REDEFINING THE SUBLIME AND REPOSITIONING APPALACHIAN LITERATURE: A
CLOSER LOOK AT THE POETRY OF WEST VIRGINIA’S MURIEL MILLER DRESSLER
AND IRENE MCKINNEY
By
JULIE A. HAINES
A Thesis Submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division
of Ohio Dominican University
Columbus, Ohio
MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH
FEBRUARY 2016
ii
iii
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………iv
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………1
CHAPTER 1…………………………………………………………………………………….5
CHAPTER 2…………………………………………………………………………………...16
CHAPTER 3…………………………………………………………………………………...38
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………..44
WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………….46
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincere thanks first go to Dr. Kelsey Squire for her assistance and guidance in this work. Your thorough planning and detailed comments and suggestions truly helped direct my thoughts and ideas into something so much more. Thanks are also owed to Dr. Martin Brick for his comments and suggestions to this work as well as providing my first introduction to graduate literary study. While these two were integral to this thesis, each English faculty member at Ohio
Dominican University that I have encountered has pushed me to academic work beyond what I once thought possible.
I am so lucky to work for Bloom Vernon Local Schools, a district that provided me the support necessary to complete this program. The administration team of Rick Carrington, Marc
Kreischer, and Brett Roberts saw the value in credentialing high school teachers to do what is
“best for kids.” I would also like to thank Darcee Claxon for our collaborative work in earlier courses and Judy Ellsesser for being a sounding board and patient listener and reader.
Finally, I must thank my husband, Thad, for his patience and support through this whole process. Whether I was worried I would miss a deadline or so distracted that I left the remote in the refrigerator, you stayed positive and encouraged me to push forward.
1
INTRODUCTION
My first taste of canonical literature that said “Ohio” was Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio (1919). I found myself connected to the people of Anderson’s fictional
Winesburg. Though years separated and set at the other end of the state from my small-town
Ohio upbringing, the connection intrigued me. This introduction set me on a path to discover more literature from or about my home state. As a lifelong resident of southeastern Ohio, however, I found little literature of or about my specific home of Gallia County, but in college I became familiar with an author from the neighboring county of Jackson, Kermit Daugherty. The librarian at the school where I did my student teaching was a relative of his, and I read his novel
Out of the Red Brush (1954). In the opening pages he discusses the volatility of the land and how after the hard working of that land of the Appalachian foothills, it was likely that “the good top dirt” would “wash down the hillside to feed up some bottom land in the valley” and “the brush’d grow no matter how thin the ground got” (10). Despite the often harshness of life on this terrain,
Daugherty’s novel ends with a more positive view of this land than what opens the story: “The big moon was a […] dapplin everything with its soft light […] the little crick run like silver […]
Way back in the Red Brush faint an clear come the music of hounds chasin a fox. The night was sweet, an beautiful, an whisperin love” (251). The ending mirrors the beginning, but that same place that causes heartbreak to those who live off of it has a power to fill the heart with something greater. This dichotomy of the Appalachian experience continues to intrigue me.
The area of Ohio where I live stands closer to the cities of Huntington, West Virginia, and Ashland, Kentucky than Ohio’s own Columbus, Cleveland, or Cincinnati. As I continued to study and read of the Ohio experience, I found myself also seeking out the literature of West
Virginia and Kentucky. The section of Ohio where I have resided my entire life comprises part 2 of Appalachia, “the 205,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian
Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi” (Appalachian Regional
Commission). West Virginia and Kentucky are also part of Appalachia, and in the stories and poems of Kentucky and West Virginia authors, I found more of a bond, more of a personal connection to experience, but I stopped pursuing such authors as I began my own teaching career and focused on reading and teaching from the canon.
My attention was brought back to the literature of my own backyard when I was lucky enough to attend several Ohio Appalachian Center for Higher Education (OACHE) conferences as part of my current teaching position. These conferences exposed me to the work of the Jesse
Stuart Foundation in Ashland, Kentucky, including the publishing of many books from
Appalachian authors. My library of Appalachian novels, memoirs, and histories expanded greatly based on the selection offered in the conference store and presented to me through keynote addresses from the likes of Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, and Jeff Biggers, author of The United States of Appalachia. At one of these conferences, I picked up a copy of Listen
Here: Women Writing in Appalachia; however, that book rested unopened on a shelf until a colleague loaned me her copy when I mentioned Appalachian literature while she was helping me brainstorm thesis topics. If two like-minded educators selected the same book, there had to be worth in it.
I then spent a summer week devouring the excerpts, poems, and remembrances in that collection. The quilts, the voices, the family dynamics, and the music within those pages are the relics of my own story, and the places of that collection, the “in Appalachia” of the title, stood paramount over all those other commonalities. Two contemporary authors in the collection,
Muriel Miller Dressler and Irene McKinney, resonated with me. The fact that these two are from 3
West Virginia, the only state fully in the Appalachian region and a location with which I had felt a connection earlier, was not surprising.
In the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Henry Shapiro argues that seeing Appalachia as a region has created “a culture of place rather than the culture of people” (1100); however, a closer look at these two “people” addressing their “place” displays both parts as vital, dynamic, and inherently tied to the region. This intensity of place makes the region an ideal situation for examination. The Appalachian region has been isolated and disconnected from the rest of
America until recently, with an economy that, while improving, was still at seventeen percent unemployment in 2013, and “Appalachia still does not enjoy the same economic vitality as the rest of the nation” (Appalachian Regional Commission). In light of this isolation and economic struggle, poets such as Dressler and McKinney provide not a nostalgic portrait of place, but one where realism permeates the regionalism. This amplification also serves as a vehicle for exploration of greater American issues, much like literature of the inner-city has in recent years.
One task I have pursued as an English language arts educator involves gathering resources to build a curriculum that engages students. If I felt such a connection to what I was reading, I began to wonder if my own students would as well: would it spur deeper reading due to that connection? If so, could I justify teaching such literature along with the canon and within the legislated standards? In the startling sense of place running through their work, the dichotomy I earlier recognized in Daugherty’s novel, these works began to find their own place in the canon for me. This was also another possible avenue for engaging my students, for in them, I also observe this dichotomy. They desire to “escape” the region but seem to stay tied to it no matter where they go. 4
In Chapter One, I review the evolution of place in Appalachian literature, from its early role in the fiction of the region to the renaissance of poetry in the region in the late twentieth century. Part of this review also addresses the transition of authors and characters in the literature, moving from outsiders writing about the region and its inhabitants with a stereotyped hand to one-time insiders writing about the inhabitants when outside of the region and finally to insiders writing authentically about life in the region. The second chapter focuses on Dressler and McKinney, looking at several poems for each author and how they combine place and the sublime, particularly in their poems dealing with outsiders and the destruction of the mountains through coal mining. This dichotomy of place and its ties to nature hearkens to the sublime and a redefining of this literary term of antiquity. In the final chapter, an examination of the potential for using Appalachian literature in the classroom occurs.
5
CHAPTER 1
A BRIEF SURVEY OF APPALACHIAN LITERATURE: FROM PROSE TO POETRY, BUT
IN ALL, PLACE
Place is, as Eudora Welty points out in “Place in Fiction,” “one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction,” but “as soon as we step down from the general view to the close and particular […] and consider what good writing may be, place can be seen, in her own way, to have a great deal to do with that goodness, if not to be responsible for it” (116). This undercurrent of the “hand of fiction” does not station itself as “lesser” in Appalachian literature.
While some place Appalachian literature under the heading of Southern literature, as evident in the anthology entitled The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume III, Contemporary Appalachia, others, such as Danny Miller in A Handbook to Appalachia, point out that Southern writers are
“more Gothic and more concerned with North-South conflicts” while “Appalachian literature
[…] is sometimes distinguished from other literatures by its strong emphasis on setting, or
‘place’” (199). How then did place become such an integral part of the Appalachian literary tradition? A survey of Appalachian literature demonstrates the importance and evolution of this sense of place in the literature.
