While Peter and his new family will be on a little hiatus from our blog, I’m celebrating the next generation of librarian with a nod to some of my favorite children’s literature at the Library of Congress. Just one look at Peter’s baby shower registry reminded of the many books I used to love.

I started the trip down memory lane with my absolute favorite: The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. Of course, I couldn’t resist a look into the biography of Beatrix Potter, who was really my first introduction to women writers now that I stop to think about it. It turns out Potter is a woman after my own heart: she was an artist, writer, animal lover, and entrepreneur, and she even bred sheep!

Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny

I had all of her most famous books: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. Like Potter, as a child I adored animals. I made more than one plea that ended up in a year of feeding all the neighborhood strays, or a Christmas present trip to the local pet store for your garden variety household pets (hamsters, fish, guinea pigs, rabbits, short of a ferret we had them all).

My very own Benjamin Bunny

Imagine my surprise when I found a book that I had long forgotten about, but apparently had a greater impact on me than my memory would suggest: The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. The name gave me a sudden shock! Twenty years after I had read and forgotten that tale, I named another present—this one a birthday present—after a character I didn’t even remember: my very own Benjamin Bunny is at home right now in his cage, probably happily destroying my apartment.

I was amazed to think of the way that years later those first books had made such an impression on me. Not just in the name I gave my rabbit, but the person I grew up to be.

I continued my own search, going through the Library’s website to sniff out other books I loved. I found so many: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Aesop’s Fables, the Three Bears, Sleeping  Beauty. All these stories had stuck with me after so many years. I can still recite “The Jabberwocky” by heart.

I know that Peter and his family are ready with over 200 books in their littlest one’s library, a rich display of life that will teach him to be curious, empathetic, compassionate, and imaginative. I hope that all of us are so lucky to be engaged with our families and with literature so early on, and also to be a part of the magic world that books present us.

At the Center for the Book, our division here at the Library of Congress, students celebrate by writing in to the authors they love for a project called “Letters about Literature.” I think it would be nice if all of our adult readers would do the same. What books do you love from your childhood? What authors would you thank?

Since an act of Congress changed the title of Consultant in Poetry to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 1985, there have been five female poets laureate: Van Duyn (1992-1993), Rita Dove (1993-1995), Louise Glück (2003-2004), Kay Ryan (2008-2010), and our current Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey.

As a young woman working in the Catbird Seat (and a writer myself in my spare time), I can’t help but feel a personal connection to the faces of the female poets laureate that dot our office’s walls.

Image of Mona Van Duyn that hangs on the wall at the Poetry and Literature Center.

Mona Van Duyn was born in 1921, less than a year after the 19^th Amendment granting women the right to vote was signed into law by then Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. It seems almost impossible to think of the leaps made by the feminist movement in the course of Van Duyn’s lifetime, and in the two generations that separate Van Duyn (who was born the year before my own grandmother) from me.

Van Duyn’s poetry isn’t feminist in the way that theorists would describe more contemporary poets like Anne Waldman, Susan Howe, or Lyn Heijinian. Her poetry speaks to much subtler identity of the middle-class suburban life, and her place in it as a woman and a wife.

Re-reading her poems yesterday, I rediscovered a favorite: “A Time of Bees.” In the poem, two lines struck me: “It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force / went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid.” The speaker’s declaration that “It is the man who takes hold” challenged me immediately. But as I continued to read, I found the strength hidden in her words—the idea that though her husband lived by “his force,” the speaker understood her place in a larger world and lived “from bees” whose “grubby softness” she tells her reader “wants to give, to give.” I thought of the power of giving, of being soft and vulnerable rather than forceful and unnaturally apart from the mess and confusion of the rest of the hive-world.

I think of what it means to be a feminist today, and I think of the many changing faces of the women I know either from their poems, their art, or simply their friendship. I think of my sister who on occasion holds flies between tweezers to tell their sex for experiments, and doesn’t seem so far from the speaker’s husband who forces the bees out of their home. And I am so happy to have Mona Van Duyn, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Kay Ryan, and now Natasha Trethewey—five women of five vastly different aesthetics and histories, roles and communities—to represent us. Only, I want more. More lines from female poets, more understanding of the feminine voice in all of its variations.

