This subject comes up from time to time in our Wednesdays@One salon. One of our cohort, a Southerner born and bred, takes his Carolina upbringing as subject matter for nearly every poem he writes (and has written in the past 25 years). It's not just that he writes about the South in which he grew up. He claims and aims to "preserve" a way of speaking and of being in the world that is fast vanishing in his view. It's a way, I suspect, for this writer to hold on to something familiar and formative as he ages and as the world shrinks and homogenizes.
And so one of our group suggests that we all try to write a "regional" poem, that is, a poem that captures or, as our colleague would have it, "preserves" something of a regional language, outlook, custom, or way of being in the world. We take this project on with some sense of hopelessness for a number of reasons.
One is that the Southern writer I refer to above is quite good at this sort of "preservationist" writing. He's practiced it for a quarter century and longer. He comes from a colloquial America, the rural South. And he is part of what his poetry confirms is a tight-knit, almost incestuously close family of grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins and near-cousins, neighbors who are at barely one remove from family . . . and all the customs, traditions, expectations and stories this closeness manufactures. His is, apparently, a Southern family thing that few of the rest of us are as steeped in, no matter where we're from or what type of family we grew up in.
Two is that, well, don't we poetry writers of a certain age always write about where we came from? Our towns, our families, our experiences . . . in other words, our remembrance of things past? And, in fact, doesn't poetry (at least the way we write it here in W@1) seek to preserve the cadences, shortcuts, idioms, efficiencies and musicality -- in other words, the speech patterns -- we grew up hearing and using every day of our lives? Without exception, everyone who comes to W@1 each week has a story to tell through a language (again, speech pattern) that wants to capture something of his and her pasts. Poetry, in our reckoning, preserves. So then, since we all already write this way, or aim to do so, how would we approach a project dedicated to what we already have been doing week in, week out?
All poetry, as we understand it at W@1, is local. Even our individual takes on History are localized to how we were raised to engage with, to understand, the wider world. So how might we structure a project around "writing regional"?
A third consideration: regional takes can become homey-jokey. In all likelihood, a project of this sort will produce funny poems, or what passes for funny among poetry writers of a certain age. We'll poke fun at some regional speech pattern or some local or family custom. Distance gives us some perspective, we might feel, on the shallowness or misbegottenness or backwardness of the places we left never to return. We left! We aren't like that now! Or an adjunct to comedy, pathos. We'll write with maudlin abandon about a way of life lost forever, except in our memories, which of course must smooth everything out to a cliché.
So, no, I don't think we can expect much from writing from our "regional roots." My guess is, we never understood those roots so well in the first place. We were too embedded in them or they in us.
But hey, I've been wrong before. So let's give it a try. Here's the project . . .
Write a poem that captures the "essence" of a region of the country, such as its local patois, custom, worldview, "flavor." This might involve food, since dish and recipe are some of the most localized of cultural stuffs. Example: corn on the cob; potluck suppers, rhubarb pie, pickle sandwiches, roadside fruit stands, sweet tea, Clark's Teabury gum, Stroh's Beer . . . you get the idea, right? Or it might focus on expressions, colloquialisms, dialects, accents, idiomatic expressions, ways of saying things, like ways of saying "soft drink": pop (where I come from), soda (where you might come from), co-cola for Coke. Or it might be an emblematic setting, such as a family affair, a community or school event (that says something about your region of the country, not about small towns or neighborhoods in general that could describe any place).
Or it might even be the way people relate to one another in, say, New England or the Rocky Mountain West, or northern Indiana. This is the kind of material that inspired many a Frost poem. How they speak to one another or dress or the music they make/listen to. What strikes you as peculiar to this place but might be passing away with time, that ought to be preserved somehow?
The poems we've seen at W@1 that do this sort of "preservation work" are meant to document in some lyrical way a uniqueness that is passing or has already passed in every way except the writer's memory. Thus the idea of preservation. Be mindful here, though, that something like letter-writing giving way to emails and texts does NOT fit the project. Why not? Because that's not peculiar to a region of the country; it's general.
So what to write about? Well, that's your problem to solve!
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