by Jim Clark<\/em><\/p>\n On Sundays when I was young my family would make the 40-mile trip from Cookeville, Tennessee, where we lived, to Celina, Tennessee, where both sets of my grandparents lived. Celina is located at River Mile 380, at the junction of the Obey and the Cumberland rivers, and was a major port during the steamboat years between Nashville and Burnside, Kentucky. My mother and father told great stories of the floods of their youth, and my father had vivid memories of the timber trade, when great logs were lashed together into giant rafts and floated down the Cumberland to Nashville to sell. Ten years or so before I was born the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Dale Hollow Dam which flooded both my parents\u2019 family farms and put an end to Celina\u2019s periodic flooding, but also to its importance as a steamboat port.<\/p>\n My Uncle Durell, my father\u2019s older brother, lived on a farm on the banks of the Cumberland River, very near the confluence of the Obey and the Cumberland rivers, whose fields were a wonderland of Indian arrowheads, stone tomahawk blades, pottery shards and other strange and mysterious signs of a vanished world and its people. Whenever my uncle would plow his fields for spring planting, we would go and spend the afternoon hunting for arrowheads, competing to find the biggest, the shapeliest, the most inexplicable, the most perfect. When we would cross the bridge over the Cumberland River, heading out of Celina toward Uncle Durell\u2019s farm, I would look to my right and see the confluence of the Obey and the Cumberland Rivers, the Obey coming in clear and cool and green, and the Cumberland all brownish and silty. Then I would look to my left, and easily within the field of my vision see the one river, becoming one color.<\/p>\n As a writer, such a metaphor seems almost ready made for these ruminations on my creative influences, and their confluence, which I am. Stylistic streams, fresh and clear, particulate and opaque, commingle in me, one dominant for a while, then another, and all of them flowing, circling, enriching. I carefully navigate them, float lazily upon them, cross and re-cross them in search of buried treasure. I find I hardly begin to incorporate a new influence before I see its myriad relationships to old influences with which it is unexpectedly congruent. If all this sounds rather Whitmanesque I can only admit it. Up ahead, I see my latest tributary.<\/p>\n I first heard of the poet and novelist Byron Herbert Reece quite by accident. I was teaching at the University of Georgia in Athens in the early 1990\u2019s and I spent a lot of my free time driving north and roaming the hills and hollers of the North Georgia mountains. Quaint little mountain towns like Dahlonega, Blairsville, Helen, and Toccoa exerted a powerful attraction on me, and even more so state parks like Unicoi, Amicalola Falls, Black Rock Mountain, and Moccasin Creek, with their miles of steep trails and breathtaking gorges and waterfalls. Perhaps because of my childhood in the Tennessee foothills of the Smoky Mountains, one of the things I have made a point of doing in every state I have lived in is seeking out the state\u2019s highest elevation, and so I came to know and love the vista from the observation tower on top of Brasstown Bald in Northern Georgia, and the breathless, shivery exultation I felt after climbing the trail to reach that prominence. Though I didn\u2019t know the poem at the time, these lines from Reece\u2019s \u201cRoads\u201d capture perfectly that feeling:<\/p>\n Therefore whatever roads repair<\/p>\n To cities on the plain, my own<\/p>\n Lead upward to the peaks; and there<\/p>\n I feel, pushing my ribs apart,<\/p>\n The wide sky entering my heart.<\/p>\n Just north of Brasstown Bald, off Highway 76, lies the little town of Hiawassee, nestled on the border between Georgia and North Carolina. There, on the banks of Lake Chatuge, is a campground I used to frequent, and just up the road is the site of the Georgia Mountain Fair. Sometime in the summer of 1992, while camping there, I saw signs advertising The Reach of Song<\/em>, Georgia\u2019s state historical drama, which at that time was being performed in the big warehouse-like theatre of the Georgia Mountain Fair. It seemed like a pleasant way to spend an evening, and so I went. The play, by Tom DeTitta, encompasses three decades around the time of World War II, when the modern world came careening precipitously up the mountain back roads to knock at lonely cabins and offer its alluring, ambiguous promise. The play is narrated by a character based on Byron Herbert Reece, and his poetry is woven into it. Though people have mixed opinions as to the merits of the play, having seen several other such \u201cstate historical dramas\u201d I am of the opinion that The Reach of Song is clearly a cut above most. At any rate, the character of the narrator of the play resonated with me strongly, and lines of Reece\u2019s poetry haunted me. I determined to find out more about this \u201cmountain farmer\/poet.