If you have a favorite line by Mona Van Duyn or any of our female poets laureate, share it in the comments and help us celebrate their voices.

Kevin Young

This Wednesday at 4:00 PM, Kevin Young will join a group of five poets in a reading to celebrate Natasha Trethewey’s year as Poet Laureate. He’ll join poets Patricia Smith and Marilyn Chin, whose work we’ve recently featured on this blog, as well as Brenda Shaughnessy and Brian Turner. Together, these five poets represent the various and powerful ways poetry can speak to the experiences that bind us—not only culturally but privately, and in the most personal of moments.

Kevin Young’s “Crowning” celebrates the birth of his son. In the past week, our featured readers have discussed their poems as part of a larger historical and political context; in this poem, Young reminds us of the power of the most fundamental mysteries of human existence.

Crowning

Now that knowing means nothing,
now that you are more born
than being, more awake
than awaited, since I’ve seen
your hair deep inside mother,
a glimpse, grass in late
winter, early spring, watching
your mother’s pursed, throbbing,
purpled power, her pushing
you for one whole hour, two,
almost three, almost out,
maybe never, animal smell
and peat, breath and sweat
and mulch-matter, and at once
you descend, or drive, are driven
by mother’s body, by her will
and brilliance, by bowel,
by wanting and your hair
peering as if it could see, and I saw
you storming forth,
taproot, your cap of hair half
in, half out, and wait, hold
it there, the doctors say, and
she squeezing my hand, her face
full of fire, then groaning your face
out like a flower, blood-bloom,
crocused into air, shoulders
and the long cord still rooting
you to each other, to the other
world, into this afterlife
among us living, the cord
I cut like an iris, pulsing,
then you wet against mother’s chest
still purple, not blue, not yet
red, no cry,
warming now, now opening
your eyes midnight
blue in the blue black dawn.

Marilyn Chin

Next Wedensday, May 1^st, Marilyn Chin will join poets Brenda Shaughnessy,Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, and Kevin Young in “Necessary Utterance: Poetry as Cultural Force,” a reading to celebrate Natasha Trethewey’s year as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Chin, like Monday’s featured poet Patricia Smith, was selected by Trethewey as a poet whose work exemplifies poetry’s ability to reach across the gaps of language and culture into a place of understanding, reason, and beauty.

Chin is the author of four collections of poetry and a novel. She is the recipient of many honors, including fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Chin’s work has been awarded the PEN/Josephine Miles Award as well as the Paterson Prize. She has translated collections of Chinese and Japanese poetry, and currently co-directs the MFA program at San Diego State University.

Her poem “Tienanmen, the Aftermath” addresses one of the most complex cultural moments of the 20^th century. With a measured care, Chin navigates between the deeply personal experiences of a single speaker and the universal implications of the acceptance violence as part of every day life.

Of her own poem, Chin writes, “I wrote this poem shortly after the ‘Tienanmen Incident’ on June 4, 1989, when the world witnessed a violent crackdown of student protesters in Beijing. Some students were killed and many were imprisoned, and the crackdown was swift. As I recall, the news of this event was all over CNN and the network news cycles for about two weeks. I remember one unforgettable image of a young student holding out his hand against a giant tank. However, today hardly any of my American students know about this incident. Moreover, when I taught in Beijing, I queried my Chinese students and only a few responded; some said that they were not born yet and had vaguely heard about it from their parents. Although initially I conceived this poem as a strange symbolic dream about an imagined soul mate . . . twenty years after its publication, I see that the poem is now serving a higher purpose: as a lingering witness to history. A poem can be a powerful ‘cultural force;’ it can inspire us to learn from the mistakes of the past and thereby help us work collectively toward a better future.”

Tienanmen, the Aftermath

There was blood and guts all over the road.
I said I’m sorry, darling, and rolled over,
expecting the slate to be clean; but she came,
she who was never alive became resurrected.
I saw her in dream…a young girl in a qipao,
bespeckled, forever lingering, thriving
on the other side of the world, walking in my soles
as I walk, crying in my voice as I cried.  When
she arrived, I felt my knuckles in her knock,
her light looming over the city’s great hollows.

