Howerton collects a generous sample of poems from C.D. Albin, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Paulette Guerin, John J. Han, Gerry Sloan, the late Mark Spitzer, Agnes Vojta, Amy Wright Vollmar, and Howerton himself. There are 189 poems here, enough to keep you in contemplation and revery for many months.

Last year’s ghastly heat and drought inspires several of these poems, notably Albin’s “Pharoah Dreamed of Cattle,” which portrays a man surveying a farm shrunken under the heat, and, like the man himself, hanging on until rains return. Maybe they won’t return. Maybe something has changed that can’t be reversed.

That sense of ecological doom informs several of these poems. There’s Carlisle’s “Kings River,” for instance, certainly a celebration of a pure stream, and yet the poet imagines another stream, and “floating/on the stagnant water among the plastic bags and beer cans.” Wild nature is awfully frail, these days.

Each poet writes a two-page autobiography that includes the reason he or she writes poetry. Carlisle’s is perhaps the most striking: “I write poetry because prose confuses me, because my head fills up with rhyme, because poetry sussurrates and moans and sighs and whispers and sings at my shoulder. Poetry because it is in every corner, around every dogleg turn, because it is dilemma and euphoria. Poetry because without poetry, what?”

Howerton’s “Rain Crow” also evokes climate change, in a wry twist on the folkloric notion that crows can predict rain. The signs aren’t there anymore and keep changing, mystifying the laconic crows. Howerton provides another definition of poetry: “Perhaps it’s an overstatement  to say that a poem should never be about what it first appears to be about.” That sentiment jumps out from “Barn Removal,” a short, disconcerting portrait of  swallows returning to their former home, a barn that’s been torn down. Home, the thing of all things we depended on, isn’t there anymore. What do we do now?

Most of these poets celebrate nature with minute portrayals that resonate beyond the page: Guerin and Sloan and Vollmar with the near-nature of back yards, and urban environments clashing against rural ones; Vojta’s desire to merge with nature (“I want to spend a year by the river/and live in her seasons”); and Han with his masterful haiku:

summer breeze

a baby turtle 

peeks out of its shell 

And then there’s Mark Spitzer, whose poetry doesn’t fit with any other of these poets. You might say it’s the freest of free verse:

so I went to the storied Devil’s Hole           

clearly marked on Google Earth                       

got onto the farmer’s land                                   

and found a sinkhole                                               

stuffed with the stuff of dumps  

Only that last line seems somewhat poetic, but Spitzer is a concrete poet, something of a rarity these days. He dazzles with line placement, citations from newspapers, and photos to create hisoriginal take on mythic creatures such as the terrible green gowrow and Big Al, an impossibly large alligator gar.  

Spitzer was very funny. He died on January 17^th at the tender age of 57. He wrote thirty-some books, and there are two in the pipeline, including Crytozarkia, from Cornerpost. He was boundlessly enthusiastic about writing, about fish, about life, and he’ll be impossible to replace. 

Wild Muse, clearly a labor of love, should stand up for quite some time as the essential collection of Ozarks poetry. It celebrates and grieves for the Ozarks, with its pure rivers and distinct wildlife, itself a great and troubled poem of nature. 

https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Muse-Ozarks-Nature-Poetry/dp/B0BNZN1Y7L/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DPWXO9S4CM09&keywords=wild+muse+howerton&qid=1675924050&sprefix=wild+muse+howerton%2Caps%2C1011&sr=8-1  

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Dave Malone, from West Plains, Missouri seems like a sketch artist to me, one of those people who carry around a pad and fine pencils or pens to record life as it rushes by. His poems are not shallow, however.. They are polished, exact, and always with characters whom Malone brings to life in a few, sparse lines.

The title poem evokes the curiosity and quiet terror of school kids crouched beneath their desks as a tornado threatens, then strikes. “Fruit” is a menacing tale of teenaged girls who accept a ride from “two old men in a truck,” and, as darkness falls, may live to regret it.

“Mattress” is a downbeat love poem, a discarded mattress standing in for a love gone sour.

A section of Malone’s book is entitled “Quarantine,” by which Malone refers to our national experience with Covid and also a feeling of being shut off from life, curtailed in some way. In “Elegy,” a man mulches trees as he mourns the loss of a friend. It’s August, and no new trees can be planted. Death is all there will be for a while. “After the Funeral” charts similar territory, musing over a highway death with causal explanations, but the death  might actually have been a suicide.

