WV POETRY BYTES: Poetic Nightfall, Music Hall of Fame, Don West & “A Hard Journey,” other books of note, Irene McKinney on YouTube
Photo by Vic Burkhammer
EVENT: Poetic Nightfall – Saturday, December 1, 7:30 p.m., at the Pocahontas County Opera House, 818 3rd Ave, Marlinton, WV 24954-1016.
After the open microphone readings, the program will feature three West Virginia poets: Kirk Judd, Wolf Knight and Edward Kennison.
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Click it — A JUST-AROUND-THE-CORNER EVENT: W.Va. Hall of Fame’s first induction ceremony Friday, Nov. 16, 2007
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Recommended:
Check out Yvonne Farley’s Nov. 11, 2007, Sunday Gazette-Mail review (at end of this blog post) of “A Hard Journey,” James J. Lorence’s biography of Don West. Having known West, she is the perfect person to review such a biography. In 1989, she put together a filmed interview of him.
West was a pioneering figure in Southern radicalism. In Don West we see the higher marriage of the practice of social justice and the practice of poetry. He put himself through Vanderbilt and was a purveyor of education and social action all of his life. West was a cofounder of the Highlander Folk School at New Market, Tennessee, and founder of the Appalachian South Folklife Center at Pipestem, West Virginia.
West was in the vanguard against Southern racism and hillbilly stereotypes. He was an ordained Congregationalist preacher, and his was the kind of Christianity he took to the mat, to the jail cell, to the fist fight, to the car being run off the road, to the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings where his poetry was sometimes used against him, he took it into action despite his farm being burned down, took it to the streets of Atlanta, the hollows of West Virginia, the outreaches of Scandinavia, Europe… he took it to the mat over hope and labor issues and the rights of mill workers and suffering miners.
Someone at the FBI thought West was the most dangerous man in the South… the Atlanta authorities wanted him dead or alive at one point… he was a poet, a truth-teller. It all reminds me of what Bernice Johnson Reagon once said (she was a student who helped challenge the legality of segregated public facilities, a protest that morphed into one of the first mass demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement):
“Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, ‘What in the world came over us,’ you know? But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us we would be dead. And when people died, we cried. And we went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like… Sometimes you know what you’re supposed to be doing, and when you know what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s somebody else’s job to kill you.”
Suggested reading:
Don West, “Clods of Southern Earth” (poetry, drawings by Harold Price) (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1946)
Don West, “No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems,” ed. by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)
Other books of note:
Doug Van Gundy — “A Life Above Water”
from which we offer an excerpt of the poem “Chipmunk”:
I was able to witness him
In all his utter chipmunkness–darting
From under the rock, sniffing the air, twitching
His tail like a seismograph needle; waiting. After
He disappeared, I watched for his reappearance
Intently. Beneath the boulder, I could hear his tiny
Twitterings in the leaves, the amplified minutiae
Of his movements. But for all of my wanting, I could not
will him to return. So it is with the miraculous.
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Click here for previous podcast/blog with Van Gundy.
Diane Gilliam Fisher — “Kettle Bottom”
“Hard stories told in the softest of voices….”
David Selby — “Happenstance”
The actor/writer/producer’s most recent book of poems, this one on life and the chance of circumstance.
Bob Henry Baber and others — “Old Wounds, New Words: Poems from the Appalachian Poetry Project “
Poems from ninety poets in the southern Appalachian region.
Fred Chappell (Editor) — “Locales: Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers”
The Fellowship of Southern Writers is an invitation-only literary organization founded in 1987 under the inspiration of Cleanth Brooks. This anthology includes a range of poets as various as Wendell Berry, Yusef Komunyakaa and Ellen Bryant Voigt.
VIDEO: A conversation with Irene McKinney
This interview with West Virginia Poet laureate Irene McKinney first aired in September 2005 on the program “Outlook” on West Virginia PBS. John Nakashima and Kate Long produced this piece. Outlook rebroadcast the program on Aug. 30, 2007.
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THIS JUST IN: The 2007 West Virginia’s Finest talent competition continues at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 15, at Capitol Center Theater, 123 Summers St., Charleston. One free part of the event is “Spotlight on Literacy,” featuring authors Deb Copeland, Ken Hechler and Patti Lawson … and a poetry group called The Poets.
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Poet Steve Scafidi and Iranian novelist Porochista Khakpour presented a joint reading hosted by the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University on Thursday, Nov. 8. The mixed crowd of professors and grad students and IFP students were favorably impressed with both writers.
Click here to read John Kernan’s writeup of the reading in the JHU newsletter.
