Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry / Edition 1

by David Rigsbee, Steven Ford Brown

Overview

Mencken's stinging characterization of the American South as "the Sahara of the Bozart" reflects an understandable frustration with the narrow view of the canon of southern literature. With its focus on novelists, it largely ignores the works of all but a few poets—the Fugitives Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom, and the larger-than-life James Dickey among them. Invited Guest is the first anthology that attempts to reach beyond this small coterie to encompass the range and brilliance of twentieth-century southern poetry. Editors David Rigsbee and Steven Ford Brown have compiled the works of a richly diverse collection of poets—all born or raised southerners.

Women and African Americans are recognized for their alternative, subversive contributions to southern aesthetics; the myopic, often scathing views of the New Critics or the overly historicist agendas of identity politics are discarded in favor of a middle ground that allows for inclusion on both aesthetic and historical bases.

Along with a respectful acknowledgement of the contributions of the most popular figures in southern poetry, Rigsbee and Brown offer long-overdue attention to underrecognized poets such as Anne Spencer, John Beecher, Eleanor Ross Taylor, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. The juxtaposition of the canonical and the little-known makes Invited Guest an intriguing illustration of the abundance and range of poetry in the twentieth-century South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813920740
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	11/07/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Rigsbee is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Mount Olive College and the author of six collections of poetry and critical works on Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer.

Steven Ford Brown is the editor of Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Angel Gonzalez, 1956-1986.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Introduction	xix
1
	The Creation
	Lift Every Voice and Sing
	O Southland!
	Fifty Years (1863-1913)
12
	Sonnet
	I Sit and Sew
	Snow in October
16
	A Recollection
	Past and Present
	Aliens
	The Dream
	Speaking of Poetry
24
	Lines to a Nasturtium
	White Things
	Letter to My Sister
	For Jim, Easter Eve
29
	Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter
	The Equilibrists
	Janet Waking
	Piazza Piece
35
	Hatteras Calling
	The Room
	A Letter from the Grass
	All Death, All Love
	All the Radios
	North Infinity Street
43
	Portrait in Georgia
	Reapers
	Georgia Dusk
	Song of the Son
49
	Ode to the Confederate Dead
	The Mediterranean
	The Oath
57
	Memo: For the Race Orators
	He Was a Man
	Memphis Blues
	Old King Cotton
	Southern Road
70
	One More River to Cross
	Appalachian Landscape
	Altogether Singing
	We Want More Say
	Report to the Stockholders
83
	Bearded Oaks
	Evening Hawk
	Heart of Autumn
	Mortal Limit
	Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth
94
	A Girl in a Library
	The Face
	The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
	The Woman at the Washington Zoo
	The Bronze David of Donatello
	Nestus Gurley
107
	For My People
	Jackson, Mississippi
	Southern Song
	Street Demonstration
113
	Welcome Eumenides
	Woman as Artist
	A Few Days in the South in February
	Envoy
131
	The Performance
	At Darien Bridge
	The Heaven of Animals
	Falling
145
	Aix-la-Chapelle, 1945
	From William Tyndale to John Frith
	The Prince
	An Elegy: December, 1970
152
	Counting the Mad
	Invitation to a Ghost
	Men at Forty
	Nostalgia of the Lakefronts
	Pantoum of the Great Depression
159
	Corsons Inlet
	The City Limits
166
	Envoy
	Luck's Shining Child
	Pastoral
	Crows at Paestum
173
	The Caterpillar
	A Poem for Emily
	Some Lines Finished Just before Dawn at the Bedside of a Dying Student, It Has Snowed All Night
	Why God Permits Evil
	Of History and Hope
183
	The Idea of Ancestry
	The Warden Said to Me the Other Day
	Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
	As You Leave Me
	A Poem for Myself
	Haiku
192
	Dark with Power
	Enriching the Earth
	The Man Born to Farming
	The Peace of Wild Things
	The Country of Marriage
199
	This Is Not a Small Voice
	Morning Song and Evening Walk
206
	December Journal
	Night Journal
	The Other Side of the River
216
	Cleaning the Well
	My Father's Hurricane
	My Mother's Hard Row to Hoe
228
	To Isle of Wight
237
	The Flying Change
	Landscape with Tractor
	Goodbye to the Old Friends
243
	Nikki-Rosa
	Ego Tripping
	Monday
	Train Rides
253
	Two Trees
	Gobelins
	Song and Story
260
	The Heart's Graveyard Shift
	February in Sydney
	Sunday Afternoons
	My Father's Love Letters
	Missing in Action
268
	Kings' Daughters, Home for Unwed Mothers, 1948
	Obedience of the Corpse
	From Just Whistle
	Floating Trees
278
	Remembering Fire
	One of the Citizens
	News of the Cranes
	Letters from the Earth
	Elegy for a Bad Example
	Acknowledgments	287
	Index of First Lines	293

Interviews

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Editorial Reviews

Rigsbee and Brown have selected not only the well-known or signature poems, but also poems that are not often anthologized, making Invited Guest fresh and interesting. This work is enjoyable and informative, incisive and insightful.

Joanne V. Gabbin

Invited Guest, as is the case with really good anthologies, significantly shapes the history of the literature it surveys.

Mary Ellis Gibson

"Invited Guest, as is the case with really good anthologies, significantly shapes the history of the literature it surveys. "—author of Mary Ellis Gibson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, editor of Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers

"Rigsbee and Brown have selected not only the well-known or signature poems, but also poems that are not often anthologized, making Invited Guest fresh and interesting. This work is enjoyable and informative, incisive and insightful. "—author of Joanne V. Gabbin, James Madison University, editor of The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry

From the Publisher