Malone can be playful, too. My favorite is this sometimes whimsical little book is “Summer Afternoon in the Pod.” It’s about a woman—living in quarantine times—who buys a cheap, blow-up pool and puts it in her back yard. She

fills the pool with chilled water,

drops magnolia blooms 

in its low tide when

her girlfriends arrive, 

and she serves apple quarantinis

as sweet as laughter. 

Around seven, a storm

tumbles in from the west 

like a toddler. But she shoos

it north. To a better home. 

What a lovely little portrait, evoking a circumscribed life and joy at once. If it were fiction, which of course it is not, I’d say John Cheever and A. A. Milne had a few drinks and decided to collaborate. 

https://www.amazon.com/Tornado-Drill-Dave-Malone/dp/1639800689/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2A9OPO39THKWM&keywords=dave+malone+tornado+drill&qid=1675923978&sprefix=dave+malone+tornado+drill%2Caps%2C412&sr=8-1  

Brooks Blevins is the author of the three-volume A HISTORY OF THE OZARKS. In UP SOUTH, he collects thirteen essays that strive to define an undefinable region.

Agriculture certainly survives but those remote, self-sustaining, hard-scrabble hill farms are in short supply. They lie fallow, or abandoned, or have been subsumed by corporate operations.

The region is no longer known for moonshine. It never was; they made moonshine in Tennessee, too.

Even the notion that Ozarkers are of Scots-Irish descent is questionable, though you wouldn’t know it from all the festivals with their dulcimers and folk music.

Blevins is sometimes quite personal, reflecting on his life in education with a commendable humility. He recalls his undergraduate days at Lyons College, where he wrote an upstart paper claiming that black and white relations were better in the “upland south” he grew up in than in the Deep South of Alabama or Mississippi. He portrayed LaCrosse, a little Arkansas town where, anecdotally at least, whites and blacks got along quite well.

But as Blevins reconsiders his student paper, he realizes that the black residents of LaCrosse had so little in life they didn’t threaten whites. And the larger point—that, in comparison to the Deep South,  the Ozarks was  relatively free of racial tensions—is moot, because the region was/is almost entirely white. That historical whiteness becomes all the more stark when you consider the lynchings in Springfield and Joplin.

I can remember walking home from school in Cabool, Missouri, and seeing a black man sitting in a construction truck outside a restaurant. I was five years old and had never seen a black person. He smiled and somehow I worked up the courage to ask him why he was sitting there. “Oh, they’ll bring me somethin’,” he said. He couldn’t eat inside—nor could he spend the night, because of a sundown law.

Giving a nod to the migrant Spruills of John Grisham’s A PAINTED HOUSE, Blevins explains how generations of poor Ozarkers, from the 1930s through the 1950s, left their worn-out farms to pick cotton in the Delta and fruit in Washington State and Michigan.

My family did this for two years, traveling to Grand Junction, Colorado for peaches and Wenatchee, Washington for cherries, until my mother refused to travel anymore and we settled on a little farm near Mountain Grove, Missouri. Our transportation rivaled the Joads of Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH: a 1950 Chevy pickup with Dad’s home-made camper shell on the back. I slept on the front seat, frightened by all the lights and noises at truck stops, where we parked to avoid motel bills.

But migrant labor, or anyhow white Ozarker labor, is no longer a way to think of the Ozarks. Nowadays, the migrants are Central Americans and, in the case of Tyson workers in Noel, Missouri, Somalis.

My favorite of these engaging essays is “The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins,” Blevins’ touching tribute to a stubborn old hill woman from near Marshall, Arkansas. Minnie kept a diary for most of her poverty-stricken life—writing, with her strange literary bent, in third person.

As Blevins notes, “Minnie was married twice and endured three near-fatal births, two failed marriages, and the death of both her parents and subsequent scattering of her siblings.” As a young woman, she traveled from her native Illinois, following a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed that Armageddon was imminent and that the faithful, or anyhow HIS faithful, needed to hide in remote mountain enclaves.