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Publication: THE SUNDAY GAZETTE-MAIL
Published: 11/11/2007
Page: 2F
Headline: APPALACHIAN ACTIVIST SUBJECT OF DETAILED PROFILE BOOK REVIEW
Byline: YVONNE FARLEY FOR THE SUNDAY GAZETTE-MAIL
Labor historian Jim Lorence has written a sympathetic portrait of Don West that is well worth reading. West was a home-grown southern Appalachian radical, whom many of us came to know during his tenure at Pipestem and the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Summers County. A native of North Georgia, he died in 1992 on Cabin Creek in Kanawha County.
Lorence has written several books, including an award-winning account of the making and suppression of the movie “Salt of the Earth.” He wrote this book about West while serving as an eminent scholar of history at Gainesville (Ga.) State College. I should reveal that I was interviewed for this book, and my husband and I developed a high regard for the author, who visited West Virginia several times.
This is not the first book to take up West’s career as a Southern radical, poet and organizer, but it is certainly the most carefully researched and documented account of his life I’ve read. Lorence has fleshed out the details and documented stories that West often casually shared but only in fragments. West’s life falls into place as Lorence weaves it into the broader context of 20th-century history of dissent and movements for social change.
Born in North Georgia to a poor family that was to leave the mountains and take up sharecropping to survive, West often said, “I came from the poorest of the poor.” He also came from a long line of mountain preachers.
Lorence points out that West had grown up in an Appalachian culture that was rapidly disappearing with the industrialization of the 20th century. From his rural mountain background, he carried a strong sense of place as well as pride in his heritage. Early in his life, West refuted the image of mountaineers as hillbillies, racists or ignorant louts with a version of history that emphasized human dignity and a rich cultural heritage.
Lorence says that West’s faith “in the capacity of the poor to overcome greed and competition to build an economically just, non-racist society remained solid.” This would be true to the end of his life. He once told me that he had faith that unless there was a nuclear war, he was certain that humankind could eventually achieve a most just and rational world.
Despite the lack of public schools and his family’s economic status, West was able to gain a good education. It was at Vanderbilt in the 1930s where he encountered what Lorence terms “his intellectual and spiritual home.” At that time Vanderbilt’s Graduate School of Religion had an activist faculty with such teachers as Alva Taylor and Willard Uphaus, who in the spirit of the times, espoused social gospel teachings and urged students to become involved in social justice work.
Here, West found a way to unite his religious inclinations with his desire to better the lives of working people in Appalachia. As a Vanderbilt student, West became involved in a coal mine strike at Wilder, Tenn., that was to shape his thinking for the rest of his life. There he preached the funeral of Barney Graham, the murdered union president at Wilder, when many were afraid to do so. Personal courage was one of the attributes that reflected West’s moral strength. That, along with a tall, athletic frame, brains and a natural talent at speaking made him a leader.
Another theme of his life would be the commitment to education. A scholarship to travel in Denmark and study Danish Folk Schools of that time instilled a lifelong dream to establish folk schools throughout the mountain South that would educate people and encourage them to seek social and economic change. This commitment led West and his wife, Connie, to found the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem.
West’s Appalachian history classes focused on the history of struggles in the region, contributions of blacks as well as American Indians, migration and the role of mountain people in the abolitionist movement. He taught that the mountain South served as a route north for the Underground Railroad. West passed on the strong anti-racist attitudes learned from his grandfather and mother.
West paid the price for his beliefs. For most all of his life, he was a high-profile and controversial individual who was more often than not a lightning rod for hostile newspaper editorials and conservatives wherever he lived. As a result of labor organizing work, West was beaten and left for dead, jailed, wanted for treason, left many times without a cent to his name, hounded by the FBI, and often unemployable. It was his wife, Connie West, an artist and teacher, who for many years carried the family financially.
Lorence asks and answers at length the central question of what motivated West politically and artistically. A reader will come away knowing what those motivations were not only because West himself was up front about what he believed, but because Lorence has tracked his development with precision. We begin to understand why a person gifted with so many talents, chose to believe deeply in social justice and held passionately to these beliefs until the day he died.
Yvonne Farley is a librarian who lives in St. Albans.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:57 am
Hello, Yvonne, found your name in google which I am very pleased to have done. Do you remember me when I visited you at your home in St.Albans? My son,Joel, and his gal,Veronica,from Stockholm, were invited to a party held at your home the summer of 2001. I recall that you didn´t like wasting good cognac by mixing it with something carbonated and sweet to make it more palatable for those who are not mountaineers as so many Parisian women do. I have sent you a letter endeavoring to contact since the last one you wrote me when I was in Sweden but never got an answer. Let me know if you are still working at the library.