Hope lies within another country’s semaphores.
The Goddess of Liberty, the Statue of Mercy—
we have it all wrong—big boy, how we choose to love,
how we choose to destroy, says Zhuangzi, is written
in heaven—but leave the innocent ones alone,
those alive, yet stillborn, undead, yet waiting
in a fitful sleep undeserved of an awakening.

Patricia Smith

Next Wednesday, May 1, 2013, Natasha Trethewey, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, will close the Spring literary season with the “Necessary Utterance: Poetry as Cultural Force” reading and lecture. To celebrate her year as Poet Laureate, she has selected five poets whose writing she feels illustrates the best of what poetry can do as force for discourse and understanding.

Patricia Smith is one of those five poets; she is the author of six collections of poetry and a children’s book.  Smith is also a nationally recognized performer of poetry.  A four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith has appeared in “Slamnation” as well as the popular HBO series “Def Poetry Jam.”  She is a faculty member for Cave Canem, a writer’s center for African American poets; a professor English at City University of New York/College of Staten Island; and a faculty member of the Sierra Nevada MFA program.

Smith’s poetry and performance is an example of the power of poetry as a tool that breeds empathy and compassion. Below, her poem “EYEWITNESS NEWS” shatters the barriers between public and individual suffering, and forces her readers to question their notions of the immediacy and the performance of pain as well as look toward a slower, more fragile understanding of what it is to truly grieve and to lose.

Patricia Smith chose to feature “EYEWITNESS NEWS” as one of her poems that she felt spoke directly to Trethewey’s idea of “poetry as cultural force.”

Smith explained, “It’s the day after a bomb exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding hundreds. Today has been blade-edged and chaotic, with a number of American cities on edge and suspects crouched in every corner. I can’t help thinking how coddled we are as a country, how this particular brand of terror—sudden and white-hot violent—is a way of life in so many other places. This one was written in South Africa as I witnessed the violence that attempted to disrupt that country’s first all-inclusive election. In this instance, I take ‘cultural force’ to mean words that force us to look unflinchingly at a culture other than our own. Sometimes its takes something as simple as a poem to slap our heads ’round and open our eyes.”

EYEWITNESS NEWS

The gritty film that CNN will treasure
will show her this way:

A mother, her glazed and bulging eyes
locked in the shimmer that creeps toward weeping,
pudgy body easing into metronome,
the boom and click of her tight new dress shoes
giving the bored choir a texture to climb.

Thank God, she’s not a howler.

This will please the masses
who click their remotes,
pass the Diet Pepsi
and receive her into their homes over dinners
of sticky rice and saucy chunks of meat.
Neatly boxed and calmly hued, she is dignity byte,
incapable of ruining the family hour
by baring her teeth and demanding what she has lost.

But here, propped sweaty in this tiny church,
we wheeze in the musk of closeness and death,
swat away the gorged and sluggish flies
who gossip buzz, whisper on our skin with spindly legs,
dance wildly on the dead boy’s nose.

He was 13, grace turning his back
to the bomb just before the blast.
Beneath the thin sheet that covers the place
where his legs should be,
there is the rustle
of nothing.
Damn those tattered gym shoes and pants legs,
stuffed with paper and sticks.

But his torso is memory, the fuel of mothers.
Ignore the singed eyebrow,
the missing cheek,
the doomed fly buzzing in the tight crown of hair,
the half-arm,
his mother’s blistered focus.

And the camera, in its sugared edit,
ignores the procession, her sudden unhinging.
As the casket is closed by six identical boys
in wing-hemmed shirts, the mother’s body stiffens,
bucks, crashes into the pew,
fists splinter the dry wood, hands roar and flail,
paperback Bibles fly, her mouth opens
wide and soundless upon raw teeth.
Head twists until neck wails and she is carried,
a squirming X,
a woman at each hand,
a man at each foot,
one dry breast popped loose,
already a shoe gone.

Already a shoe gone. Already a foot gone. A leg.
Already a leg gone. Two legs. A life.
Already her son gone, the moon following.
Try stuffing her hollow heart with paper,

paper and sticks.

Can you help me find a novel I read about twenty years ago about time travel back to the dinosaur age?

 I’m trying to find a poem for my mother. It’s about how life is like a tapestry and I think a few lines go something like this “And I in foolish pride/ Forget He sees the upper/ And I the underside.”

 I’m looking for a detective series where the main character is named Witherspoon and he’s a teacher at an agricultural college, but I don’t know the author.

My grandmother read me this picture book when I was little, and now that I’m about to become a grandmother, I want to find this book. The cover was blue and had a bunny on it and it was about the baby bunny learning to hop.

Similar questions flood into the Library of Congress every day via our “Ask a Librarian” service as they do to public and academic libraries everywhere. We might be given characters’ names, book cover descriptions, sometimes a range of publication dates, a possible word or two in the title, and often plot descriptions. The plot descriptions can be as broad as “it was a scary book about children being chased by witches” or as detailed as “I think this book was set in the Midwest and is in the form of letters written to a pen pal. The letter writer’s favorite color is yellow and she likes to sit under a tree and eat apples.”

Granger’s Index to Poetry

Librarians have developed a wealth of techniques and resources over the years to try to find the answers to such “I’m looking for…” questions. Historically, we have relied on such published reference sources as Granger’s Index to Poetry, Short Story Index, and Fiction Catalog; genre guides such as The Supernatural Index: A Listing of Fantasy, Supernatural, Occult, Weird, and Horror Anthologies; and library catalogs to attempt to find answers.

We check large catalogs such as the Library of Congress’s or WorldCat; the latter is a compiled listing of the holdings of 72,000 libraries! Unfortunately, individual poems or short stories normally don’t get listed in library catalogs. Subjects weren’t always assigned to fiction, and now that they are, they tend to be quite broad. In the past, catalog records did not usually contain summaries of the books (except for children’s books), so various clues we received about plots―aliens in a western mining town―were not as useful as the patrons hoped. Descriptions of the cover are often useless here at the Library of Congress because we strip off paper covers and frequently rebind materials. Characters might show up in the Dictionary of Fictional Characters or similar reference works, but obviously no one source lists all the characters in all the books!

When trying to identify poems, the many-volumed Granger’s Index to Poetry has helped librarians since 1904. It has allowed us to search by author, title, first line of the poem, last line of the poem, and by very broad subject―can you image how many poems there are about nature? But often the poetry questions come to us with just a miscellaneous line or stanza not fitting into any of the findable categories.

The Internet and online databases have vastly increased our research capabilities for these “I’m looking for…” questions. Granger’s Index to Poetry is now the subscription database The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry. It allows us to search multiple volumes at once, but even more useful, it contains the full text of many poems as does another subscription database, LitFinder. We are no longer reduced to only searching first or last lines.

Free full-text sites such as the HathiTrust Digital Library, the Internet Archive, and Google Books allow us to conduct broad searches that get within books for that particular line of poetry or character name. While it’s not always possible to see the full text of more recent materials, many of them are searchable and can lead us to a source we can find. Subscription databases found in many public libraries such as NoveList or Fiction Connection allow patrons to search by genre, setting, characters, and that all-important plot summary. Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com often include a publisher’s description of a book (we’re starting to add these to library catalogs), synopses of reviews, and readers’ reviews. Often the readers’ reviews include a lot of plot detail. And now you can frequently get an image of the cover that might match your memory!

 The Poetry Foundation’s Web site has over 10,000 poems searchable by subject, occasion, author, etc. Thousands of individuals post or describe favorite poems and books on Web sites and blogs. So a general Internet search can sometimes instantaneously retrieve an item for which a librarian might have searched for hours or weeks in pre-computer days. There are also listservs and electronic bulletin boards based around such subjects as science fiction or children’s books. A question posted on one of these sites reaches thousands of readers who might recognize a book’s plot description even if an individual librarian can not locate it.