Minnie married another follower and stayed in Arkansas the rest of her life, recording in minute detail everything that happened. More precisely, everything that didn’t happen. Hers is a chronicle of endless hardship, without much levity or triumph. She lived with her son, Lawrence, an obsessive junk collector who hoped to fashion something extraordinary out of all that rusty farm machinery. Nonetheless, the pair survived, Minnie dying in 1974, Lawrence in 1992.

Minnie read books and met every day with vigor and resolve, but even her account of killing a rattler that crawled behind her cook stove, while certainly vivid, is not unusual in farm life. In any case, Blevins’ reverential account breathes life into this forgotten woman, whose tenacity and stubbornness might symbolize a tenacious, stubborn, mostly ignored region. If you want to define the Ozarks, the old Ozarks at least, look no farther than Minnie Atteberry.

Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, by Brooks Blevins (2022)

Brooks Blevins is the author of the three-volume A HISTORY OF THE OZARKS. In UP SOUTH, he collects thirteen essays that  strive to define an undefinable region.

Agriculture certainly survives but those remote, self-sustaining, hard-scrabble hill farms are in short supply. They lie fallow, or abandoned, or have been subsumed by corporate operations.

The region is no longer known for moonshine. It never was; they made moonshine in Tennessee, too.

Even the notion that Ozarkers are of Scots-Irish descent is questionable, though you wouldn’t know it from all the festivals with their dulcimers and folk music.

Blevins is sometimes quite personal, reflecting on his life in education with a commendable humility. He recalls his undergraduate days at Lyons College, where he wrote an upstart paper claiming that black and white relations were better in the “upland south” he grew up in than in the Deep South of Alabama or Mississippi. His thesis portrayed LaCrosse, a little Arkansas town where, anecdotally at least, whites and blacks got along quite well.

But as Blevins reconsiders his student paper, he realizes that the black residents of LaCrosse had so little in life they didn’t threaten whites. And the larger point—that, in comparison to the Deep South,  the Ozarks was  relatively free of racial tensions—is moot, because the region was/is almost entirely white. That historical whiteness becomes all the more stark when you consider the lynchings in Springfield and Joplin.

I can remember walking home from school in Cabool, Missouri, and seeing a black man sitting in a construction truck outside a restaurant. I was five years old and had never seen a black person. He smiled and somehow I worked up the courage to ask him why he was sitting there. “Oh, they’ll bring me somethin’,” he said. He couldn’t eat inside—nor could he spend the night, because of a sundown law.

Giving a nod to the migrant Spruills of John Grisham’s A PAINTED HOUSE, Blevins explains how generations of poor Ozarkers, from the 1930s through the 1950s, left their worn-out farms to pick cotton in the Delta and fruit in Washington State and Michigan.

My family did this for two years, traveling to Grand Junction, Colorado for peaches and Wenatchee, Washington for cherries, until my mother refused to travel anymore and we settled on a little farm near Mountain Grove, Missouri. Our transportation rivaled the Joads of Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH: a 1950 Chevy pickup with Dad’s home-made camper shell on the back. I slept on the front seat, frightened by all the lights and noises at truck stops, where we parked to avoid motel bills.

But migrant labor, or anyhow white Ozarker labor, is no longer a way to think of the Ozarks. Nowadays, the migrants are Central Americans and, in the case of Tyson workers in Noel, Missouri, Somalis.

My favorite of these engaging essays is “The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins,” Blevins’ touching tribute to a stubborn old hillwoman from near Marshall, Arkansas. Minnie kept a diary for most of her poverty-stricken life—writing, with her strange literary bent, in third person.

As Blevins notes, “Minnie was married twice and endured three near-fatal births, two failed marriages, and the death of both her parents and subsequent scattering of her siblings.” As a young woman, she traveled from her native Illinois, following a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed that Armageddon was imminent and that the faithful, or anyhow HIS faithful, needed to hide in remote mountain enclaves.

Minnie married another follower and stayed in Arkansas the rest of her life, recording in minute  detail everything that happened. More precisely, everything that didn’t happen. Hers is a chronicle of endless hardship, without much levity or triumph. She lived with her son, Lawrence, an obsessive junk collector who hoped to fashion something extraordinary out of all that rusty farm machinery. Nonetheless, the pair survived, Minnie dying in 1974, Lawrence in 1992.