The Prose Tradition
The beginnings of an Appalachian literature are best found in the period directly before and then after the Civil War. As pointed out by Miller in both A Handbook to Appalachia and An
American Vein, stereotypical portrayals of the Appalachian man as a moonshiner, a ruffian, or a simpleton and the Appalachian woman as the earthy ingénue or sage and haggard mother began 6 to garner the attention of outsiders writing about the region during this era. These outsiders included, but were not limited to, journalists, local color authors, and missionaries (American
Vein xi; “Appalachian Literature” 199-200). Exemplars of this trend can be found in two
Tennessee authors, George Washington Harris and Mary Noailles Murfree. Harris, born and raised in Pennsylvania, garnered attention for his Sut Lovingood character, an Appalachian
“nat’ral born durn’d fool.” Murfree’s novels and short stories often are set in the Cumberland or
Great Smokey Mountains of her home state of Tennessee; however, Murfree herself was from a wealthy family from the larger cities of the state and spent quite a bit of time being educated in
Philadelphia.
Harris’s title of Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. Warped and
Wove for Public Wear (1867) evokes a stereotype both in image and dialect on its own. While
Sut often exposes the hypocrisy of wealthier, more urbane characters, his characterization still espouses a ruffian stereotype, as evident in the first description of him:
These and like expressions were addressed to a queer looking, long legged, short
bodied, small headed, white haired, hog eyed, funny sort of a genius, fresh from
some bench-legged Jew's clothing store, mounted on "Tearpoke," a nick tailed,
bow necked, long, poor, pale sorrel horse, half dandy, half devil, and enveloped in
a perfect net-work of bridle, reins, crupper, martingales, straps, surcingles, and
red ferreting, who reined up in front of Pat Nash's grocery, among a crowd of
mountaineers full of fun, foolery, and mean whisky. (19)
Amidst this quixotic description, exists some “sort of a genius,” but that genius emerges via the
“fun, foolery, and mean whiskey.” That genius does not garner Sut fortune, acclaim, or even stability. 7
In Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (1885), the visiting hunter Varney views the mountain people as at the mercy “of their narrow prejudices, their mental poverty, their idle shiftlessness, their uncouth dress and appearance” and their lives of a “peculiar and primitive state of society” (134). Varney’s fellow hunter Chevis feels as if he has visited a location “as far as ever from the basis of common humanity” (135) when in the mountains, although he does strive for “a broader view” of this humanity. In Murfree’s novels, the formal language of the narrator and outsiders serves as a stark contrast to the dialect of the mountain people. In another passage from In the Tennessee Mountains, this contrast emerges between the first utterances of a local character and the narrator’s analysis:
"I do declar', it sets me plumb catawampus ter hev ter listen ter them
blacksmiths, up yander ter thar shop, at thar everlastin' chink- chank an' chink-
chank, considerin' the tales I hearn 'bout 'em, when I war down ter the quiltin' at
M'ria's house in the Cove."
She paused to prod the boiling clothes with a long stick. She was a tall woman,
fifty years of age, perhaps, but seeming much older. So gaunt she was, so
toothless, haggard, and disheveled that but for her lazy step and languid interest
she might have suggested one of Macbeth's witches, as she hovered about the
great cauldron. (3)
The irony of a Shakespearean comparison cannot be denied. The character being described would not understand the allusion, one that alludes not to a young, beautiful, or benevolent character but to a witch. Nor does this allusion mean much for a mountain reader. This allusion aims at the outsider, the educated or urbane reader entertained by the simpler characters. 8
What Murfree’s work has above Harris’s, though, is a burgeoning sense of place. In the story of Sut Lovingood, the reader finds all dialogue and movement, but in In the Tennessee
Mountains, the titled mountains do play a force, and this force echoes the lives of the inhabitants.
The mountains “[stand] against the west like a barrier” (1), keeping the people from moving in both a literal westward movement and a figurative cultural advancement. Despite this blockade, the mountains are also the site of “days [passing] over” with a “splendid apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold… received into the heavens” (1). “Love” and “hope” (2) likewise disappear into the mountains. Although at times florid in description, the imagery still helps connect the region and its literature to more traditional genres.
The next major transition and trend in Appalachian literature was still in prose. Any romanticism found in the likes of Harris and Murfree disappeared in the first part of the twentieth century as a theme of reform pervaded novels by the likes of Sherwood Anderson, Grace
Lumpkin, Ellen Glasgow, and Olive Tilford Dargan. The reform of the “disgusting, deranged, and degraded” mountaineer served as a microcosm for the need for reform in the coal and textile industries (Miller et al. “Appalachian Literature” 200-201). In this period too, the authors had
“outsider” qualities. Anderson moved to the South later in life, Lumpkin spent considerable time in New York City, Glasgow was part of an upperclass family, and while Dargan was born and died in Appalachian states, she spent much of her life in other parts of America and in Canada.
Representative of this group, Anderson’s Kit Brandon: A Portrait (1936), while considered “one of the most compassionate novels ever written about Southern mountaineers” (Williams 8), has an interviewing newsman telling the title character’s story. Miller et al. explains this lack of truly
Appalachian authors writing about Appalachia as a result of “a lack of educational opportunities and the leisure time required to cultivate a literary tradition” (“Appalachian Literature 200-201). 9
Mountain life was difficult, and education and writing were, for many, unnecessary in the struggle to just survive.
The 1930s and 1940s finally saw Appalachian authors, as part of a larger group of
Southern authors, writing about their own place emerge and gain literary standing. Many of these authors also begin the addition of poetry to the Appalachian tradition. Paramount on most lists of this area are Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Harriet Arnow. Those “educational opportunities” lacking before are the elixir for Jesse Stuart, a long-time educator as well as a widely-known author of both prose and poetry. While many of his characters retain a homespun quality, he saw education as a form of “human conservation” and wanted to grow a more forward-thinking
Appalachian populace, as seen in his idyllic works such as The Thread that Runs so True (1949).
Such a populace would be more respectful of place, treating their homeland with more care. The prose and poetry of James Still garnered popularity as well as critical acclaim. His River of Earth
(1940) often has The Grapes of Wrath mentioned as a companion piece, and his poetry breaks away from the traditional rhyme and meter of Stuart’s. His poem “Earth-Bread” aligns as a precursor to the later literature and social thought analyzing the contradictory role of coal as provider and devastator to Appalachia. In it, coal serves as the “[...] earth-bread / This stone- meat, these fruited bones” (10-11) that makes up a “dark harvest” (13). Coal counts as a harvest, a provider, but as one dark not just in color; coal darkens the land with damage as well. This place of soaring mountains and dark depths can be seen in Still’s prose characters; the land dominates and shapes their lives while leading them to a love/hate relationship that keeps them there even while they contemplate more. In 1967, Still helped gain critical appreciation for
Appalachian literature when he was the subject of a study in The Yale Review by Dean Cadle
(Graves 8). Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954) “is one of the few Appalachian novels 10 finding its way into the American literary canon” (Miller et al. “Appalachian Literature” 202), but it focuses on the life of displaced Appalachian characters, the Nevels family from Kentucky, living in Detroit, as Arnow herself did, and focuses on the role of industry in the destruction of humanity for commercial gain. This theme also emerges in the place-based poetry of writers to be analyzed later in this paper, but the placement of the theme outside of Appalachia mitigates its discussion here.
The Poetry Tradition
While Appalachian prose continued to evolve in the 1950s and 1960s, the era also saw the burgeoning of a poetic tradition on the edge of artistic and critical success. In “Contemporary
Appalachian Poetry: Sources and Directions,” George Ella Lyon examines how a sense of place pervades the poetry of the region beginning with that era of the 1930s and 1940s. Collection titles such as Hounds on the Mountain and Song in the Meadow hint at the role of place that becomes a key in the forces of that poetry, and Lyon discusses how contradictions are key to looking at Appalachian poetry:
Given these opposing forces at work in Appalachian life--the long-lived isolation
which preserved ignorance along with strong family ties, the volatile coal
economy with its exploitation of human and natural resources, the accelerated
modernization and the accompanying loss--it is not surprising that its poetry
offers varied and often contradictory visions. (12)
These “contradictory visions” often try to unify the distrust and desire for advancement, the beauty and terror of the region, and the money and destruction of mining. Lyon goes on to look at two trends in contemporary Appalachian poetry, ties to the past and ties to the land. Both of 11 these stem from the role of change as the flux of the 1960s likewise altered the state of
Appalachia and exploded the writing of poetry in the area. As she points out, fewer than a dozen author’s names are associated with Appalachian poetry up to 1960 while the number triples when looking at the 1970s (18).
