Southern Poetry: Antebellum to Contemporary

Southern poetry embraces dichotomous elements: it contains poems lauding the Confederacy, and also poems deeply critical and mournful of the racist violence, oppression, and racist terrorism that characterize the region’s history. Yet a common thread runs through Southern poetry—attention to the land, the rural South as a character in its own right, and with that attention to the land a quality of haunting and being haunted by the history of the South: the violence of colonization, enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow. Twentieth-century poet Etheridge Knight, born in Mississippi, lyrically describes the earth of Mississippi merging with the graves of his ancestors, calling him home to a place where, as a black man, he is not safe. Nineteenth-century poet Sidney Lanier, born in Georgia and, like Knight, a man who had experienced imprisonment, shapes in his poetry a mythical country where trees and rivers and indigenous crops become forces superseding the human; but Lanier, a soldier for the Confederacy, does not mention enslavement in his poetry. In Southern poetry, this blind spot—the white Southern poet who does not see or reflect upon the racist violence of enslavement, Jim Crow, lynching—is often submerged into a poetry melancholic and obsessed with unnamable violence and loss, even as African American poets of the South often name this loss in terms of personal memory. Myth—of the aristocratic, agrarian South—in white Southern poetry, and memory—of personal risk and suffering—in African American Southern poetry, can be understood together as a common pull to write the land, albeit from different perspectives.

Countercultural Structures of Contemporary Global South Poetry

This essay heeds the fractal reckonings of countermemory—disparate strains of collective memory that resist totalizing models of official historiography—in an array of contemporary poets of the hemispheric South, who are highly attuned to the southern bohemian ethos: Yusef Komunyakaa, Derek Walcott, Brenda Marie Osbey, Kwame Dawes, as well as reggae icon Bob Marley. These poets share a sense of the Gulf and Atlantic cultures as open to transnational, cross-ethnic flows through black diasporic histories streamed along permeable coastlines. The analysis points up the progressive creativity fostered by a hippikat (Wolof “open-eyed”) poetics, one that resets our connection to place from an ecological vantage even as it expands preexisting academic accounts of the field. Drawing from Ras Michael Brown’s recent history of the African Atlantic, the essay shows how contemporary southern poetry shifts us past previous conceptions of “southernness” and into the explicitly transregional, transcultural ethos of current global southern studies.