\u201d<\/p>\n From the two primary biographical sources available\u2014 Raymond A. Cook\u2019s Mountain Singer: The Life and the Legacy of Byron Herbert Reece<\/em> (Cherokee Pub. Co., 1980) and Bettie Sellers\u2019 The Bitter Berry: The Life of Byron Herbert Reece<\/em> (Georgia Humanities Council, 1992)\u2014 I learned that Reece was born in 1917 in a cabin on a small farm near Choestoe, in Union County, Georgia. From the mid-1940\u2019s to the mid-1950\u2019s, he published four volumes of poems and two novels, all with E.P. Dutton, and all receiving generally favorable reviews. His mother and father had contracted tuberculosis by the mid-1930\u2019s, and Reece faithfully tended their mountain farm, even while accepting visiting writing positions at the University of California at Los Angeles, Emory University, and the University of Georgia. He eventually contracted the disease that killed both his parents. Depressed by his deteriorating health and the prospect of hospitalization and dependency, he took his own life on June 3, 1958, in his quarters on the campus of Young Harris College, in Northern Georgia, where he was teaching at the time. He was 40 years old.<\/p>\n At the height of his success, Newsweek<\/em> magazine published a profile of Reece entitled \u201cGeorgia Poet\u201d in its January 1, 1951 issue, which contains this description of the Reece farm, and of Reece as a farmer:<\/p>\n Reece is a working farmer. He gets up about 6 o\u2019clock in the winter to<\/p>\n do with his father, Juan Reece, his share that 147\u00bd acres require. The<\/p>\n farm grows potatoes, beans, corn, rye, and some fruit (cotton won\u2019t<\/p>\n take hold there); and the Reeces keep 100 chickens, six milk cows,<\/p>\n two teams of mules, and a new Farmall tractor.<\/p>\n Reece\u2019s twin loyalties to farming and writing took their toll on him, and his biographer Raymond Cook observes that \u201cHe had long since learned that there was no perfect balance to farming and writing; both had to go on at all costs.\u201d In a 1953 article Reece wrote for the Atlanta Journal<\/em> magazine, he explained the relationship using the metaphor of \u201cmarriage,\u201d much as Kentucky farmer\/poet Wendell Berry would do later:<\/p>\n We all have to participate in some form of marriage in this life, and<\/p>\n mine has been to farming and writing. The marriage contract is to<\/p>\n love, honor, and cherish through sickness and health. If a confession<\/p>\n of bigamy is implicit in my figure of speech I can only admit it, but like<\/p>\n the poet to Cynara I have been faithful to each in my fashion. I have<\/p>\n dropped work on a story to do spring plowing when the hero was on<\/p>\n the point of giving the villain his comeuppance. I have made the land<\/p>\n wait for its harvest while I finished a book.<\/p>\n Reece\u2019s relationship to academia was more difficult and complex. Though it is clear that he was admired and respected as a teacher, and that the teaching he did was a source of some satisfaction to him, it is equally clear that he did it primarily because he needed the money, and that it was a considerable aggravation to him. Feeling the pressure of E.P. Dutton\u2019s deadline for delivery of the manuscript of his second novel, Reece observes: \u201c[W]hen I get thirty or forty papers to read and grade answers to questions nobody has any business being asked anyway, I think: My God, what am I doing here? Of course the answer is I\u2019m doing it for money, which is not a very good reason for teaching. I lack the scholar\u2019s impersonal interest in knowledge for its own sake, and of course I also lack the scholar\u2019s scholarship.\u201d<\/p>\n Given his rural background, and the fact that he never finished college, Reece never felt comfortable among the academic \u201chighbrows,\u201d as he referred to them. After his return to North Georgia from his stint as Poet-in-Residence at UCLA, he writes: \u201cThe farm seems good after a sojourn among the intellectuals who scorn anything simply stated and who have no belief in anything to pull themselves together.\u201d \u201cUniversities,\u201d he continues, \u201care such disappointing places because one demands that they fulfill his ideals for the university and they do not.\u201d In an observation as timely now as it was in 1950, Reece concludes, \u201cToo, steeped as Americans are in the traditions of Success which means money and position and power, the universities just can\u2019t help treating the arts as a sort of step-child from which nothing much is expected.\u201d<\/p>\n The more I read by Reece, the more impressed I was. Here was a genuine, rural mountain farmer, who, despite his difficult and rather circumscribed life, was also a genuine literary artist of considerable merit and who had, at least during his lifetime, a considerable national reputation. Reece was a compelling figure to me because of my own background and interests. I grew up on a small farm in the Upper Cumberland area of Middle Tennessee; my father was a county agent for the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service, and my mother was a high school teacher. I graduated from Vanderbilt University, where many of my professors were students and friends of the members of the Fugitives and Agrarians who gained international fame there in the 1920\u2019s and 1930\u2019s for their poetry, their literary criticism, and their scathing critique of the modern industrial mindset. Literature and the land had always been strongly connected in my mind, and Reece seemed to be a perfect example of that connection.<\/p>\n I also saw a lot of myself in Reece. I had always aspired to a symbiotic balance of culture and agriculture in my own life, agreeing with the \u201cfolk art\u201d vision of Fugitive poet Donald Davidson, espoused in his essay \u201cA Mirror for Artists\u201d in I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/em>, that the artist is best served and nourished by an agrarian society \u201csince only in an agrarian society does there remain much hope of a balanced life, where the arts are not luxuries to be purchased but belong as a matter of course in the routine of his living.\u201d Likewise, I sought a balance that would embrace the best of \u201cthe modern\u201d while holding on to whatever good age-old tradition had to offer. Today, I live on a couple of acres in the country, about six miles from Barton College, the small liberal arts school where I teach. Barton is located in Wilson, North Carolina, the self-proclaimed \u201cTobacco Capital of the World,\u201d a small town on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina. Farming is still a major means of livelihood in the region, though it is often a sad sight to see the small farmers here struggle to hold on to their heritage as they are buffeted by the maelstrom of the modern world. As for me, I have a good-size vegetable and herb garden, a small stand of dwarf fruit trees, three large dogs, and, like everyone else out here, I get my water from a well. I don\u2019t have many close neighbors, and there are acres of fields and woods beyond my backyard that stretch back to Contentnea Creek. It\u2019s not a farm, by a long shot, but it\u2019s enough land to keep me busy and happy and centered.<\/p>\n Though Byron Reece was highly intelligent and very well read, and able to offer knowledgeable and exacting critiques of modernist poets like Eliot and Auden and of the state of modern poetry generally, he also remained intimately and practically acquainted with farming and hunting and all aspects of country life, including the influence of the language of the King James Bible and the ancient ballads handed down from generation to generation by close-knit mountain families. And just as my parents\u2019 family farms were flooded to create Dale Hollow Lake, Reece\u2019s home place in Choestoe, at the foot of Blood Mountain, is now covered by Lake Trahlyta, a part of the TVA\u2019s rural electrification project completed in the early 1940\u2019s. Finally, in poems like \u201cThe Speechless Kingdom\u201d and \u201cThe Service of Song,\u201d Reece articulated a poetic credo that speaks to my own sense of aesthetics and artistic purpose. \u201cUnto a speechless kingdom I\/Have pledged my tongue, I have given my word\/To make the centuries-silent sky\/As vocal as a bird\u201d he declares in the former, and in the latter he concludes:<\/p>\n For this is the service of song:<\/p>\n To brighten the dim<\/p>\n Coin of a kingdom whose king<\/p>\n Lies centuries asleep,<\/p>\n To render the humblest thing<\/p>\n To memory\u2019s keep.<\/p>\n II<\/p>\n As for me, I came into this world in 1954 in Livingston, Tennessee, in Overton County, shortly before Byron Reece made his exit from it. I suppose the year of anyone\u2019s birth always seems special, pivotal, poignant, so I\u2019ll make bold to say that it seems to me that 1954 in many ways marked the beginning of the modern world in which we still live. 1954 saw the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb, in the spectral shadow of whose mushroom cloud I existentially laughed and played, learning, absurdly, in elementary school to \u201cduck and cover\u201d should one explode in our vicinity. 1954 marked the birth of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, in whose heretical, Dionysian cult I remain enthralled, believing still, on occasion, that it really can \u201csave your soul.\u201d It witnessed the end of the reign of terror of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the beginning of a pervasive and long-term cynicism on the part of American citizens regarding the world of politics and its denizens. It saw the Supreme Court\u2019s final, unequivocal repudiation of \u201cseparate but equal\u201d in Brown v. Board of Education and served as midwife to the difficult birth of the Civil Rights movement. In 1954 IBM marketed the first mass-produced computer, the IBM Type 650 EDPM, which, in large measure, officially kicked off the \u201ccomputer revolution.\u201d Boeing tested the 707, the first jet-powered transport plane. The U.S. Navy commissioned the USS Nautilus, the first atomic submarine. Well, I could go on, but back to me.<\/p>\n I was born in Livingston because there was no hospital in Byrdstown, in neighboring Pickett County, where my family lived and where my father was the county agent. At that time, the state of Tennessee coded its automobile license plates by numbers representing the rank, by population, of Tennessee\u2019s ninety-five counties. Thus Memphis license plates began with the number 1, indicating that Shelby County was the largest county, population-wise, in Tennessee. Pickett County\u2019s license plates began with 95.