All the lives this place
has had, I have. I eat
my history day by day.
Bird, butterfly, and flower
pass through the seasons of
my flesh. I dine and thrive
on offal and old stone,
and am combined within
the story of the ground.
-- Wendell Berry, "History", Locales : Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers
Locales : Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, edited by Fred Chappell (Baton Rouge : University of Louisiana Press, 2003)
In 1987, a notable assembly of writers, including Cleanth Brooks, Fred Chappell, Shelby Foote, George Garrett, Elizabeth Spencer, and others, organized The Fellowship of Southern Writers. Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Walker Percy, Ernest J. Gaines lent their support. Since their first "convocation" in 1989, the Fellowshp has gathered at a biennial meeting that coincides with the Chattanooga Conference on Southern Literature. Awards are given at that time for the best of Southern writing -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, new writing, and distinguished achievement. Locales : Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers "is made up of poetry by members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and winners of the Hanes Prize for Poetry."
As editor, Fred Chappell provides a fitting preface, writing eloquently of poetry and place:
It may be that the label 'regional' is more harmful to the reputation of poetry than to that of fiction. Poetry is supposed, by its very nature, to strive for universal application, to approach ideals limited in no way by questions of setting or ostensible subject matter.
Yet speech that addresses universal concerns must take place somewhere within the universe, and when that place is specific, the poetry has a greater force than a placeless poetry might have. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and W. B. Yeats understood that the general is most securely held to when in the grip of the particular, and our contemporary southern poets take this doctrine to heart.
I have tried to emphasize this truth with my choices of poems for Locales. Almost all of the poems here are not just specific, not only regional, but tightly joined to highly particular places within the southern region. Place names abound in these pages, and each name contains or connotes a unique flavor of its own. Though the places are often small, the poems are not shallow in depth of feeling nor narrow in breadth of implication.
The lens of particular place is capable of intense focus and of correspondingly strong force. Here, then is a southern gazette of heart and mind with mountains and valleys, forests and farms, rivers and marshes, graveyards and barrooms -- places that have resonated with the poetry these poets overheard and captured and imagined. Every site has its tone; southern locales sing with a choir of them.
In Locales, you can read poetry by A. R. Ammons, James Applewhite, Wendell Berry, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, James Dickey, George Garrett, Andrew Hudgins, T. R. Hummer, Rodney Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Morgan, George Scarbrough, Dave Smith, Henry Taylor, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Robert Penn Warren and Charles Wright. Move with them into southern places.
See the Louisiana State University Press website for addition information on Locales.
This is the heart's world. This is the land
Of the spirit, not the man-kept land
Of people and people's voices, but the land
Of clear blue mountains and cedar-colored skies;
Of green corn waving, of loneliness
Cool and separate in the waving corn.
--George Scarbrough, "Eastward in Eastanalle", Locales : Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers
