My grandmother’s table always has enough food for two or three times the number of people at the table, a legacy, I’m told, from the days when my great-grandparents ran a farm just off the highway on the county’s southernmost stretch. They had a large family (seven children) and a number of farm hands to feed, but they also often had visitors, people who’d come in off the road looking for a warm meal. Strangers don’t stop anymore, but all our family recipes–and my grandmother’s cabinets, which contain at least six complete sets of dishes–maintain the possibility as they transmit the lesson: always be prepared for company.
Perhaps as a result of this long engraining, I’m always thinking about different kinds of hospitality, especially the ways people greet or do not greet their guests.
As a poet, I occasionally have the opportunity to travel and enter other communities for a time–and while at times I’m grateful for moments alone so I can continue to prepare, I’m especially grateful for those times when someone comes to greet me at the airport or seems in some other way to have prepared to welcome–an empty seat in the car, a cup of coffee, a smile.
I’ve just arrived in Atlanta, where I’ll be for the year to come, and since I’ve had to drive almost 1600 miles from Denver, weighed with a radically edited collection of books and clothes and housewares, the past ten days week have been a flurry of gathering, unpacking, situating, establishing, addressing, cleaning, and adjusting again to another time. In the midst of such tornadoes, I have caught more than one bright moment in an invitation to a glass of wine, to drinks and dinner, to the shared conversation that brings me here.
I love the welcome. This welcome is one of friendship, because I know people here, and, missing the stranger’s welcome that is a moment of grace and underserved fame, I wonder what I might see, what others would show me if I were strange and new to town? What do others writers know, what would they tell me?
What I’m really wondering is what great story another would offer so that I could inhabit this new place–not just its space, its volumes, but also its history, its idea?
???
This, I know, is a desire somewhat peculiar to me to find in another realm of life some of the habits of engagement I value most in poetry–particularly an awareness of the places where the stitch in the seam between past and present comes undone.
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If I were greeting you in Gadsden, Alabama, where I grew up, I might take you to Broad Street, on the north side of the Coosa River, where stands a statue of Emma Sansom, the young woman who helped Nathan Bedford Forrest escape Union Colonel Abel Streight. Because she is supposed to have pointed the way for Forrest’s exit, she is depicted with an outstretched finger, though over the years that finger has been broken off so many times, it has more often than not been a fist–a fist on the arm of the woman who helped Forrest escape capture so he could later found the Ku Klux Klan, a fist that almost suggest the black power fist of the late 60s and early 70s, a fist for 1973 and 1974, the years of vibrant racial tension and riot–those two forces at times clenched together in that fist.
Or I might tell you that Gadsden was once named Double Springs and that the name was changed to honor James Gadsden, famous for the Gadsden Purchase. Some people believe that the name change came after the Purchase and was a gesture meant to invite the planners of the transcontinental railroad for which the Purchase was made, though that railroad never came. In fact, the name change came well before James Gadsden became an ambassador to Mexico and had nothing to do with the railroad at all: the town’s name was changed to honor the man who had served Andrew Jackson during the Creek War of 1813, riding across the land our town now occupies, perhaps to sites like Tallasseehatchee, which was burned, with most of its citizens still in their homes, just 15 miles south. One name that contains a story of honor and a story of horror–if you get this, you’ll get this town.
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What would an Atlantan (Atlantean? ATLien?) tell me about Atlanta?
I’ve been looking again at the Atlanta index of Locuspoint, Charles Jensen’s genius that, after some desuetude, is coming back, is about to grow again.
I love the idea of Locuspoint–a journal that is also an index, an investigation into the poetry of a particular city and so, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely, an investigation into the city, the place. Every effort reminds one of poets one knows and introduces one to new writers.
It was in the Atlanta section of Locuspoint that I first read Colin Kelly’s work, and that I discovered that Anthony Grooms, whose novel Bombingham is a personal favorite, is also a poet. Though, for the most part, the poems included in this segment of Locuspoint aren’t much about Atlanta, at least not per se, which leads me to beg my question again: what introduction would a poet make?
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The summer issue of Kenyon Review includes a poem by David Bottoms, arguably one of the Atlanta poet (if not the Atlanta poet), but the poem doesn’t bring me into the city as much as it re-situates me in the country the city has insinuated. It puts me in a woodland South I know well–the Alabama of my childhood is only 90 miles west, and though the town of Gadsden and the city of Birmingham are the cities of my stories, my childhood was spent in the woods outside Gadsden on land my great-grandparents owned. I know well the startle of Bottoms’ poem, finding a snake and trying to stay calm while you figure whether it’s poisonous or not:
then a jolt in my head and a blur, and an old poem
opened onto a grave
where gray bones tangled like roots
and a bracelet of black hair circled a wrist bone.
I stood on that path
and felt down my own bones a thrill I couldn’t account for,
like my hand paralyzed in the air
or the shadows of the trees having crossed the path“
There’s another presence, another hand here, that inhabits the fear, and then animates the speaker again, so the snake is shook from his wrist. There is another moment inside this moment.
???
So I know what I’m looking for is, in a way, a pathway into the kinds of poems I write or want to write–what’s that Eliot says about poets always, even when they don’t want to, imagining their own poems? Where, I’m asking, are the poems Atlanta will offer me?
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When I was little, Atlanta was the site of brief family vacations–an annual trip to Six Flags most notably. One trip included a detour to the Atlanta Zoo and the Cyclorama.
The Cyclorama is a magnificent and weird thing–an oil painting over 40 feet tall and nearly 400 feet in diameter mounted inside a huge drum. It lives in its own building that allows you to climb into the painting and view it from a rotating platform. The painting shows part of the Battle of Atlanta–specifically the events of July 22, 1864–in an almost Technicolor brilliance. At the base of the painting have been placed three-dimensional figures that bring the scene forward, and among these figures (horses, soldiers, &c) is one that is modeled on Clark Gable.
Perhaps because of Gable’s presence, Gone With the Wind gets mapped onto the painting, and part of me has remembered the painting as an artifact of Confederate memory, an altar to the Lost Cause–though another factor may be the proximity of Stone Mountain with its carving of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on their Confederate mounts. Even the Cartoon Network’s Squidbillies visit the Cyclorama in one episode and give it a Confederate reading.
But in fact, the painting depicts a turning point in the Battle of Atlanta from the Union vantage. As you sit on the moving platform, your viewpoint is from within the Union line. The painting was commissioned by John Logan, who was a Union commander during the battle and who used the painting in his campaign for Vice President in 1884. It is so clearly a document of Union that it’s hard to leave the Cyclorama and exit through Grant Park, which was named for Lemuel Grant, a 19th Century businessman, without thinking of the other Grant.
This is the story I would offer here, a tangle of times and allegiances, Technicolor and world.
So, welcome to Atlanta.