Here this survey breaks from prose to look at the evolution of Appalachian poetry exclusively since the 1960s. Why the 1960s? This time period saw the crystallization of
Appalachian poetry as a poetry of its own place yet of merit beyond the mountains traditionally confining the region. Two points contributed to this crystallization. First, the social outlook of the country was seeing acceptance growing for many groups, such as minorities and women, while the popularity of shows such as Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies had an opposite effect on the region. Second, Appalachia served as a battleground in the War on Poverty, bringing even more exposure, often negative, to the region. Both of these contributed to a
“cultural crisis” perfectly fit for poetry, as Lyon explains:
Poetry, so often considered impractical, a luxury, is in fact a natural human
response in dealing with this loss and distortion of value, because poetry is a
valuing process. Through its intense selectivity in imagery, in rhythm, in sound
and in word, poetry imparts value; its light shines on the few things chosen till
they become luminous, radiating a truth long locked within. (19)
Poetry then served as a voice, perhaps less noticed, for the challenge in going from an often neglected region to one of growing national attention. By processing this challenge through poetry, the voices of the region were able to impart some value or beauty into the situation through the power of fewer words over many and the inherent truth in using only the right words, even when they are harsh. 12
Graves, in the introduction to the Appalachian volume of The Southern Poetry
Anthology: Volume III, also adds that the overall American movement from the “urbane (and mostly urban) poetry of the 1950s” to a more natural (less patterned and practiced) and nature- based poetry of the 1960s emerges in Appalachian poetry as well, a trend which continues today.
As Lyon did with the 1930s and 1940s, Graves calls attention to the number of place-based titles in contemporary Appalachian literature:
River of Earth by James Still; The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by John Fox,
Jr.; The Landbreakers by John Ehle; The Unvanquished Earth by Wilma
Dykeman; Green River and At the Edge of the Orchard Country by Robert
Morgan; The Mountains Have Come Closer by Jim Wayne Miller; Ebbing &
Flowing Springs by Jeff Daniel Marion; Maggie Anderson's Windfall, and
Kathryn Stripling Byer's Wildwood Flower. (9)
The union of place so signifies the genre that the physical geography of the place titles both the region and its literature.
Charles Wright, one of those Appalachian poets to emerge during the 1960s, served as the 2014-2015 Poet Laureate of the United States and earned a Pulitzer Prize. His Appalachia- inspired work continues to exemplify the qualities of place in the literature of the region and how it separates from the rest of the South. In an interview with Daniel Cross Turner, Wright pointed out that “The Southern narrative tradition looks at landscape as history, a door into the dark, as it were. I tend to look at landscape as revelation, a door into the light. When I look at the landscape, I see what’s not there…. You think about what’s behind it, but you’re left with what you can see.” His 1998 Appalachia contains the poem “Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of 13 the Rat.” In the opening stanza of the poem, an excellent summation of the dichotomy of place in
Appalachian literature occurs:
East of town, the countryside unwrinkles and smooths out
Unctuously toward the tidewater and gruff Atlantic.
A love of landscape’s a true affection for regret, I’ve found,
Forever joined, forever apart,
outside us yet ourselves. (1-5)
Here joined together in place is the paradox inherent, the “true affection for regret” and the
“Forever joined, forever apart.” This speaks to the “heavenly aspects” of Appalachia that Wright mentions in the Turner interview while acknowledging the struggle that constitutes part of it as well.
This sense of place embedded in the nature-based poetry helps to situate Appalachian poetry alongside and even within the canon. Merits can be outlined for looking at Appalachian literature as its own entity with its own parameters and conventions; however, looking at
Appalachian literature, particularly poetry, along with canonical literature and terminology, brings even more to the study of Appalachian literature. For example, the application of such a lofty and cerebral term as “the sublime” to Appalachian poetry brings clarity to the work while also aligning it with more classic literature. Several key attributes of the sublime apply here.
Intrinsic in all of the classic definitions of the sublime is a sense of Longinus’s grandeur, an epic quality of beauty that leads to Edmund Burke’s addition of “terror” to the standard description. In his The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, Harold
Bloom explains how the American sublime involves a contradictory “incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism” (3) while providing a more abrupt contrast 14 between that beauty and nature, forming “illuminations of discontinuity” (6). Here, the
American sublime dovetails with American tenacity, the constant reinvention, where man, here the author, wants to always go beyond the possible, expected, or accepted while still staying connected. This definition of the American sublime applies not just to Bloom’s “high literature” of Emerson, Whitman, Eliot, and others. Even the early prose of Murfree’s In the Tennessee
Woods, with the mountains’ “splendid apotheosis” of the day and Chevis’s reaching for “a broader view,” hints at the future depths of the sublime found in contemporary Appalachian poetry. As delineated by Robert Higgs in an introduction to the chapter “Nature and Progress” in
Appalachia Inside Out, “understanding Appalachian life means recognizing that the relation between land and people has always involved conflict as well as harmony and appreciation of natural beauty” (183).
Embedded within the aforementioned sublime emphasis on nature, vastness, focus, and transcendence exists a sense of place. So many classic poetic examples of the sublime include contemplations of nature and place. As Welty concedes in “Place in Fiction,” “place induces poetry, and when the poet expertly attends to place, a meaning may even attach to the poem out of the spot on earth where the poet utters the words, and the poem will “signify the more because it does spring so wholly out of its place, and the sap has run up into it as into a tree” (123). This sense of place, this sap running from location to author and back again, can be one of harmony and tension, of beauty and terror, as people move from surviving off the land to finding ways to control the land. In recent times, the terror comes not just from the vastness of the environment but from the vastness of humanity’s attempted dominion over the environment. In the
Appalachian region, the place has its own beauty and terror in the dense wilderness and rough mountains, but that place has also been terrorized by people attempting to modify, control, and 15 possess the environment, from the tops of mountains to the depths of the coal mines. As Graves points out,
Perhaps no single concern emerges […] as the importance of landscape in
preserving a way of life from the past, in the present, and for the future. The […]
poets represented in Contemporary Appalachia have witnessed transformational
changes in both the economy and the environment of the region. Many poems
address the impact of coal mining, particularly the stripping away of our
mountaintops, as well as the disappearance of family farms as a means of
sustenance (9)
In light of man’s attempted dominion over nature, another layer of meaning must be added to the sublime, the terror of the realization of humanity’s role. If the sublime can help elucidate
Appalachian literature, here Appalachian literature can expand the sublime. This literature can also be placed next to canonical literature as a companion, or even an evolution, since they expand upon what Wordsworth saw occurring and voiced in “The Tables Turned”: “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— / We murder to dissect” (26-
28).
16
CHAPTER 2
THE SUBLIME PLACE-BASED POETRY OF MURIEL MILLER DRESSLER AND IRENE
MCKINNEY
Several issues converge to make the poetry of two Appalachian women, Muriel Miller
Dressler and Irene McKinney, exemplars for redefining the sublime via place-based poetry.
Paramount is the urgency found in their poetry as Appalachian women newly experience exposure and success. Jim Wayne Miller, a leading scholarly voice in Appalachian literature through the last part of the twentieth century, acknowledges that “the Appalachian region is still seen as the site of an unmitigated patriarchy, with the result that the region’s women writers and the impressive body of work they have created is not sufficiently visible, recognized, or appreciated” (qtd in Ballard and Hudson 3). Despite this patriarchy, Amy D. Clark, in “Letters from Home: The Literate Lives of Central Appalachian Women,” explains that “women are the primary transmitters of literacy in their families,” and this means that although not recognized as authors or even functioning as authors, Appalachian women have a great understanding of the power of language and literature (56). Clark goes on to point out that most Appalachian women writers achieving literary acclaim during the past several decades have listed place and familial ties as key impacts on their work. These familial ties, particularly those of caregiver to older and younger generations, add a deeper element to the bond to place and the desire to expose the destruction of place. Protection of family and protection of place are closely tied together.
