“First” posted poems by Adrian Blevins earlier this year here, but your editor has taken a second pass at her work below…
Mainline media chatter about the gulf between citified elites and rural voters isn’t getting us anywhere. One gross example turned up in an April, 2018 issue of Politico. Tickled by the cretinish thesis Trump was “shaking up the book industry,” its author chose not to mention the Donald is dead-set against reading anything but bullet points. According to Politico’s journo (or a bubble-headed editor?): “America’s literary bubble is rethinking its identity.” He cites the post-election revelation of a “gatekeeper” (the sort who says “I get it” before you’ve finished a sentence?): “I wasn’t focused on how closed off our worlds have become from one another…thanks to the election, I have a very different sense of what kind of marketplace we are all in.” Trump-inspired money pimps in publishing aren’t checking in at Highlander Folk School. They seem stuck on “rural noir” and venture capitalist J.D. Vance’s me-so-worthy-them-crazy Hillbillly Elegy. Thankfully, though, vital rural voices–in the south and north–aren’t all asking: “WWJDD?”
Take Adrian Blevins’ book of poems, Appalachians Run Amok. Blevins is glad to wander on the periphery—she grew up in Appalachia and now lives in Maine. She may be locked on her “beloved mountains” but her poems tend to be anti-pastorals. Her book’s epitaphs provide useful coordinates for mapping her own “attitude wearing red flannel.” One is from a classic of rural writing, The Doll-Maker:
“What crops do they raise in this country?” the officer asked, as if he didn’t much care but wanted to make some sound above the kid’s breathing.
“A little uv everything.”
“But what is the main crop?” he insisted.
“Youngens,” she said, holding the child’s hands that were continually wandering toward the hole in his neck.
“Youngens for the wars and them factories.”
But Blevins isn’t an agit-prop writer, as her second epitaph (from Suzanne Scanlon’s Her 37th Year) confirms:
When asked, “What is the role of the artist in society?” Jean-Phillipe Toussaint replied, “To run away.”
Blevins is a life-long runaway (though she stayed tight with the mom and dad and has kids of her own). She’s always had a radical sense of direction:
…Oh fuck
how the mountains would hang over us
like the wide brows on the faces of kings
while we built our fires by the creek
that was so gauzy and meek
we would walk in it sometimes
if we wanted to and always we wanted to
the free children of Appalachia
and disliked wearing shoes
and thus would take them always off
and toss them here and there
to wander shaggy nowhere together
down that twisted stream.
Which leads away from any city (though Blevins memorializes her mom for escaping to New York in the late 50s). She disses The Apple in “Poem for My Mother with Frank O’Hara in It”:
“But New York is loud New York is impenetrable like everything’s a car wreck
& a tragedy……..made of electricity……..& pee
& there are no meadows in New York, either—no ponds…no pastures…no sheep.
Also the horses in New York are fascists. They do what the cops say. The cops of New York,
they say go, & the horses of New York? ….They go. ….But in Appalachia
the wildlife has its own way of doing things. In Appalachia the horses never met a cop
they didn’t want to humiliate, whereas in Appalachia the horses stop whatever they’re
……..doing
to amble down the creek bed looking for watercress since hunting for honeyed things
is a great way to live, as all Appalachian horses seem just somehow to know. …You
……..chew off
the rein. You spit out the bit. …& no matter where you are after that or what anyone says
or how stormily, …you’ve done it. ……..you’ve made it, …..you’re home.”
Blevins isn’t down with “safe spaces.” She takes aim at campus silliness in “Trigger Warnings,” offering her mother’s “suck-it-the-fuck-up” grin and bear it credo as an alternative to leftish censoriousness. She backs her polemical poem up by passing on a story her mother told her when she was twelve – “the worst thing she ever saw was a field-hand with a calf.” “Not nothing,” as Blevins says, but she could take it then and the notion you can avoid what’s worst in this life may just be an excuse for obliviousness. It surely won’t prep you for the whiff of Trump’s unprotected environment:
…the fracking, the cancer in the waterwell, the little
Appalachian babes making a happy racket in creeks
of coal soot & splashing around in petroleum baths,
& smelling like soap & Mountain Dew…
Blevins’ nose for freedom doesn’t steer her to right-wing libertarianism: “…If there’s one thing you don’t like more than a city, it’s a Republican.” She zaps reactionary country kitsch—“That shit…let us admit…can be ridiculous.” But her attitude is at odds with Hollywood’s versions of the South too: “filmmakers don’t know jackshit about Southern girls.”
Blevins permits herself to go off on the page but she has good Southern manners. She skipped “Trigger Warnings” and anti-NYC poems at her reading on the Upper West Side. She probably read her audience right. They didn’t seem ready for her country humor. (She assured them it was ok to laugh at her lines, but the crowd stayed stiff—as if the room was full of Ph.D.s in piety.) Not that Blevins should be reduced to standup. Even when she’s teasing her twenty-year son, “Kid Icarus.” She tells how he fell twenty five feet off a roof (where he’d been drinking beer as he took in a spring night) and lived to tell after landing “on the sidewalk face-down.” That miracle is no yuck to his mom who seems condemned to panic-dream his fall over and over. Maybe that comes with the territory (and family DNA). Blevins and her boy share her dad’s dream of getting “out & out & away…” Daddy Blevins seems to have given the poet her template for “new-fangled Appalachians…”
as in Appalachians in the MoMA & Appalachians
in the Uffize in Florence, Italy, where my father
was so happy once he got there it looked like fear,
though really it was more thoroughgoing than that
as in far more cruel, for here at last the exceptional thing
that old genius otherworldly Michelangelo had done
as in made way way way way back when
Blevins’ vision of her daddy in the Uffizi beats hip hop’s latest, flashy iteration of “ni**as in Paris”—the Carters’ “Apes**t” video of themselves taking over the Louvre. Beyonce and Jay Z won’t risk looking overawed (or less than hip). OTOH, there is a hip hop-hillbilly connection on display. The Carters implicitly bow to that old genius Leonardo, turning to gaze at Mona Lisa on their way out. Let’s hope they’ll encourage their hip hop audience to pay even more attention to what was made way back when. There are surely diehards for art waiting to be cultivated in projects as there are on mountains.