Poetry
Subjects: Poetry
Poetry
Poetry
They Live
by Ross WhiteNow they say the Internet is being attacked by sharks.They say. Them. You know who They are,malicious backlit figures in high- backed chairs,wearing jewel- crusted gold rings, stroking white cats.
Poetry
Call
by Atsuro RileyIt starts with the lamp that lamped our night our dirt. Cause of this (wear-balded) red-mud ring going glow. The old ever-voice (with the tear through it) intonation, riveting. Souls and appetites (from holler, brink, and gully) lured and drawn. The story-man encircling us binding us by lard-torch and ditty. So. In the beginning. And »
Mason–Dixon Lines
by Southern CulturesFor 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 »
Unburied Treasure: Edgar Allan Poe and the South Carolina Lowcountry
by Scott Peeples, Michelle Van ParysWhile 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 Chinaberry Trees in Niggertown
by Andrew Hudgins“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
by Charles WrightAutumn’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 »
All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself
by Charles Wright“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.
Beautifully Landscaped Grounds Invite You Home Each Day
by Peter A. Coclanis“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
Sartoris Resartus
by Charles JoynerThe South is an enigma,Secret and sacred.
The Sacrament of Remembrance: Southern Agrarian Poet Donald Davidson and His Past
by Paul V. MurphyDonald 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
On Winslow Homer’s Weaning the Calf
by James ApplewhiteWhat 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.