Minnie read books and met every day with vigor and resolve, but even her account of killing a rattler that crawled behind her cook stove, while certainly vivid, is not unusual in farm life. However, Blevins’ reverential account breathes life into this forgotten woman, whose tenacity and stubbornness might symbolize a tenacious, stubborn, mostly ignored region. If you want to define the Ozarks, the old Ozarks at least, look no farther than Minnie Atteberry.

First published in 1933, THE WOODS COLT is one of a few Ozarks classic novels, praised highly at the time and taken as representative of the region in centers of publishing and academia. As a small measure of the novel’s staying power, my second collection of stories, THE WALNUT KING, was published in 1990 by a small press in Kansas City called Woods Colt. Woods colt is Ozarks talk for bastard, thus Woods Colt Press traded on an underground image—a rejected, against-all-odds, faintly obscene, perhaps in bad taste, bastard image. THE WOODS COLT became a cult favorite over the years, generally with male writers who fancied themselves to be in the tradition of Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell, with a dash of Henry Miller thrown in just for scandal’s sake. In this manner of thinking, THE WOODS COLT is romantic. To bring the influence up-to-date, you might think of Jim Harrison and Daniel Woodrell.

First things first: Arkansas has done a splendid job of recreating the original text, even including the dark woodcuts of Raymond Bishop. I don’t know a thing about Raymond Bishop, but his illustrations are so wonderful that it’s doubtful the novel would have succeeded without them.

Here’s the story: Clint Morgan, a mule-headed and ignorant hillbilly/bush ape/hill person, is in love/lust with Tillie Starbuck. He has a rival, Ed Prather. Tillie may or may not be entirely faithful to Clint, but she’s certainly more levelheaded. Filled with rage, Clint corners Ed at the post office, where Ed works. This might seem like an ordinary scuffle between two hotheaded young men, but the post office setting makes the fight and the property damage a federal crime.  Ed eagerly pursues the case, mainly to defeat Clint in the pursuit of Tillie. Clint walks right into Ed’s trap, wounding a federal officer, and later committing murder. The fates begin to close in on Clint but the reader follows him, fascinated, in his flight to the remotest hills.

Clint isn’t likable. He’s quick-tempered and stupid. He’s also real—we all knew people like him in our teen-aged years. Men still go crazy over women, one hopes, and Clint is a victim of Ed Prather’s cunning. And the reader never pulls back from the page because of the long, gripping chase scene in which Clint does, at last, seem sympathetic. Williamson brings the suspense up slowly, with little respites as Clint seeks food in the wilderness. Also, there’s a new love interest, a sad teenager named Nancy. That she’s fourteen adds to the novel’s slightly prurient edge. Maybe prurient is not the right word. Lurid–and compelling.  

In his introduction, Ozarks scholar Phillip Howerton praises Williamson for his knowledge of folklore and Ozarks flora and fauna. He faults the novel for its stereotypical characterizations and for its inexact reproduction of Ozarks speech.

My quick test of Ozarks dialect is “allus” for “always,” which I discovered reading Vance Randolph and then listening to people talk. Allus is still widely used. Williamson, however, uses always for always. With that small measure, I judge Williamson’s dialect to be somewhat inaccurate, and certainly there’s too much of it.  

With the towering example of Huck Finn not far in the past, novels written in dialect were popular in Williamson’s time. Faulkner, Caldwell, and especially Zora Neale Hurston were skilled practitioners. They all wrote about a region they grew up in, however, while Williamson seems to have been a quick study, and perhaps an opportunist. Anything for a book, so who could blame him? His seeking out, and obtaining, Vance Randolph’s endorsement shows a certain self-consciousness—and shrewdness.

As for the stereotypical characters, they rang true to me, much truer than the  Arcadian hillfolk in THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS. The characters talk funny and make a lot of moonshine, but mostly they hate and love and scheme. The grannies are perhaps the most obvious stereotypes. The two young women, while narrowly drawn, ring true, and so does violent Clint.

None of these faults, if faults they are, matter much. The novel holds up because of the powerful story. To cite movies, it’s the plot of HIGH SIERRA, FIRST BLOOD, and dozens of Westerns and adventure stories. A man alone, a man on the run, a man whose time has run out. Thank you, Phillip Howerton, and thank you, Arkansas, for bringing this great old yarn back to us.