<\/p>\n Talking with people nowadays about where they were born, and where and how they grew up, it almost seems to me that I was born in another country, another century. Growing up on a farm in the wild, shaggy, sparsely populated hills of the Cumberland Plateau, in the severe and rigorous lap of the fundamentalist Church of Christ, I knew from an early age that I was \u201cdifferent.\u201d My young playmates who lived in town spent their free time at the swimming pool, the roller rink, and at lawn parties in immaculately redundant subdivisions. Though I did make it into town occasionally for some party or event, mostly I roamed the endless woods and fields, kept company by my dogs and an occasional horse or cow or pig, often singing, sometimes at the top of my lungs because I could, or talking to myself, making up stories and people and worlds. As a child I was often alone, but I was never lonely, and never bored. Recording his own similar experience, Byron Reece wrote: \u201cIn the far, dark woods go roving\/And find there to match your mood\/A kindred spirit moving\/Where the wild winds blow in the wood.\u201d<\/p>\n I loved to sing hymns, especially, though more for their strong and sorrowful music than their pious lyrics. A perverse favorite was \u201cAt the Cross,\u201d number 7 in Christian Hymns, Number Two<\/em>. \u201cAlas! and did my Savior bleed? And did my Sov\u2019reign die? Would He devote that sacred head, For such a worm as I?\u201d I\u2019d bellow, while mowing the front pasture on our dusky, rose-colored Farmall Cub tractor. Isaac Watts\u2019 great lyric of self-abasement, even though followed by a triumphant, ecstatic chorus, is an artifact of the old world. In the politically correct, self-actualized new world, the neutered modern lyrics substitute the line \u201cFor such a one as I?\u201d The worm has indeed turned.<\/p>\n The hypnotic drone of the tractor, coupled with its ceaseless circling path, drew out of me Bible passages memorized in Sunday School: Job\u2019s magnificent \u201cHath thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder . . .,\u201d or Paul\u2019s moving disquisition on Charity, with its memorable beginning, \u201cThough I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.\u201d<\/p>\n Lest anyone surmise from this that I was some sort of weird backwoods child evangelist, even if only preaching to the birds, snakes, and mice whose little abodes I leveled as the tractor wheeled inexorably, cutting its neat swath, let me hastily add that the secular was also well represented in my repertoire of field hollers and work songs. In Junior High I had an English teacher who made us memorize poems, and, unlike most everybody else, I quickly discovered I was pretty good at it. I memorized the whole of Dylan Thomas\u2019s \u201cFern Hill,\u201d and could induce a sort of self-hypnotic trance merely by chanting those lines about being \u201cgreen and carefree, famous among the barns\/About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home.\u201d I am unashamed now to admit that, for a time at least, Leigh Hunt\u2019s \u201cAbou Ben Adhem\u201d was a favorite recital piece of mine, as was John Gillespie Magee\u2019s \u201cHigh Flight,\u201d which I memorized from a TV \u201cshort\u201d that always seemed to air on Sundays after church, during the wonderful old \u201cPete Smith Specialties.\u201d I remember a time, around 1968 or so I suppose, when I would often unironically (as best I can remember) follow my stilted, sonorous recitation of \u201cHigh Flight\u201d with a spirited rendition of Eric Burdon and The Animals\u2019 anti-war song, \u201cSky Pilot\u201d (\u201cSky Pilot, Sky Pilot\/How high can you fly?\/You never, never, never, reach the sky\u201d), bouncing atop the tractor and singing along to my tiny, tinny AM transistor radio. My favorite songs from around that time, though, were ones that seemed to speak to my country life during those long, lazy, hazy days of summer break: Bobbie Gentry\u2019s \u201cOde to Billy Joe,\u201d Dusty Springfield\u2019s \u201cSon of a Preacher Man,\u201d Tony Joe White\u2019s \u201cPoke Salad Annie,\u201d Neil Diamond\u2019s \u201cBrother Love\u2019s Traveling Salvation Show.\u201d<\/p>\n From an early age, I knew that every situation in which I found myself, every experience I incurred, had a corresponding set of words, and those words a corresponding music. And at my best, when I was thoughtlessly but mindfully immersed in the physical and mental and spiritual flow of life, those correspondences were seamless and transparent and shimmering and whole. Experience – Word – Music was my formulation for the genesis of a poem. Small wonder, then, that a poem like Reece\u2019s \u201cThe Mower,\u201d with its focus on the ineluctable small core of transcendence at the heart of even so mundane a task as mowing would almost seem to be written especially for me:<\/p>\n Sometimes he knew, strangest unlikelihood,<\/p>\n Amidst the dull toil in the sweltry day<\/p>\n A flash of beauty to quicken his blood<\/p>\n A memory time could not take away.<\/p>\n Such was the wonder he beheld with awe<\/p>\n When through the dew-spray mowing at morning made<\/p>\n A lance of sun came piercing, and he saw<\/p>\n Rainbow on rainbow widening from his blade.