Donald 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
What 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.
“‘We sell the world to buy fire . . . our way lighted by burning men.’” The name of Wendell Berry first came to my attention about forty years ago. I was then a student at the University of Virginia and a part-time employee of Noonday Book Shop, where a book called November Twenty-Six Nineteen »
In “The Great Wagon Road,” published in the Spring 1997 issue of Southern Cultures, historian T.H. Breen told of his encounters and adventures while attempting to trace the route of the great migration of German and Scots–Irish settlers from lands north into the Carolinas. Breen’s essay set Michael Chitwood thinking…
You could see it, or it could see you, anywhere in town,the county jail crowning the lofty granite courthouse.I watched it as I rode into Asheville for weekly church;
My husband callsfrom his month-long trip to Californiastill nursing the angerhe left me holding like a small childin the dwindling window of the airport
Poetry
I sorely do love her, I thought said.Actually, he said he loved her surely,but Southerners mix words up sometimesand I have often taken them at face value. So as this Southern man was talking aboutthe Southern woman he would marry, it seemed to me grownups tangled their feelingsunnecessarily, and especially love. And,since we were in »
“She is AM radio. Chevrolet. The hot blacktop outside the Dairy Freeze.” Gold pollen floated on the air, And through a sunlit galaxy of flies I watched a silver, glinting muscle rise, Thrash once, then wriggle quickly down.
“Outside, in the parking lot, sparrows bathe in the dust. Empires rise and fall. He’ll notice and say nothing of it on the air.”” Small-town AM station, morning show, still doing a gospel number every hour.
“He is cocky. He’s also cute and a good kisser.” C. P.’s outlaws versus the Martinsville Oilers.Hotdogs and popcorn fill Friday night airalong with moths that flutter and flirt withdanger in the field lights.
“. . . if you wasn’t already prepared to stop, beloved, you shouldn’t have started.” 1.But you know, friends-blessed children of the all-encompassing spirituality-good advice is where you find it. Yes!