerance and felt comfortable driving without hubcaps. I still know how to avoid all of the sketchy roads in Charleston and I’m mistaken for a native by the tourists every time I visit this fine city—it must be my floppy straw hat and blue flip flops. Today as a Tar Heel I’m hopelessly addicted to bacon, I freak while driving in snow, and I love to spin tales that may not have a point.
Gail Peck: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am a proud Virginian, the Dogwood state. If I was going to get switched, it wasn’t going to be from a branch of the dogwood. And I did get switched on occasion because my grandmother believed, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” She had to make up for Poppie’s lack of discipline. He’d let me play Barbershop and lather his head with Old Spice, and taught me Solitaire which he played by pulling his chair to the bedside, the cards laid across the peacock bedspread. He scooped out oysters from the stew so I could savor the liquid. We ate jelly-roll cake together. When Granny’s day ended, we sat on the porch swinging, the morning glories closed by now. She played the harmonica and, Tango, the dog howled. That old house still stands, and beside it the apple tree I climbed.
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.
Poetry
Essays