<\/p>\n I eventually got to college, Tennessee Tech University, and, alas, spent less time roaming the farm in the company of myself. I met a friend, a fellow writer and free spirit from Virginia, who introduced me to the subtle, anarchic discipline of listening, really listening, to the Grateful Dead, and also to the wonders of contemporary poetry. Not \u201cmodern\u201d poetry, like that of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, but poems written by real live poets like W.S. Merwin, James Dickey, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, William Pitt Root, and Robert Morgan. In smoky candlelight, through odors of venison, onions, and brown rice, the Dead, echoing T.S. Eliot, sang \u201cShall we go, you and I while we can\/Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds,\u201d while James Dickey\u2019s Poems 1957-1967 <\/em>became a ball of light in my hands as I read:<\/p>\n To sing, must I feel the world\u2019s light?<\/p>\n My green, graceful bones fill the air<\/p>\n With sleeping birds. Alone, alone<\/p>\n And with them I move gently.<\/p>\n I move at the heart of the world.<\/p>\n For a time I sought the primal, the unmediated. The soil in the neat furrows of a farm field smelled to me of civilization, and, yes, of its discontents. I worshipped at the altar of the Ur-; participation mystique was my game. My hair and beard grew long and my clothes ragged. I roamed as far out, or as far in, as I could, on foot, by canoe, mental traveler in a wilderness of stone, leaf mold, water, and words. I began writing poems with titles like \u201cBaptist Ridge: Notes of a Native Son,\u201d \u201cRivereyes,\u201d and \u201cVoices of the Forest.\u201d With apologies to James Dickey, and for the first time ever in print, here is a verse from \u201cCampfire,\u201d circa 1972:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I sit in a clearing grown thick with presence.<\/p>\n My eyes are the eyes of the trees.<\/p>\n Darkness is sweeping the fire in on itself,<\/p>\n Becoming again the spirit of night<\/p>\n As my shivering cloak of night-skin<\/p>\n Seeks the power gone out of the fire.<\/p>\n Alone, cocooned within my sleeping bag,<\/p>\n I echo the light of the ritual moon.<\/p>\n \u201cBaptist Ridge\u201d is a geological formation in Middle Tennessee, located between Cookeville and Celina, near Hilham. But in that poem I was obviously thinking of one of my favorite biblical characters, too, John the Baptist, who grew his hair long and wore \u201ccamel\u2019s hair, and a leathern girdle,\u201d oblivious to societal conventions and niceties. His was \u201cthe voice of one that crieth in the wilderness.\u201d Byron Reece\u2019s odd, elliptical litany, \u201cJohn: A New Testament Ballad,\u201d captures his essence: \u201c\u2018O who is that with raven tress\/And fire-face, crying in the wilderness?\u2019\/\/ \u2018It\u2019s John.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Around this time I transferred to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, and, along with the classes required for a major in English, I began taking courses in anthropology, religious studies, and philosophy, to try and satisfy a hunger I could not name. I wanted a solid, physical spirituality, body centered, free of the straitjacket of centuries of civilized, mental religion. The names of those courses are indicative: \u201cEcstatic Experience in the History of Religion,\u201d \u201cNative American Literature and Spirituality, Psychology of Perception,\u201d \u201cAngelic and Demonic Themes in Twentieth-Century Literature.\u201d I did and did not find what I was looking for. I came closer, perhaps, by losing myself in truly ecstatic events like the Grateful Dead concert I attended one fine Saturday in October.<\/p>\n But in those courses I did begin reading translations of Native American songs, and found in them powerful analogs and sources for poems by contemporary poets I was reading like Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, and William Pitt Root. These were poems with titles like \u201cSong of Man Chipping an Arrowhead,\u201d \u201cSong of the Vines Ripening,\u201d and \u201cSong of the Taste,\u201d as if to emphasize my earlier formulation: Experience – Word – Music. Here are two such short Native American \u201cDream Songs,\u201d the first from the Papago, and the second from the Wintu:<\/p>\n In the great night my heart will go out,<\/p>\n Toward me the darkness comes rattling,<\/p>\n In the great night my heart will go out.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Where will you and I sleep?<\/p>\n At the down-turned jagged rim of the sky you and I will sleep.<\/p>\n In a Modern Poetry course I read Wallace Stevens\u2019 line from \u201cAn Ordinary Evening in New Haven,\u201d\u2014 \u201cThe poem is the cry of its occasion,\u201d\u2014 and I cried \u201cYes!\u201d I included some of my own efforts in this genre in my first book of poems, Dancing on Canaan\u2019s Ruins<\/em>, poems with titles like \u201cSong of Departure,\u201d \u201cSong of the Survivor,\u201d and \u201cMountain Walking Songs.\u201d Here is the first section, entitled \u201cNashville,\u201d of a suite of short song-poems called \u201cSongs from the Lost Map\u2019s Legend\u201d:<\/p>\n The air bloomed<\/p>\n wherever we walked.