Another South: Experimental Writing in the South
Edited by Bill Lavender
Introduction by Hank Lazer
University of Alabama Press
277 pages
ISBN number: 0817312404
Reviewer: Wynn Yarbrough
Lewis Carroll’s playful poem "Jabberwocky" encourages readers to be playful, to solve the puzzle, to relax in the work of nonsense and sound. The impulses that guide a reader through Lewis Carroll--and return a reader to Carroll--are the same ones a reader might feel reading Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, a collection of poets writing in “experimental" ways. The poems range from the pictorial to the staccato word blot, from combinations of lines from famous poems rearranged to a numbered list of observations. Hank Lazer, professor of English at the University of Alabama, introduces the work with a definition of what experimental means, what the South has shed (in terms of its images) and what new directions poetry might take. In short, one shouldn't go to this book to eat collard greens or to expect pecan pie at the end of each poem.
Lazer (also included in the collection) uses the introduction to discuss how the South has changed and how the image seems to lag behind the reality. The relationship between regional and experimental is certainly one that has its lies, its betrayed promises, its scarring transitions, its hopeless divorces. But does any region other than the West hold so much contradiction and connotation as the South does with its mythic ties to a chivalric code (Twain claimed there would be no civil war if it weren’t for Sir Walter Scott), a ruthless agrarian culture, and a history with song and slavery side by side?
This is what Lazer and Lavender have set out to do: examine the place that has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. Think of Atlanta and how its population doubled in ten years; the “new" South may as well be called a place and not an institution. This change is what many writers have been arguing hasn’t been reflected in the poetry from the South. As Lazer says in the introduction, “For poetry in particular, I am asking that a broader stylistic range and an innovative necessity be granted as essential, especially if our poetry is to be pertinent in expressing the complexities, collisions, contradictions, and persistent traditions of the present" (xxx).
Tradition is to be damned in these poems or at least re-evaluated. These poems can be difficult and almost nonsensical at times (but wasn’t Faulkner quite different from Margaret Mitchell)? If we use the term postmodern, what does that mean? It means that many of the poems “in this anthology [are] deliberately on the edge, both locating that edge and moving away from it" (xvi). So fixed meaning, clarity, narrative ease are abandoned in much of the work for the sake of newness and, at times, in this collection, fascinating, inviting work.
Voice and sound are important parts of the writing in this collection: often profane, witty, full of sex and sacrilege. Many of the pieces deserve to be read out loud, as they are performance pieces. As Kalamu ya Salaam says in "Sound is ProFound Sense":
music is
more than model
coordinated sound
is inspiration
is literally breath
indispensable
the taking in
of the material world
the exhale of
the spirit self
Or Andy Young, who uses the repetition from the Prayers for the People, in his poem "In Anguish, the Heart Finally Prays":
in viridian curtain of nightfall
and in the way its plain language says “yes"
hear my prayer
Voice and sound aren’t the only tools the poets in this collection use. There are the graphics in the poems creating a textuality that seems both an honest attempt at humor and inventiveness (in "Poem with Referees"-- captions of referees giving signals for calls in one column/ text in the other). Next to these poems with graphics, there seems to be a burning desire to break away from narrative and formulaic work and the way mainstream poetry has been published. For example, there are the playful punctuation poems of Bob Grumman, such as "Mathemaku No. 17":
then, to the starboard, a lilac-paced synchrony
of (((((((dolphins)-1)-1)-1)-1)-1)-1)-1)-1. . . and
((((((((sun)-1)-1)-1)(song))(song))(song))(song))(sng)-4
Lazer, a professor of English and Assistant Vice President at the University of Alabama, has a bigger job on his hands trying to rope in or collectively talk about something as individualistic (sometimes arbitrary) as the various impulses of “experimental writing" that run through this collection. He asserts that this visual concern could be called “kudzu textuality," and he uses the example of Jake Berry’s work with its graphics running in and around the poems that are sometimes left justified, sometimes centered, sometimes in prose format and always accompanied by discombobulated sketches, cuneiform like characters, and other graphics. Lazer, an academic, adds a note to help clarify what he means about kudzu textuality:
It would be fair to note that the concept of kudzu textuality bears some relationship to other terms in critical theory, such as Kristeva’s concept of the chora, or the notion of a libidinal economy, or, most pertinently, Bataille’s notion of excess, super-abundance, and not utility. . . . (xxvi).
There is some wonderfully varied work in this collection, but it is intended to spark controversy or, at the very least, makes us look at “Southern" writers with a new kaleidoscopic lens, a set of eyes not so blurred by the stereotypical. There seems to be a community feeling to this collection in the same way there is a community feeling to the work in the Best Poems series (with different editors bringing their team on the field as they see fit). Maybe this is inevitable. Maybe the tired metaphors of gravel roads and whiskey breath need to give way to some radical experimentation (what have these metaphors meant for different classes, races, and genders?). Maybe the experimental nature of many of these poems sets them up for failure. In “experimental" work, the image is often decentralized. But imagery is one of the most powerful tools as work in this anthology. Bill Lavender, one of the editors, has an image of a cat that is killed in "A Note to Skip on Max and Maxine":
. . . a hole in her stomach you could put your fist in
still she purred
when I rubbed her neck, forced out
her verb when the subject seemed to merit
and she did it to console me. . . .
There are other poems where the images dance around meaning, resisting the easy narrative picture. While the sonic qualities of the poems are somewhat lacking, the freshness of the metaphors can’t be denied. For example, in A. diMichelle’s "Archipelago (Interrag Diocesan)":
this is the imbecile static of rosary detention
perching bi-polar gyroscopic fission
etc.
candle. star. spiral. atom. ostracoderm. wet.
“The time has come," the Walrus said,/ “To talk of many things. . . ." But has it come for writing that isolates readers, that obscures a “fixed meaning" in a poem, that abandons narrative clarity? Has the time come to write merely for other writers? Many writers in this collection are responding to works of other writers in this community. Is this any different from Poetry, Tin House, the Southern Review? Some readers will be put off by this collection, wanting poems that jump through the flaming hoops of fire, that balance on the standard high-wire: desiring poems that “deliver the goods." Others will find a welcome relief. Others will find an adventure in looking and thinking and hearing about the South in ways often unconsidered. Not all the rides in this “Wonderland" will send you back to the front of the line, but the trip promises to be more than an experiment.
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