Therefore, while striving for acceptance and recognition, which often involves reaching outside of the region, Appalachian women are still deeply connected within the region, as Maggie
Anderson explains in “Mountains Dark and Close around Me”: 17
I like to think that as Appalachian women writers, we have now come far enough
in our work and in our lives that we can manage to dress in whatever costumery
we need to—or choose to—and still not ‘get above our raisin’.’ I don’t know. I do
know that I love the West Virginia landscape and grieve for its maimed
reconfiguration and destruction in the name of money and progress. I know that I
love my people, but we sometimes share an awkward affection. Occasionally, I
have to stomp away from the dark, close mountains of home, swearing this will be
the very last time. Always, I have to come back. (39)
Even when away from this place, authors are brought back to it. No matter where they are, the boundaries and heights created by the land of Appalachia keep it with them.
But does the literary work of these women rise to the level of the canon? Does it compare and deserve even a modicum of the attention given to other American authors? In The Daemon
Knows, Harold Bloom discusses how his chosen canonical authors (Whitman, Emerson, James,
Frost, and others) display “A selfhood endlessly aspiring to freedom from the past” that “is bound to resist actual overdeterminations that bind us all in time.” He then purports that this
“high literature” attempts to “[find] our own sense of being” from “an earthly shore” (19). This definition of the sublime should not be limited to traditional “high literature.” The poetry of
Appalachia also involves this search for a “sense of being” deeply tied to “an earthly shore,” and the union of these with the experience of Appalachian women amplifies the applicability of the sublime and place to those outside of the canon, and a modern understanding of the terror that we do to our “earthly shore” stands evident. Ann Townsend, in “The Technological Sublime,” does look at a modern redefinition of the sublime, focusing on how the traditional subjects of sublime poetry, mountains, waterways, and the like, have become cliché because “when the wildest 18 nature has become tamed, when there’s little left to discover, landscape may no longer call up the sublime in us” (188); therefore, Townsend sees technology, with the extended example of the atomic bomb, as the source of beauty and terror. Townsend does not consider how the terror in her example ties back to nature via human hands. The poetry of Muriel Miller Dressler and Irene
McKinney does, and in it we find a union of a sense of place that expands the sublime with an acute awareness of the man-made or induced terror that threatens the beauty of nature and takes the once awe of wonder at nature’s expanse to an awe of desperation at humanity’s destructive force on nature.
Muriel Miller Dressler
The rawness found in the poetry of Muriel Miller Dressler (1918-2000) serves as a stark example of a new sublime in the face of changing place. Dressler was born in Kanawha County,
West Virginia, near the state capitol of Charleston. This proximity to the capitol does not lessen
Dressler’s role as a nature-based poet speaking to the sense of Appalachian place, for in West
Virginia, villages and “hollers” can be found within just a matter of meandering miles from the city. Dressler did not graduate from high school, but acknowledged the depth of her education via her mother’s love of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer. Dressler is not the same type of
Appalachian woman described in the 1880s by Murfree, whose Appalachian woman would not have understood the Shakespearian characteristics bestowed on her. She began publishing late in her life - her first poem was published in 1969 - but she easily made up for her late start and spoke at Harvard in 1976 (Ballard and Hudson 189). That first published poem, “Appalachia,” exemplifies her desire to “record Appalachia without the sensationalism given it by writers outside the hills” (qtd. in Ballard and Hudson 189), and “Go Tell the Children” and “Elegy for 19
Jody” speak to an awareness of the level of terror now added to nature by humanity’s advancement. All of these themes then culminate in “Renaissance in the Hills.” Dressler’s firm confidence, so clearly found in her poetry, might seem to belie her background, but this confidence combined with a humble background represent the sublimity of Appalachian poetry perfectly.
Avery Gaskins, in her “Notes on the Poetry of Muriel Miller Dressler,” explains the role of change in Dressler’s era:
[…] Dressler’s own generation saw the first strip mines in Appalachia. They
stood bewildered by a scene that would soon become familiar, the high wall, the
coal auger, the mechanized shovels, and the convoys of dump trucks. They also
watched the growth, decline, and rebirth of conventional coal mining[…] Many of
Muriel Dressler’s poems study this painful attempt to adjust to the changing face
of Appalachia and individual efforts of the human will to transcend the pain.
(143)
Herein resides the contradiction again; the “human will” attempts “to transcend the pain” that humans inflicted. Dressler’s “Appalachia,” her first published poem, exemplifies this contradiction.
The Poetry of Muriel Dressler
“Appalachia,” Dressler’s most commonly anthologized poem, serves as a confident statement of place and person that also condemns the outsider as making judgments about the region, calling to mind those who create stereotypes in popular culture and media. The poem was her gateway to relative fame, used by Ben A. Franklin of the The New York Times to introduce a 20
1981 article on coal strikes and a 1985 Los Angeles Times article on West Virginia by Charles
Hillinger. This poem serves as a great example of what Jesse Stuart had to say about Dressler: “If
Muriel Dressler had not existed, she would have had to be invented […] She has a way of getting right at the heart of the region’s uniqueness as well as at the pressure that many Appalachians feel to conform” (qtd in Cuthbert 4), but in this poem, the speaker will retain that uniqueness and resist conformity.
Beginning with the forthright proclamation of “I am Appalachia. In my veins / Runs fierce mountain pride; the hill-fed streams / Of passion” (1-3), Dressler quickly moves from the forceful “I” to an accusatory “you” as she adds “stranger, you don’t know me!” to the third line.
This finger-pointing use of the second person occurs fourteen times in the poem, from explaining how “You’ve analyzed my every move” (4) to a list of experiences the analyzer will never understand and culminating with the last line decree that “Though you’ve studied me, you still don’t know” (31). Embedded in that list of experiences not understood by the outsider can be found the sublime, that union of beauty and terror, and its further union to place, the same mountains that provide “pride” and “passion” along with devastation and horror. The “I” of the poem proclaims to be “enigmatic” (6), a mystery of contradictions much like the sublime.
The first situation the speaker presents as an example of what the outsider does not understand exposes that the outsider has “never stood in the bowels of hell, / Never felt a mountain shake and open its jaws / To partake of human sacrifice” (7-9). The mining companies cause this opening in the mountain as the bedrock of the terrain weakens by the holes left behind.
The outsider, the “you” at which the speaker points a poetic finger, can also be found in the mining industry. Here, Dressler exposes her audience to the terror not found in the mountain alone but in the mountain transformed by humans. However, Dressler does not dwell on the 21 economic and environmental situation, and the next situation presents those horrific mountains in a gentler mode, as the outsider also has “never stood on a high mountain, / Watching the sun unwind its spiral rays” (10-11) or “ran / Wildly through the woods in pure delight” (13-14). The beauty of the sublime develops out of the immensity of the mountains that also can provide the simple beauty of “glens for wildflowers” (12) and places to “[dangle] your feet in a lazy creek”
(15).
At this point, midway through the thirty-one lines of the poem, Dressler expands from the
“I” and “you” of the poem, to open up to others of the mountain, the “nimble-fingered fiddlers”
(17) and “hunters shouting with joy” (21) that share the mountain, not studying and consuming it as the “you” does. In the lengthiest vignette of the poem, lines 22 through 27, Dressler takes the poem upward on the mountain to describe the common Appalachian tradition of burying loved ones “high up on a ridge / Because mountain folk know it's best to lie / Where breezes from the hills whisper, ‘you're home’” (23-25). This imagery contrasts with the “bowels of hell” of the coal mines alluded to earlier in the poem. The mountains should be treaded upon, even in burial, and not be dug under. The mountains mean to provide beauty, sustenance, and solace, even in death as “graves on a hill / Bring easement of pain to those below” (26-27). The mining of the mountains has the power to take this away.
In the concluding lines of the poem, the speaker declares “I am Appalachia; and, stranger,
/ Though you've studied me, you still don't know” (31-32). Perhaps in these lines, Dressler provides some explanation to why Appalachian literature is just gaining wider popularity outside of the region even as it struggles to find its place within the region. Dressler “lets the region speak for itself and makes it clear that she feels that the region has a personality of its own”
(Gaskins 144). The literary voice reflects the populace of Appalachia, one that in many situations 22 desires to leave the brutality of the region just as it cannot get away, and stays full of contradictions that can serve as difficult for some outsiders to understand. Just as the sublime can be a challenging concept, so too can be the land that supplies the terror and the people that survive it.
Dressler’s “Elegy for Jody,” first published in 1977, dwells more in the figurative than her “Appalachia” does, and this begins in the use of “elegy” in the title. The poem mourns not for the death of Jody but for her transition to adulthood and the challenges and loss of purity that accompany the transition. In his 2008 commencement address at the University of Cincinnati,
The Waltons creator Earl Hamner, an author and close friend of Dressler’s, describes the poem as
“advising a young person who is about to enter the wood of life.” This journey goes into a metaphorical woods, and the character Jody evokes Little Red Riding Hood, as she does “wear a crimson shawl” (1) and “put on a scarlet hood” (2). The speaker advises Jody to “make a point of being brave” (3) in the changing woods. “Harsh winds” work to “denude the trees” (5) and the falling leaves land on an earth described as “cryptic” (6), where what appears to be ground to stand upon actually weakens by the hand of man. The path that the “child” must follow overflows with shadows, described as being an “ebon rug” (11), and although the speaker reassures that “I’ll weave for you” (11) that path, the reassurance flees for the “greening trees are gone” (11), and darkness always presides, whether from the sky or elsewhere.
While Jody goes into the woods of the poem, Jody as representation actually leaves the woods, leaving the mountains and place of her childhood to enter the rest of the world, the world infringing on and destroying the mountains, and to enter that world, she must “don heavy armor”
(13). This same world that Jody enters also forced her, as a representation of Appalachia, out of the woods; the industry and politics of the outside world enter and destroy, so she then must go 23 into the same world that entered and destroyed in order to survive. She seeks improvement in that which destroyed. As Gaskins explains, the “Appalachian people dearly love the ironic situation, perhaps because so many things in their own lives began with the hope that one outcome would be the result only to have the opposite come true” (148). The arrival of industry brought with it the hope of a better life, but this was fleeting and what was left was land denuded, just like the trees of the poem. Desperation comes from the speaker in the admission that “I cannot bring / Fair April back again” (15-16). Here the terror of the modern world conquers the beauty of the natural world. The journey of the child represents the journey of the
Appalachian region. Just as a child falls prey to the disappointments and failures of maturity, so too does the purity and beauty of the region as it faces change.
This terror, and the use of children as the recipient of this terror, also unfolds in
Dressler’s “Go Tell the Children.” The metaphor disappears, however, and in this poem, a lament in five stanzas, the imperative title line repeats as a commandment:
Go tell the children the mountain is trembling,
An earth moving monster is eating its way
Through grapevines and shumate and wild laurel thickets
And even Sweet William has fallen prey. (1-4)
Whereas “Appalachia” looked at traditional coal mining’s work, and the shaking that comes from “the bowels of hell” with the destruction under the mountain, here Dressler directly addresses the destruction of strip mining, with the “earth moving monster” describing such equipment as the coal augers used to remove land to get to any coal left in a seam, weakening and causing the “trembling” of the mountain. The beauty of the “grapevines and shumate and wild laurel thickets / And even Sweet William” disappear along with the mountaintop. Unlike 24
“Elegy for Jody,” this poem presents actual destruction, not the metaphorical journey of a child to the struggles of adulthood. After the opening lines, the poem moves quickly into the desperation of the situation, with the second stanza beginning with a refrain of the title amplified by replacing “the mountain is trembling” with “their true love is dying” (5). Not only does the flora of the first stanza disappear, for also “The whippoorwill’s song no more shall they know”
(6) and “The fullness of mountains--of mountains must go!” (8). Mountaintop removal shaves layer by layer off of the height and life of the mountains.
The darkening imagery of devastation continues through the final three stanzas. The children must “weep” (9) and “hang down their heads in sorrow” (11) as “The flowers of the fringe tree are blacker than midnight, / The blue fruit now lies on the crust of dead earth” (13-
14). The use of “blacker than midnight” brings to mind the darkness of coal. Now, the flowers disappear, and the darkness of coal replaces them, causing the song the children earlier sang that
“the grass is so green” (12) to be untrue, only a vestige of the past. The speaker of the poem also begins to look toward the future, and in it, the darkness continues, for the speaker “weeps at their birth,” with “their” being the children yet to be born, for in their lifetime, “the mountain is dead!”
(20). The warning that the “mountains must go” (8) from earlier in the poem will come true.
Desperation comprises this poem, with a focus on the terror, but Dressler does return to a more positive outcome in the next selection.
Dressler echoes all three of these previously outlined poems in “Renaissance in the
Hills”: the beauty of the terrain, the terror inherent in nature, the new sublime of the destruction of outsiders, and a hope for recovery. “Renaissance in the Hills” opens with the speaker walking in “unquiet fields and restless woods” (1) toward “the glen where / Laurel and rhodendron gnarl /
The emerald moss” (2-4), and dreaming of “the green years of unspoiled land” (5). Now “misty 25 shadows” (6) and “wandering spirits [that] know an endless strife” (7) populate this formerly
“unspoiled land.” In reflection on the Appalachia of the past, the speaker recalls when the men and “the oak […] fought for land” (13).
The fight with the oak for control of the land represents the sublime of the past. The men held their ground, but now they hear a “rumble in the earth” (9), the modern sublime of man over nature, where the mountains have become “the land of spoilers, / Who rape the earth and then defile the man” (16-17), and “When they have spent their strength” (18), these “defilers” disappear. In their future wake resides Dressler’s positive slant, for the speaker knows that
From their decay our
Roots will know a growth of
Foliage bruised in silent fields.
A bloom that’s new. My people merely sleep! (19-22)
These concluding lines demonstrate Bloom’s American sublime that exhibits an “incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism” (3). The strength of the region comes from surviving the terrain, the stereotypes, the poverty, and the destruction. This strength through experience will take the region through whatever it faces.
Irene McKinney
Irene McKinney (1939-2012), poet laureate of West Virginia for the last eighteen years of her life, once decreed, “I’m a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet, and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to” (qtd. in Anderson 39). That honesty ties very much to her place. When discussing her work on a memoir in a 2005 interview conducted by Kate Long of West Virginia Public 26
Broadcasting, McKinney declared that “I am formed by this place” and explained how the contradictions of West Virginia and Appalachia form the basis for her writing. Whereas Dressler never completed a high school education, McKinney attended West Virginia Wesleyan College for her undergraduate degree and earned an MA at West Virginia University, followed by a PhD at the University of Utah. After briefly teaching throughout the United States, she returned to
West Virginia. She published several collections of poetry and was featured on Garrison
Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Two of her poems have also made it to the Poetry Foundation’s website, where her work situates alongside the Appalachian poetry of Ohio’s James Wright.
The power of place constitutes the focus of McKinney’s introduction to a compilation she edited entitled Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia. When looking at the common themes of Appalachian literature, McKinney explains that “writers have been characteristically concerned with more recent history, like the West Virginia Mine Wars, the battle of Blair Mountain, the War on Poverty, the human and ecological disasters at Hawk’s Nest and Buffalo Creek, and the devastation caused by man mountaintop removal mining in the southern part of the state” (2-3). However, another undercurrent flows through the representation of place in Appalachian literature, one that McKinney sees as unique to the area, and that “is an awareness of non-human history, the history of the earth itself” because “there are constant reminders of geologic time which we can physically see in the folds and uplifts, the rolling quality of the hills like a slowed-down ocean, even in the telling layers of the road-cuts”
(5). In her comments on the work of her mentor Louise McNeill, McKinney acknowledges the awareness in Appalachian literature that “the human control of the nonhuman is an illusion” (6).
This human attempt to control nature brings about the sublime terror in contemporary
Appalachia. The people understand and respect “geologic time,” for they find it difficult to feel 27 of any true greatness when they measure themselves against the age and vastness of the
Appalachian mountains; however, they live at the mercy of those who feel they can control it, mine it, and profit from it. An evolution of this cycle can be found in McKinney’s progression of subject matter through five poems: “Unthinkable,” “The Rite,” “Twilight in West Virginia: Six
O’Clock Mine Report,” “Deep Mining,” and “Woods Burning.”
The Poetry of Irene McKinney
McKinney’s first published poetry collection, 1976’s The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap, includes an initial look at humanity’s role in nature’s terror in the, at first glance, unassuming nine-line poem “The Rite.” However, the title sets off the deeper theme, evoking that ancient birth of the mountains that McKinney stressed in Backcountry along with that knowledge that her “life is small” (2) in the age and vastness of the geography. The rites to which McKinney refers are sacrificial rites. “The stream seeks its dream” (3), yet McKinney’s speaker admits to
“living in it” (4) and preventing some water from reaching that goal. The subject grows tighter as
McKinney’s speaker reflects on consuming an apple, as she lets “the seeds spill, pass through my hands / like slick words” (5-7). The seeds of the apple are as meaningless to her as “slick words,” words one can imagine being spoken and then forgotten, words meant to deceive. In both the stream and the apple, one finds “Not death / but dying” (8) and a worry that “How can you eat what you love” (9). That final line also brings to mind the idea of man destroying the mountain, something loved, in the name of the “slick words” of contemporary society, of industry and economy. While not as blatantly brutal as some of Dressler’s poems or McKinney’s own later ones, the theme of humanity’s destruction of nature begins to emerge. 28
Her 1989 Six O’Clock Mine Report includes two works, “Twilight in West Virginia: Six
O’Clock Mine Report” and “Deep Mining,” that directly address the devastation wrought by humans on the land of West Virginia. In “Twilight in West Virginia: Six O’Clock Mine Report,” unlike in the work of Dressler, the descriptions of the once beauty of a mountain are minimal; no romanticizing of her subject occurs. As McKinney explained in an interview with Jeff Mann in
Her Voice: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry, she does not romanticize because “it is not a settled, certain way of life. So to romanticize it and say that it is, or ever was, would be an enormous lie. I would rather err on the other side, to come down on the tougher, nastier parts, if I have to err at all, rather than to prettify” (200). The poem opens with a simple reprint of a mine report, although one of the mines mentioned, Bergoo, was the site of a
1981 mining accident:
Bergoo Mine No. 3 will work: Bergoo Mine
No. 3 will work tomorrow. Consol. No. 2
will not work: Consol. No. 2 will not
work tomorrow. (1-4)
The allusion to Bergoo reminds the Appalachian reader of the destruction already witnessed by the region, immediately setting up a darker tone to the poem.
The text then moves into twilight in the mines as the “Green soaks into the dark trees” (5) and “The hills go clumped and heavy / over the foxfire veins” (6-7). The light of foxfire hearkens back to McKinney’s discussion of the prehistoric, and the other light in the scene of the poem emits from “A man with a burning / carbide lamp on his forehead (12-13) and “fires in the mines” that “do not stop burning” (30). These two feuding sources, the prehistoric and the industrial, leave as the victims in between the miner and the land. Much as Dressler compared a 29 mine to “the bellows of hell” in her “Appalachia,” McKinney’s mine contains an all-consuming fire, starting with the horrific “open mouth / of the shaft” (11-12) around which “grit / abrades the skin” and the “air is thick” (9-10) from the heat of the mine. This is not a twilight of a gentle transition from sunlight to moonlight; this is a twilight warning of an end.
McKinney also takes the poem inside the mine, with the image of that single man, “with a burning / carbide lamp” (12-13), and the use of the word “burning” echoes once again to a hell underground. The man “swings a pick in a narrow corridor / beneath the earth. His eyes flare / white like a horse’s, his teeth glint” (14-15). He has become animal-like, even frightening, through his livelihood. He becomes a silhouette, darkened by the lack of light and the dark of coal with “sleeves of coal, fingers / with […] black half-moons” (16-17). The coke ovens become “rows of fiery eyes” (21), even more frightening than the image of the man.
The text goes back outside quickly, taking the reader to the mountain roads above, where
“Above Slipjohn, a six-ton lumbers down / the grade, its windows curtained with soot” (22-23).
The scenario ends though with an even more ominous “No one is driving” (24), a reference to the soot-covered window blocking the face of the driver. The montage adds a sense of abandonment and lack of direction to the situation. The “six-ton” takes the poem deeper into the road imagery, imagery that continues in the last two stanzas of the poem before taking us back into the mines with the final line:
The roads get lost in the clotted hills,
in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough,
the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze.
The hill-cuts drain; the roads get lost 30
and drop at the edge of the strip job.
The fires in the mines do not stop burning. (25-30)
In that penultimate stanza, the mountains are “clotted” by the terror brought by human advancement. “The red cough,” the exposed “marl” layer of the earth, and the noxious “sulphur ooze” found in waterways near coal mines mar the “Blue Spruce maze,” something that should be beautiful. Even the “roads get lost,” for mining destroys the mountain but also destroys itself, using up the resources provided in nature. In an apocalyptic turn like in Dressler’s “the mountain is dead” (20) in “Go Tell the Children,” the last line warns that despite this knowledge, the destruction continues.
In “Deep Mining,” another selection from Six O’Clock Mine Report, the perspective of the miner, voiced as “I,” occurs again, along with an anonymous “you” that also plays a role in the process. The wonder of mining opens the poem: “Think of this: that under the earth / there are black rooms your very body / can move through” (1-3). The speaker has entered the “arteries of coal in the larger body” (6), and continuing with the circulatory imagery, the speaker helps to unclog the artery, sending a clot of coal to those who “walk up there on the crust, / in the daylight” (9-10) and warm their body by the heat of the burning coal. The cycle evolves, and that same miner who loosens the coal and “[slogs] in the icy water / behind the straining cars” (19-
20) comes to the surface and also consumes the heat.
This floating coal warms but damages, just as a clot in an artery destructs a human body.
The miner and “you” also mar the flow by being part of it, much like the speaker in “The Rite,” for “there is a vein that runs / through the earth from top to bottom / and both of us are in it” (27-
29). The miner burns, destroying the earth from underneath while the consumer destroys it from above with the desire for heat because 31
You’re going to burn this fuel
and when you come in from your chores,
rub your hands in the soft red glow
and stand in your steaming clothes
with your back to it” (12-16).
While this warming occurs, the speaker and the miner trade places, with the speaker now as the one in the mines, “behind the straining cars” (20), and then the places reverse again so that someone always works the mine, just as someone always uses the coal. The cycle never ends; the land never rests. However, the temporary warmth of “the cooking stove,” “softer clothes,” and
“quilt” (23-26) lull some, including the speaker, into a sense of comfort and complacency.
Then the structure of the opening commandment to the poem (“Think of this:”) reflects in the final lines:
Listen: there is a vein that runs
Through the earth from top to bottom
and both of us are in it.
One of us is always burning. (27-30)
The “us” of the poem’s final line makes clear the complicity of all, not just the mining industry.
Just as in “The Rite,” the speaker has an awareness of the terror and personal complicity, hinting of an awareness that can lead to change. In this awareness exists key parts of the definition of the sublime from two sources. Denis Donogue describes the sublime as not art but a feeling
“provoked by an object in nature before which her imagination trembles, till her reason reasserts itself” (qtd. in Baker 170). This awareness found in “The Rite” also represents Immanuel Kant’s 32
“dynamical sublime” where the sublime results from the horror of death in the face of nature’s terror and leads to awareness, a new balance, and deeper understanding (Baker 170).
Baker also contends that “the American sublime text pushes off, continues its journey”
(173), and McKinney does exactly that in “Woods Burning,” first published in her 2004 Vivid
Companion. The poem was inspired by a line from a news story, which McKinney includes before the poem, that reads “The arsonist returned to aid the firefighters.” In McKinney’s hands, the fire of this line goes from triggering a memory of the fiery red and gold of autumn leaves to creating terror in nature as the arsonist, for the speaker takes that voice, will also be “up the river
/ with the rest of them, fighting / the flames, not afraid / to put my hands in the fire” (66-69).
These words comprise the last lines of the poem, and the “I” of this poem spends the preceding lines tracing the fires started by people, starting with the arsonist’s own fires burned while hunting or in the smokehouse and including the coal mining industry’s “years of logging, / slash- piles burning and we were / moving on, up the mountain / so steep we held on with our hands”
(30-33) and the speaker’s father’s “years in the mine” (59) that involved “[blowing] the land to
Kingdom Come” (61). The speaker proclaims that “Like my Daddy / before me I can make things happen” (64), echoing the earlier ominous memory that “Them old quilts smell like the dead, / like my Daddy before me” (13-14), but providing perhaps the previously mentioned reassertion discussed by Donogue and the new balance and deeper understanding outlined by
Kant. In the arsonist’s awareness of his own criminal fires, a connection to the criminal fires started by the mining companies happens, evoking the deeper understanding discussed by Kant.
The poem moves from the idyllic memory to brutal realization, yet the allusion to action, action that the individual still can take, exists, echoing Donogue’s reassertion in action. Here too resides 33 the irony of the Appalachian situation. The arsonist receives condemnation for starting fires and damaging the earth while other men do the same thing in the name of industry and advancement.
In a 2009 interview with Emily Corlio, McKinney explained how her connection to place came to be: “Having grown up on a farm in a pretty isolated place, I was really tuned into everything that was going on in the natural world, in the animal world, in the vegetable world.
We were very close to all those processes. It was just inevitable.” This kinship emerges in one of her last poems, “Unthinkable,” published in the posthumous Have You Had Enough Darkness
Yet?
In this catalog of place memories put to verse, the speaker of the poem, much like
McKinney herself, “tune[s] into everything,” announcing that “I am age, I am later, / I’m wider scope, the blue note / in the barn, the sister of hope” (1-3) in the opening lines and going on to connect self with a range of entities from man’s “torn-down home” (6) to the “genealogy of nights” (10). This list ends with “The going-on, / the going away, diminuendo. / Erosion then, the hanging-on” (14-16). That ending hints at the destruction of place, the erosion issues brought on by the mining industry, an industry McKinney address more bluntly about in other poems.
This blending of memories both good and bad reflects McKinney’s belief that she “be just as truthful as I can about the unpleasant things in my life” for “the positive side is nothing without that underlayment of the gritty parts of life” (Long).
Connecting Dressler and McKinney
Like their sublime predecessors, Dressler and McKinney were writing from a sense of place undergoing change. For their English Romantic predecessors, that place was a juxtaposition of nature and the Industrial Revolution. For the American authors prior to the 34 twentieth century, the change was in the new, the establishment of an American voice. Arguably, the Appalachian region was one of the most changing regions during the twentieth century, and in this change, Dressler and McKinney recognized the terror and beauty of change to place. Also, they sound as the voices of women just emerging from the “unmitigated patriarchy” that Jim
Wayne Miller admits existed in Appalachia; they represent the women with ties to caregiving, a caregiving that makes them attuned to threats to home and place.
Although both women began publishing poetry in the 1970s during a renaissance of
Appalachian literature, obvious contrasts to their backgrounds emerge. For Dressler, this initial publishing and recognition came later in life, in her late 50s, and from a background with little traditional education and centered in Appalachia for most of her life. Miller, in contrast, was twenty-one years younger than Dressler when first published and would soon after earn her PhD, spending many years teaching outside of Appalachia. Despite these divergent backgrounds, both women express similar themes, demonstrating the convergence and power of these themes in the literature of Appalachian women.
As previously mentioned, Dressler sought to “record Appalachia without the sensationalism given it by writers outside the hills.” She does this with her truthful descriptions that moderate the idyllic or demeaning moods of earlier Appalachian literature. For example,
Dressler references the idyllic glens and woods in her “Appalachia” as the works of earlier authors such as Mary Murfree do, but without a heavy crutch of sentimentality and nostalgia.
She also brings in banjos and hunters without resorting to the caricatures of George Washington
Harris or the stereotypes of the media of the mid-twentieth century. McKinney also shows an evolution from the works of earlier authors, including those more immediate to her in the timeline of Appalachian literature. If Jesse Stuart wanted a more educated region, he got it with 35 the likes of McKinney, but in that education came a stark honesty that removed any sentimentality. Her work voices a continuation and combination of a desire to protect place while also being honest about its inadequacies, as in the work that gained literary prestige for James
Still. Though a self-proclaimed “hillbilly,” McKinney adds polish to her work while maintaining honesty and authenticity, using as her subject matter the world around her.
Harold Bloom states that the American sublime always looks for movement away from the past, avoiding simplifications that attempt to connect too thinly. He also sees the sublime in humanity’s desire to “seek memorial inscriptions, fragments heaped against our ruins” while still on this “earthly shore,” and for Bloom, his “high literature” examples find ways to expand and transcend life with greater awareness (19). Dressler and McKinney exemplify Bloom’s description of movement away from the past through their desire to rectify the damage humanity has wrought through their awareness of the past; there cannot be movement from an entity unless awareness of that entity happens. Dressler has her understanding of why her culture buries loved ones on a hillside in “Appalachia,” recognizing that these have become Bloom’s “fragments heaped against our ruins” at the hands of man. In McKinney’s “Deep Mining,” the speaker realizes complicity in that which destroys the very home of the speaker, thus showing the greater awareness lauded by Bloom in his “high literature.”
Dressler and McKinney’s works here analyzed do not just exemplify aspects of the
American sublime as outlined by Bloom. They also hearken back to the foundations of the sublime as outlined by David Baker in his essay “The Sublime: Origins and Definitions.” Baker looks at how the sublime evolves from Longinus’s desire for “noble diction” to the democracy of the American sublime, which he argues “may not be elevated” (174). Most telling when looking at how that sublime plays out in more contemporary poetry, as Baker concludes his discussion 36 with American poetry in the nineteenth century, is his statement that where “Europe found its sublime in its terrifying heights and decay. American has its own aesthetic problem: it never stops” (174). Part of that never stopping ties to the continued desire for change and advancement, and although slower to change than in other areas of the country, Appalachia has been the recipient and victim of that desire. The region never stops, even when the devastation begins to outweigh benefits, as seen in the poetry of Dressler and McKinney. Although the mountains begin to shake and tremble, the people have not heeded the warnings, and the beauty of nature undergoes domination by the terror of advancement taking an unwanted path for those living in the mountains.
Although Dressler points fingers at the outsiders in “Appalachia,” and sees some escaping the region in “Elegy for Jody,” “Go Tell the Children” speaks of an Appalachia that becomes no more as man creates the terror that takes away the beauty of nature. However,
“Renaissance in the Hills” ends with a positive note after integrating all of the prior themes.
McKinney’s “The Rite,” “Twilight in West Virginia: Six O’Clock Mining Report,” and “Deep
Mining” focus on the terror of this new sublime, echoing Dressler’s warning of a disappearing
Appalachian terrain. “Unthinkable” includes an answer to the question of her final collection of poetry, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? That answer is “yes.” With the destruction realized, the complicity is admitted, and the action must be resolved. Although those earlier warnings were not heeded, Appalachia will reinvent, and poets in the tradition of Dressler and
McKinney will put honest voice to this reinvention.
This poetry, touching on the traditional culture of Appalachia while also addressing issues applicable to modern society, does not just have connections to the canon and high literary tradition. It can stand on its own, and it can be compared to any other poetry of place. This 37 poetry of immediacy and warning also has an authenticity and power of approachability that does not demean it in any way but brings with it a call for awareness, action, and change. Perhaps no better facet of our society stands better ready to embrace this literature than the classroom, for as
Wordsworth related in “The Tables Turned”:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can. (21-24)
The following chapter addresses the place of Appalachian literature in the Appalachian classroom and what can be taught from literature of this place of a once “vernal wood.”
38
CHAPTER 3
THE PLACE IN THE CLASSROOM FOR APPALACHIAN LITERATURE
Appalachian literature is still growing in esteem. For example, the National Endowment for Humanities’ 2016 list of summer programs for educators contains two programs dedicated to
Appalachian literature. Shakespeare also gets two programs. However, the inclusion of
Appalachian literature in the classroom, whether in an Appalachian classroom or elsewhere, has stayed minimal. If Appalachian authors are not even read in many Appalachian classrooms, why should they be included in classrooms outside of the region? Why should Appalachian literature, particularly when such work voices a new defining of the sublime, be a part of the literary classroom experience? This unique awareness and new sublime voice, with an early realization of the damages to our natural world that our desire for commercial and monetary advancement has wrought, positions Appalachian literature uniquely in the literature of America and even beyond. On one hand, the geography of the region traditionally has kept the area isolated; however, certain experiences, such as the incursion of the mining industry, have amplified situations in a way that makes them relevant to a broader spectrum. Environmental concerns are one of those situations. The first step in showing Appalachian literature’s relevancy begins with positioning it in the Appalachian classroom.