<\/p>\n Remember<\/p>\n the bright wind<\/p>\n that whirled in our wake?<\/p>\n Somehow, perhaps through the Cherokee of his own North Georgia mountains, Byron Herbert Reece arrived at this same formulation, writing poems with titles like \u201cSong after Harvest\u201d and \u201cA Song for Breath.\u201d<\/p>\n Through my interest in the Grateful Dead and their large, loose-knit community of northern California psychedelic, post-beat artists, writers, and characters, I discovered the emerging Bioregional movement, especially its literary manifestation, and voraciously read such writers as Edward Abbey, Ernest Callenbach, and Gary Snyder. I could hardly wait for the next edition of Stewart Brand\u2019s Whole Earth Catalog<\/em>, or, later, the next issue of CoEvolution Quarterly<\/em>. I published poems in Katuah<\/em>, the bioregional journal of Southern Appalachia. I have found that many people of my generation, at least those possessed of a social conscience, have an abiding interest in and commitment to ecological concerns. Born too late to participate in the major Civil Rights and Vietnam War protest movements of the tumultuous 1960\u2019s (I was a twelve-year-old Tennessee farm boy during San Francisco\u2019s \u201cSummer of Love\u201d and fourteen the summer of Woodstock) I embraced, in spirit at least, the decentralist, communally oriented \u201cback to the land\u201d movement of the early 1970\u2019s. Ironically, it was this California-based \u201chippie\u201d movement that led me back to the farm, and back to the South.<\/p>\n Sometime in the mid-1970\u2019s I picked up a curious looking anthology with the even more curious title One Lord, One Faith, One Cornbread<\/em> and discovered that the wild and wooly Grateful Dead\/Merry Pranksters community had a Southern contingent, made up mostly of Kentucky writers like Gurney Norman, Ed McClanahan, and Wendell Berry. Though I had read and enjoyed Norman\u2019s Divine Right\u2019s Trip<\/em>, which was serialized in The Last Whole Earth Catalog<\/em>, this was my first introduction to Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer with some radically traditional ideas, who quickly became a favorite of mine. Berry\u2019s carefully crafted, rhetorically powerful, and above all musical poems led me inexorably back, spiritually, to the land of my birth. While capable of some of the darkest and direst critiques of the excesses and the failings of modern day America (\u201cDark with power, we remain\/the invaders of our land\u201d are just two lines of his that speak volumes), he also attempted answers and solutions, as in poems like \u201cThe Peace of Wild Things,\u201d \u201cA Discipline,\u201d and most especially, \u201cEnriching the Earth.\u201d And anyway, how could I possibly resist a collection of contemporary poems entitled Farming: A Hand Book<\/em>? So I seem to have completed yet another circle in discovering Byron Herbert Reece, another, earlier, tradition-minded but modern \u201cfarmer-poet\u201d who, like Berry, makes me glad to be who and what I am, a country man and a poet, and the descendant of farmers. Here is one of Reece\u2019s finest farming poems, \u201cNow to the Fields,\u201d oddly reminiscent, to me, of the ecstatic section VII of Wallace Stevens\u2019 great meditation on modern-day paganism \u201cSunday Morning\u201d:<\/p>\n Now to the fields the bronze men rise and go<\/p>\n About the business of the harvesting.<\/p>\n The autumn sun is all the god they know<\/p>\n And labor all the rite of worshiping<\/p>\n That deity of weather. While the sun<\/p>\n Lamps the round dome of their enormous church<\/p>\n They worship, and till harvesting is done<\/p>\n God is no farther than the fields to search.<\/p>\n III<\/p>\n Whenever I encounter a new artist for the first time – whether literary, musical, or visual – my first impulse is to compare him or her to similar artists with whom I am familiar. When I first encountered the poems of Byron Herbert Reece, two writers immediately came to mind: Wendell Berry and James Agee. Berry\u2019s relevance is perhaps the most obvious. He remains one of my three or four favorite contemporary writers and a fine example of someone who truly practices what he preaches. In his essays, fiction, and poems, he encourages people to \u201cstay home,\u201d as one of his poems puts it, participate in the life of the community, and practice proper stewardship of the land and other natural resources. Berry has lived, with his wife Tanya, for many years on their small farm in Kentucky, which they farm by horse power.<\/p>\n And yet for all my considerable admiration of Berry, his portraits of farm life sometimes seem a little studied, or mannered. The picture is sometimes too sweet and pretty, with too little acknowledgment of the sour and the ugly. Even as I write this it occurs to me that Berry is too good a writer and observer of human nature to pen a book that is anything less than complex and mixed, as human nature is, but I am speaking here of a general tendency in his fiction toward a studied optimism and a confidence in the ultimate working out of things for the good.