So, how can you learn librarians’ research strategies and the myriad sources we use when you are trying to answer your own “I’m looking for…” questions? Peter Armenti, superb librarian and frequent blogger here, has distilled this information into a marvelous Web site, Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author. You’ll learn which sources are likely to be found at your library and which are freely available via the Internet. This Web site is equally useful for individuals looking for literary remembrances, as well as for librarians continuing to answer these questions.

Admittedly, I probably find an answer to the “I’m looking for” question less than 50% of the time, but my colleagues are treated to occasional shouts from my cubicle, “YES, a reference success!” As to the above questions: there are several novels about time travel and dinosaurs and the patron recognized the title when I gave him several choices; the poem is called variously “My Life is But a Weaving” or “The Tapestry Poem;” the detective is Witherall from a private school, but the patron was pleased to learn of another series featuring an agricultural college; and I still don’t know the bunny book!

Daniel Hoffman
1923-2013

On March 30, 2013, Daniel Hoffman passed away at the age of 89. His first book, An Armada of Thirty Whales, was published in 1954, and chosen by W. H. Auden to be part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He would go on to publish 12 other books of poems, eight books of criticism, a book of translation, and a libretto. He received many honors for his work, including a National Book Award, the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

More than any of these achievements, Hoffman’s own words seem best able to describe his commitment to poetry. This past year our office asked Hoffman to write about his work and his time in the Library. In his response, which referenced his ground-breaking book Brotherly Love, Hoffman wrote:

But why write a poem? I was on this course by my life-long commitment to poetry, and by two epigrams I came on in Emerson’s Essays: ‘America is a poem in our eyes’ (from The Poet), and ‘Facts yield their secret sense of our annals, and annals are alike” (History). It became my purpose to discover the secret sense of our annals, and so reveal the poem hidden in history.

Hoffman’s dedication to this “secret sense” and to the poem “hidden in history” illustrate his belief in unity and mystery and beauty.

Letter from Daniel Hoffman to Richard Eberhart
June 20, 1961

The Poetry and Literature Center office has many of Hoffman’s letters in our files. In one such letter, with his friend Richard Eberhart (then Consultant in Poetry), Hoffman wrote about a series of poems he would go on to record for the Library. Hoffman says of his poem “The Hermit at Cape Rosier”:

Now that you’ve taken the poem for the record I’ll tell you that you and Betty and Dikkon all wandered in the maze with me—do you remember the time at Undercliff, about six years ago, when we set out to find the Hermit’s house, following a trail from the road near the Cape Rosier post office, and after an hour and half emerged at exactly the spot where we had entered the woods? As you’ll see the reality got changed somewhat in the poem, but who’d know that better than you?

‘Structural as architecture’ must, I guess, be a subliminal echo of your long-ago memorized Groundhog. You know how a phrase, or an image, or a cadence, can get into your marrow so deeply…

In the papers that follow, someone has included the transcription of that poem as it was recorded at the Library. As Hoffman insinuates in his letter, the story differs dramatically from the poem. I see in this difference the ability of a poet to take fact as inspiration for a greater fiction; I also see in his reworking of the line “Beautiful as architecture” in Eberhart’s famous poem “The Groundhog” as an example of how great lines beget others, and how poets continue to be in dialogue with other poems.

We at the Poetry and Literature Center mourn Hoffman’s loss, and honor his life-long commitment to the art as well as his contribution to the Consultancy and the Library.

Within the coming month, you should be seeing a new addition to our menu, “Poetry of America.” As part of our 75th year celebrating Poetry Month at the Library of Congress, we’ve compiled a new series of recordings from some of the most iconic poets of our generation speaking about the poems they love and they see as an integral part of our culture as Americans.

After reading and listening to many wonderful poets, we couldn’t help but be a little moved. We decided to kick-off the month by blogging about some of our most beloved poems. We hope you’ll join in and discuss poems you love in our blog’s comments section!