Students are often asked to connect their own lives to what they read, with the hope that those connections will engage them, make the material more approachable, and give the learning longevity. Students find kindred teen angst in Romeo and Juliet, discuss how they define family while reading The Outsiders, analyze examples of their own action and inaction via Hamlet, reflect on their own hard choices in “The Road not Taken,” feel the pain of lost love and 39 hollowness of material wealth in The Great Gatsby, or realize how the dangers of contemporary society have increased since the era of “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”
However, while merit exists in these realizations of common themes uniting humanity, this theme work involves vague, general connections made to Italians of centuries past or socialites of the Jazz Age. Using Appalachian literature—particularly contemporary Appalachian literature—in the Appalachian classroom, lends immediacy and increased relevance to learning.
These connections are tangible, so much so that students can hear of places they have visited or live, walk through lands they have seen, and hear voices akin to those in their own surroundings.
Even hearing that an author has local ties has an effect, such as with the spark I saw in students’ reactions when I once mentioned that Ambrose Bierce was born in Meigs, Ohio, a location about
30 miles from where I was teaching at the time.
The concept of using place-based material in education is not new. John Dewey discussed the power of it in his work with schools during the late 1800s:
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his
inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and
free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in
daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school, its
isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of
his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his
home and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday
experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of means, to
arouse in the child an interest in school studies. (qtd. in Smith 586) 40
Dewey realized the power in meeting the learners where they are, a method that shortens the distance between student and content. Fast forward one-hundred years, and the power of place in education was highlighted in Harvard’s Living and Learning in Rural Schools and Communities:
Lessons from the Field. The report calls this “pedagogy of place” and emphasizes that “it clearly increases student understanding and often gives a stronger impetus to apply problem-solving skills” (Perrone). This focus on place dovetails well with other contemporary trends in education, including integrating multicultural and adolescent young adult literature into the classroom.
Recent trends in English language arts education have embraced multicultural literature as a means to engage students. In a discussion of a presentation by author Sharon Flake, Shirley
B. Ernst and Janelle B. Mathis outline how Flake questioned “how children feel when they are in a bookstore and don’t see books about themselves” (10). Flake’s concern fits for Appalachian students as well, students who, even when in college, see little of themselves in literature beyond general affiliations and themes, and as college educator Donna Pasternak, who works at West
Virginia’s Marshall University, explains, struggle to “look at themselves and their literature as culturally and artistically significant” (6-7) because they have “internalized these Appalachian stereotypes” (3-4). This struggle stems from the ongoing stereotypes presented to these students.
A devalued culture leads individuals within that culture to also feel devalued.
In addition to the encouraging of multicultural literature in the classroom, the use of adolescent/young adult (AYA) literature has also been a movement designed to engage more students. However, many of these AYA titles concentrate on urban settings, leaving Appalachian students yet again removed from the content. Alden Waitt, in “’A Good Story Takes Awhile’:
Appalachian Literature in the High School Classroom,” discusses how students for whom the canon contains no interest find themselves pulled into AYA literature with real students in real 41 situations. Even these novels, as related by Waitt, focus on the city and suburban areas and
“revolve around the experiences of college-bound, middle-class protagonists who have apparent unlimited access to technology, transportation, and myriad resources” (81). This setting does not represent the world of many Appalachian students; therefore, Waitt argues that since AYA literature set in the urban world has helped develop attention and skills in the urban students, should not the same hold true for Appalachian literature, whether AYA or otherwise. Moreover,
Waitt sees an inclusive approach the most productive, for “it is… far preferable that it
[Appalachian literature] be used to normalize the literature, that Appalachian works be assigned along with traditional canonical texts in the classroom” where “the typical English class themes—social mobility, the individual versus the group, the quest for identity, and confronting the wilderness—abound in these works” (84). For Waitt, this integration of texts brings relevance, deeper critical appraisal, and an exploration of values; however, such integration should not romanticize the region. Instead, such integration “will enlighten and perhaps provoke anger so that change may be effected by the students themselves” (84).
While Waitt focuses his attention on aligning Appalachian prose with traditionally taught novels, this layered relevance, enlightenment, and exposure can also be found in Appalachian poetry. R. Parks Lanier, in his “Field Guide for Teachers,” explores the layers of Appalachian poetry that make it particularly useful in the classroom. Lanier discusses how the union of the pastoral, the personal, and the political in the best Appalachian poetry make such works exemplars for teaching. With these multiple layers of meaning, such poetry provides each reader or student an avenue of connection and engagement. This political, pastoral, and personal union also speaks to the contradictions of the sublime and the uniqueness of the American experience 42 while also providing context and connection for students at different levels and from different perspectives.
Each part of Lanier’s pastoral, personal, and political reside in the poetry of Dressler and
McKinney. For Lanier, the pastoral poem looks at Appalachia and the past in an “intensely lyrical” mode. Dressler did this in her poetry with glimpses of a life “danced to wild sweet notes” at the “Outpouring of nimble-fingered fiddlers” (“Appalachia” 16-17), as did McKinney, when a child, saw “In the fall of the year / when leaves burn red against / the eye and heart” (1-3), that the world seems to be “all sweet red maple / and oak in the early time, / gold sycamore and birch” (15-17). The personal poem converses with the reader, even in an “intimate and confessional” way (Lanier 191). Little argument exists that Dressler’s “Appalachia,” with its recurring “you,” is not a conversation, albeit a vehement one. McKinney’s story in “Woods
Burning” unfolds to the reader as an organic meander, with the storyteller working through the story on the page. Finally, the political poem is an argument, a warning or a stance; the understanding of terror in both authors exhibits this part of the Appalachian triptych.
Works such as those of Dressler and McKinney can work in the Appalachian classroom to engage students through the recognition of themselves in the works. Even greater than the engagement is the potential for action, as voiced by Waitt and as evident in a study by
Audra Slocum of West Virginia University. Slocum studied the comments and work of three high school students during a stand-alone Appalachian culture unit. The content of the unit focused on rhetoric and composition, using literature that Lanier would find at the cross section of his pastoral, personal, and political. The goal of the unit was “for students to develop rhetorical dexterity” (194) while looking at Appalachian identity from an insider and outsider perspective. When students found themselves not in the role of “other,” as they often felt when 43 studying history and literature, they found “legitimacy and value” in their “intellectual work as critical scholars” (205). Students did not make just vague connections; they invested in their studies and built those critical skills so desirable in today’s education world, echoing the reasoning for pedagogy of place from the likes of John Dewey and the Annenberg Rural
Challenge. 44
CONCLUSION
Recently, the staff at the high school where I teach opted to do a cross-curricular, two-week intersession between semesters. The staff-selected topic was local culture and concerns. Science teachers looked at local environmental and health concerns, the Spanish teacher had students compare Appalachian traditions to the traditions of various Hispanic cultures, the music department brought in local bluegrass musicians for jam sessions with students, and language arts teachers used works by local authors and had students write their own folklore stories. Many staff members commented on the level of engagement of students during these activities and student desire to study the topic more or take action, something that had not occurred in some of the classes before. I know in my own classroom, student responses to and analysis of the poetry we read, including Dressler’s “Appalachia” and McKinney’s “Six
O’Clock Mine Report,” were some of the most thorough and astute that I have read. I noted many students using the terms “relevance” and “connection” in their work. Interestingly, I noted how their own writing voices, an elusive quality to engage in teenage writers, emerged more in these response since they felt validated by reading from published authors with a similar voice. Although this was a stand-alone unit, I did reference other works they had read and have continued to reference those Appalachian works as we have extended our reading, and the works stand their ground and maintain their relevance against the likes of Nathaniel
Hawthorne and William Faulkner.
This unit showed me the need for more wide-spread scholarly investigation and teacher-initiated practice of how “pedagogy of place” can be harnessed in the classroom.
Numerous institutions of higher education host Appalachian Studies programs. This sensibility 45 can be fostered at the secondary and lower levels as well. Within any such curriculum, a juxtaposition of the local with a regional, national, or even global approach would only serve to strengthen students’ sense of ownership of place and feelings of worth. Here stands the potential for a positive domino effect, whereby those students that value their place then honor it as adults in scholarship and real-world application.
Will more Appalachian literature make its way into the canon? I believe so. The strength of the tradition and the power of the new voices in the region will only continue to garner attention. The issues, the language, and the creativity all demand it. I also hope that the authenticity of place-based literature, learning, and scholarship continue to grow throughout the world.
46
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