<\/p>\n Reece, on the other hand, while he did often praise farm life, nevertheless seemed to wrestle with its physical demands and aggravations, especially as they tended to eat into the precious time and energy (energy that was in increasingly short supply as his tuberculosis progressed) he tried to reserve for his writing. He himself observed, to his editor at E.P. Dutton, Elliott Graham, that farming and writing both \u201cmake too many demands on your energy and time.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor was he, I think, a farmer by natural inclination, but more so by fate and circumstance. One feels this sense of frustration and disquiet in lines like these from \u201cThe Travelers\u201d:<\/p>\n It was not yesterday time taught,<\/p>\n By keeping me to fields confined,<\/p>\n How there may be escape in thought.<\/p>\n And in \u201cThe Stay-at-Home,\u201d the poem\u2019s speaker stoically and somewhat fatalistically takes his place<\/p>\n . . . with other men<\/p>\n Like him in bone and blood,<\/p>\n Who often thought of going<\/p>\n But had the will to stay<\/p>\n And turn them to their hoeing<\/p>\n When cocks crew up the day.<\/p>\n This despite the fact that,<\/p>\n The sounds he most regarded<\/p>\n Were all of passing things:<\/p>\n Swift waters flowing,<\/p>\n Winds to westward blowing,<\/p>\n Footsteps outward going<\/p>\n And wild, wandering wings.<\/p>\n Reece\u2019s two novels\u2014 Better a Dinner of Herbs<\/em> and, in particular, The Hawk and the Sun<\/em>\u2014 also offer grimly poetic naturalistic critiques of their rural communities, as opposed to Berry\u2019s still-evolving depiction of the relatively healthy, sane, and decent fictional community of Port William. The Hawk and the Sun<\/em>, for example, tells the story of the brutal mob lynching of a presumably innocent crippled black man and the \u201cgood people\u2019s\u201d hypocrisy, cowardice, and general ineffectuality. Nevertheless, both Berry and Reece are authentic farmer\/poets who even use the same metaphor, namely \u201cmarriage,\u201d to describe their relationship to the land.<\/p>\n James Agee may seem at first and to some a strange comparison to Reece. After all, though Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and though his relations, on his father\u2019s side at least, were mostly rural farm people, he was educated at prestigious prep schools, and, ultimately, Harvard University. Add to this the fact that he lived most of his decidedly bohemian adult life in the urban Northeast, writing for magazines such as Time, Life, Fortune<\/em>, and The Nation<\/em>, and the comparison begins to seem unlikely indeed. It is Agee\u2019s writing, however, in particular his nonfiction masterpiece about the lives of tenant farmers in northern Alabama during the depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>, that makes him a useful and enlightening comparison to Reece. That book has been called many things, but one thing it can certainly be said to be is a sort of phenomenology of farm life, or at least of tenant farm life.<\/p>\n One passion that Reece and Agee shared was photography, and each man\u2019s similar comments regarding the relatively new art form reveal much about his aesthetic and artistic inclinations. In a letter to E.V. Griffith, a younger writer with whom he often corresponded, Reece, after his return to Choestoe from his stint as Poet-in-Residence at UCLA, comments on the fall color in the mountains: \u201cThe world here is so astonishingly beautiful one can hardly bear to look at it. . . . I have been taking a few color photos on Kodachrome,\u201d he reports. \u201cI can\u2019t afford to shoot too many, but it is a great temptation to wreck my bank account, which wouldn\u2019t take much doing, and record some of the beauty of the countryside.\u201d In another letter to Griffith, a few years later, Reece describes this almost visionary moment: \u201cThe other day I drove about half way down Georgia, and suddenly I saw a filling station isolated in sharp light against the hills, and for a moment it was as beautiful as anything I ever saw and absolutely timeless. I don\u2019t know what it meant. I know it hurt me and I was grateful for the hurt because it was proof that I am alive.\u201d<\/p>\n I mention these two passages to point up the similar aesthetic and artistic vision held by both Reece and Agee. In his astonishing \u201cPreamble\u201d to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>, Agee writes:<\/p>\n For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him<\/p>\n who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection<\/p>\n into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness,<\/p>\n seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in<\/p>\n sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no<\/p>\n symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined,<\/p>\n the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what<\/p>\n is.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is why,\u201d he concludes, \u201cthe camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n Near the end of his \u201cPreamble,\u201d Agee writes similarly of music. He advises his reader to get a phonograph or radio \u201ccapable of the most extreme loudness possible\u201d and listen to Beethoven, or Schubert. \u201cTurn it on as loud as you can get it,\u201d Agee instructs, and put the speakers as close to your ears as possible, focusing exclusively on what you hear. \u201cYou won\u2019t hear it nicely,\u201d he says. \u201cIf it hurts you, be glad of it.