Our Picks

Caitlin Rizzo, Office Assistant:
“The Western Wind” by anonymous

O Western wind when wilt though blow
That small rain down can rain—
Christ, that my lover were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

“The Western Wind” is a poem I find myself drawn to again and again—I don’t go very long without hearing its music in my head. There’s something about that second line, “That small rain down can rain,” that enchants me. In many ways, it’s a rather awkward line, even clumsy in the way it seems to repeat itself, but there’s also a sense of wilderness there. The syntax frees itself to feeling, gives itself over to experience by breaking the typical confines of the sentence’s simple structure in a way that mirrors the growing desperation of the speaker. “Christ” comes harshly on the propulsion of an em dash and the stop of a line break, the poetic language of “O”s and “wilt”s suddenly falls away revealing such a simple, animal sentiment in its longing for rest and company. The 16th century poem remains anonymous, and even that seems to add to the poem’s resistance to the domestic routines of our Western culture. Since the 16th century we’ve been begging to stay in bed, begging for nature to interrupt our forced cycles of industry, and yet here we are centuries later, and every morning I still wake up and think of this poem as I peel away the covers.

Staffer Caitlin Rizzo sits down to a delicious meal of poetry in honor of Mark Strand.

Kelly Yuzawa, Office Detail and the head of our “Poetry of America” Initiative:
“Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand

I love this poem, by the Poet Laureate from 1990-1991, because it expresses what I find true about good poetry: that it’s both fortifying and slightly dangerous. Reading a great poem can change you, or at least make you see the world differently for a time. We library folk can be a little serious and set in our ways, so the image of the poetry reader as a ravenous dog threatening the quiet librarian with his joy makes me smile.

At the Poetry and Literature Center, where I get to work three mornings a week, I consume poetry as part of my job. When I return to my cubicle in the quiet part of the library, I sometimes feel like the speaker of this poem, as if I have ink on my chin and a whiff of wildness about me.

Rob Casper, Head of the Poetry and Literature Center:
“Coal” by Audre Lorde

When I lived in Cambridge, MA, many years ago, I heard Peter Davidson give a talk on his tenure as poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly. I have forgotten almost everything he said, save for one comment I have lived by ever since. When asked how to determine a good poem from a bad one, Davidson said the former made him slow down when reading it.

“Coal” by Audre Lorde is a poem that demands, then rewards, slow reading. It begins with the singular “I,” then does nothing less than reconfigure the world. So much depends on subtle shifts, though—in this poem, which uses anaphora as incantation, the difference its opening pronouncement, “I / Is the total black, being spoken / from the earth’s inside,” and its penultimate line, “I am black because I come from the earth’s inside,” seems momentous. The first line, after all, begins by breaking rules of subject/verb agreement (and the poem continues to operate by its own rules—say, with the use/non-use of periods). But it’s hard to say more without simply repeating lines. All too often I turn to the idea that a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully, but “Coal” makes me feel it with fervor—and reminds me that poems are made to investigate meaning-making. In this extended metaphor, there are so many echoes of arguments—about how our words are shaped by power and privilege and rage and love. “Love is another kind of open” is, I would argue, one of the best lines ever written, and the fact that it comes before “Some words / bedevil me” makes it all the more lovely. Of course there is play between “coal” and “diamond,” but Lorde never rests on properties—hers is a constantly evolving force of speech.

Getting back to Stevens, though—I can’t properly explain my love for this poem. “Coal” is so beautiful in its containment, its endless complexity. I want to read it over and over and over, say it aloud and in my mind. I want to fully feel it. It makes me feel incapable and awed, makes me a believer, and it lets me know there’s something essential I share with Ms. Lorde and the mysterious logic of her most famous little lyric.

Susan Robinson, Executive Director
Fellowship of Southern Writers

On March 27, the Poetry and Literature Center will host a celebration of writers and writing from the American South. The event will feature authors from the Fellowship of Southern Writers reading from their work and exploring the rich cultural tradition of a distinctly Southern literature.

The following  interview was conducted by e-mail with Susan Robinson, Executive Director of the Fellowship of Southern Writers to showcase the ways the Fellowship continues to preserve and to recognize that legacy.