\u201d What you hear, says Agee, \u201cis beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.\u201d<\/p>\n Reece was clearly a lover of music, as well. The oft-repeated story of the discovery of his suicide includes the detail of a phonograph in his quarters at Young Harris College playing Mozart\u2019s Piano Sonata in D. Several of Reece\u2019s Christmas lyrics were set to music by Kenneth Walton and published by Boosey and Hawkes, and John Vincent, director of UCLA\u2019s department of music, asked him to write a libretto for an opera based on the old folk song \u201cThe Ballad of Little Mattie Groves.\u201d<\/p>\n Reece and Agee both seemed to find mere words almost inadequate to the task of capturing \u201cthe cruel radiance of what is,\u201d and so they sought inspiration and borrowed techniques from other arts such as photography and music. The toll exacted on both men by such a sustained effort at artistic transcendence, however, was considerable. Reece and Agee were, to one degree or another, \u201cdoomed romantics.\u201d Both led relatively short, intense, creative lives, and while Reece took his own life, both led lives that hastened their own demises, with alcohol, tobacco, and other vices figuring prominently. Each man marched to a different drummer and detested falseness and compromise. Physically, even, Reece and Agee seem to fit the romantic stereotype, as each could be characterized as \u201cdark and brooding.\u201d<\/p>\n It would be interesting to know what Wendell Berry would make of these men, and their complex, flawed lives and art. A partial answer, and a recognition of his kinship with men such as Reece and Agee, is afforded by his poem \u201cA Warning to My Readers,\u201d in which he says \u201cDo not think me gentle\/because I speak in praise\/of gentleness, or elegant\/because I honor the grace\/that keeps this world. I am\/a man crude as any.\u201d Berry concludes the poem with an acknowledgment of the difficulties inherent in being an artist, and a human being: \u201cThat I\/may have spoken well\/at times, is not natural.\/A wonder is what it is.\u201d Neither culture, which the poem addresses, and of which the world of art is a part, nor agriculture, with its formal, orderly cycle of tilling, planting, and harvesting, is \u201cnatural,\u201d and the wonder is that these three writers found their way to an art that hides its artistry, presenting the natural, rural world to readers in all its \u201ccruel radiance.\u201d<\/p>\n IV<\/p>\n Earth Day, April 22, 2003: I have tried for some time now to find an appropriate ending to this meditation on influence and inspiration, but it has all come to naught. Like a dammed up river, my words and thoughts circle and sink, refusing to spill, their ineffectual sediment settling slowly out of sight. Around Celina, Tennessee, they tell stories about Corps of Engineers divers, working in the icy dark waters on the intake ducts near the bottom of the Dale Hollow Dam, who have paused for a moment in their work, turning at the flicker of a shivery shadow, and come face to face with monsters. Catfish, six feet long, they say. Or more. Benign giants nourished by river nutrients carried downstream to sift and settle in the still waters of the dam\u2019s pool, their wide, whiskered faces and flat, blank eyes close enough to touch. \u201cCanst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?\u201d a voice out of a whirlwind asked Job. Risking sacrilege, I\u2019m inclined to answer, \u201cMaybe, just maybe.\u201d And maybe the best way to end is by example. To those hither by whose help I\u2019ve come, I make this small offering of an oddly shaped, glistening curio, drawn out from the depths, plowed up in the fields:<\/p>\n Moonrise at Dale Hollow Lake<\/p>\n Later,<\/p>\n as evening\u2019s dark hand<\/p>\n stills the water<\/p>\n and tourists glide<\/p>\n like boats to their homes,<\/p>\n I sit with friends<\/p>\n on an island point<\/p>\n and watch the moon<\/p>\n dance above cedars,<\/p>\n its reflection<\/p>\n fanning out<\/p>\n across black water.<\/p>\n A fish rises<\/p>\n as though to strike<\/p>\n the feathered light.<\/p>\n Something just this side<\/p>\n of saying<\/p>\n aches in my jaw.<\/p>\n Source: Nantahala Review<\/em>, issue 2:2 — https:\/\/www.nantahalareview.org\/issue2-2\/non-fiction\/CLARK.htm (via the Internet Archive)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Circles of Influence and Confluence: One Writer\u2019s Inspirations (on Byron Herbert Reece) by Jim Clark On Sundays when I was young my family would make the 40-mile trip from Cookeville, Tennessee, where we lived, to Celina, Tennessee, where both sets …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-individuals-families","category-local-history-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2906,"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions\/2906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tngenweb.org\/ofp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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