 CR: How would you define the “Southern writer”? Is it simply a geographic classification or is there something deeper in the content, the style, or even the context of a writer’s work that makes them uniquely “Southern”?

SR: The Fellowship of Southern Writers (FSW) defines a “Southern writer” as either a native-born Southerner or resident of the geographical South for a life-period sufficient to have earned “citizenship” in the region.

The organization’s goal is the same today as it was when the FSW was established in 1987: To encourage and stimulate the very best writing in the South without being confined to any particular emphasis, allegiance, bias, school or approach.

CR: The Fellowship of Southern Writers recently celebrated its 25^th Anniversary.  In those 25 years, the Fellowship has nearly doubled in size, growing from a group of 22 charter members to include 50 active fellows.  Do you think that the Fellows active today represent the same ideas and ideals as those original members?

SR: In October of 1987 Cleanth Brooks, Fred Chappell, George Core, Shelby Foote, George Garrett, Blyden Jackson, Andrew Lytle, Lewis P. Simpson, Elizabeth Spencer, Walter Sullivan, C. Vann Woodward, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. met to discuss forming the FSW.  Their goal was to recognize and to encourage writing of the highest quality.  Moreover, they wanted membership in the organization to include not only novelists, poets, dramatists, and critics of literature, but also writers of history and other genres as well whose work displayed literary excellence.

Today the FSW’s fifty diverse and active members still hold this purpose at its center—to recognize and to encourage writing of the highest literary quality.

CR: On Wednesday, March 27, the Library will feature fellows Madison Smartt Bell, Edward P. Jones, Jill McCorkle, Ron Rash, and Charles Wright.  This is a diverse group—what connections do you see in their work?

SR: This delightful group of Southern writers provides a wonderful cross section of the Fellowship’s membership. Together, they represent the essence of the FSW: Authors producing literary works of the highest quality.

CR: What do you see as the future of the Fellowship of Southern Writers—both the organization and the growing group of writers it represents?  How might this represent changes in Southern culture?

SR: The Fellowship and its membership continue to evolve with the changing Southern landscape.  The organization is dedicated to recognizing up-and-coming Southern writers through prizes, awards and fellowships, and recognizing new genres that represent literary excellence such as performance and the spoken word.  It will continue to expand its membership to include Southern authors of prominence whose works display literary excellence.

Lesley Dill (American, b. 1950). The Poetic Body: Poem Dress of Circulation, 1992. Lithography, letterpress, and collage. Reproduced with the artist’s kind permission.

 Though Poem Dress is grounded in representational imagery, Dill handles  image, text, texture, light, and paper, poetically. A blue anatomical heart placed near the center of the dress bodice anchors the composition. River-like veins and arteries radiate out from the heart and trail down the long, bell-shaped skirt. Here, the artist deliberately conflates the body’s covering with its usually-hidden inner workings. The dress is made of a shimmering, translucent paper that lends further ambiguity as the heart seems to emerge from just below its surface. The paper is reminiscent of the tissue-like type still used for commercial clothing patterns.

 Dill has famously observed: “As clothing cloaks or reveals , so does language, which can selectively present or obscure.” The Dickinson poem she invokes here underscores these ideas as an equal partner in the artwork:

 The healed Heart shows its shallow scar

With confidential moan—

Not mended by Mortality

Are Fabrics truly torn—

To go its convalescent way     

So shameless is to see

More genuine were perfidy

Than such Fidelity—

 The words are studded with ambivalences that invite questions and multiple readings: healed but scarred and maybe truly torn, shown but confidential, genuine perfidy (deceitfulness), mending and mortality. Dill places the first three words in a roughly triangular arrangement inside the bodice, then threads the rest from left to right then up and down along the veins and arteries. The overall effect is map-like. Dill’s green letterpress text plays with rhythm and emphasis through selective use of capitals, bolding, and spacing. All of these elements combine to trigger associations with domesticity, sewing, and costume while challenging assumptions about the body, spirit, healing, authenticity, and what is and isn’t hidden. Lesley Dill’s nuanced weaving of text and image in Poem Dress of Circulation reminds me just how porous the boundaries between these languages can be.