From the Mountain, From the Valley Read online

  From the

  Mountain

  From the

  Valley

  New and

  Collected Poems

  James Still

  Edited by Ted Olson

  Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Copyright © 2001 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Murray State University,

  Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508–4008

  05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

  All previously published poems are reprinted here by permission. Previous publication information appears in the bibliography.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Still, James, 1906-

  From the mountain, from the valley: new and collected poems / James

  Still; edited by Ted Olson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8131-2199-X (acid-free paper)

  1. Appalachian Region, Southern–Poetry. I. Olson, Ted. II. Title.

  PS3537.T5377 F76 2001

  811'.52–dc21 00-012280

  This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  To my loved ones:

  Teresa Lynn, Kaila Ann,

  Jacob Alexander, and Hiram

  Contents

  Preface

  A Man Singing to Himself: An Autobiographical Essay by James Still

  The Poems

  Dreams

  Burned Tree

  Fallow Years

  The Bright Road

  Artifacts

  Answer

  Let This Hill Rest

  Lambs

  Swift Were Their Feet

  Wilderness

  Dulcimer

  Horse Swapping

  Mountain Fox Hunt

  Infare

  When the Dulcimers Are Gone

  Reckoning

  Heritage

  Death on the Mountain

  Shield of Hills

  Uncle Ambrose

  Clabe Mott

  The Hill-Born

  Aftergrass

  Child in the Hills

  Passenger Pigeons

  Farm

  Fox Hunt on Defeated Creek

  Foal

  Post Offices

  Earth-Bread

  On Troublesome Creek

  Interval

  Graveyard

  Tracks on Stone

  Coal Town

  Fiddlers’ Convention on Troublesome Creek

  Journey Beyond the Hills

  Rain on the Cumberlands

  Dance on Pushback

  I Was Born Humble

  On Redbird Creek

  Pattern for Death

  Yesteryear’s People

  A Hillsman Speaks

  Spring

  Hounds on the Mountain

  Horseback in the Rain

  With Hands Like Leaves

  River of Earth

  White Highways

  Court Day

  On Double Creek

  Night in the Coal Camps

  Epitaph for Uncle Ira Combs, Mountain Preacher

  Nixie Middleton

  Come Down from the Hills

  Eyes in the Grass

  On Buckhorn Creek

  Year of the Pigeons

  Where the Mares Have Fed

  A Man Singing to Himself

  Now Has Day Come

  I Shall Go Singing

  Leap, Minnows, Leap

  Morning: Dead Mare Branch

  A Child’s Wisdom

  Banjo Bill Cornett

  Fiddle

  Mountain Men Are Free

  Hill-Lonely

  Death in the Hills

  This Man Dying

  Granny Frolic

  Passing of a County Sheriff

  Drought

  Apples

  The Broken Ibis

  Early Whippoorwill

  Abandoned House

  Wolfpen Creek

  Apple Trip

  Funnel Spider

  The Trees in the Road

  Lamp

  Man O’ War

  Lizard

  On Being Drafted into the U.S. Army from My Log Home in March 1942

  Candidate

  Winter Tree

  “Welcome, Somewhat, Despite the Disorder”

  Of the Wild Man

  Day of Flowers

  Hunter

  Are You Up There, Bad Jack?

  Visitor

  The Common Crow

  After Some Twenty Years Attempting to Describe a Flowering Branch of Redbud

  On the Passing of My Brother Alfred

  What Have You Heard Lately?

  Madly to Learn

  High Field

  Unemployed Coal Miner

  Apples in the Well

  Death of a Fox

  In My Dreaming

  Here in My Bed

  Yesterday in Belize

  Artist

  Of the Faithful

  Knife Trader

  Truck Driver

  Okra King

  Could It Be

  Of Concern

  Dove

  Here and Now

  Mine Is a Wide Estate

  My Aunt Carrie

  Mrs. Lloyd, Her Rag Sale

  Recollection

  At Year’s End

  Those I Want in Heaven with Me Should There Be Such a Place

  My Days

  Bibliography

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  Preface

  Ted Olson

  Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, James Still was known primarily as the writer of River of Earth (1940), a novel that many people have identified as one of the finest literary responses to the American Great Depression. He is anything but a single-work author, though, having produced another novel (Sporty Creek, 1977, revised edition 1999), numerous short stories, several children’s books (perhaps the most widely read of these has been Jack and the Wonder Beans, 1977, reprinted 1996), a folklore study (The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life, 1991), and many poems. Still has displayed prodigious ability with all of the literary genres in which he has worked. His fiction has been widely praised by critics and general readers; his children’s literature is loved by those who have read it, young and old alike; and his documentary, folkloric writing has gained the respect of scholars for its keen insight into pre-industrial Appalachian life. His poetry, while a generally overlooked component of his oeuvre, is arguably the foundation for all his work in other literary genres.

  Poetry has certainly been Still’s longest-lasting literary interest. His first published poem, “Dreams,” saw print in April 1931, more than four years before the publication of any of his fictional works. While not producing much fiction after the 1950s, Still continued to place new poems in the pages of respected literary periodicals i
nto the 1990s; for instance, one of the best-loved of Still’s poems among contemporary readers, “Those I Want in Heaven with Me Should There Be Such a Place,” was written and published in the early 1990s.

  In the 1930s Still’s poetry appeared in some of the most prestigious periodicals in the United States, including Atlantic, Nation, New Republic, New York Times, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review; yet, by the end of the twentieth century, his poetry was generally overlooked in national literary circles and not widely known in Appalachia (though, to its credit, Kentucky named Still that state’s Poet Laureate for the period 1995 to 1997). Still’s fiction has received much more attention, likely in part a consequence of the American literary culture’s longstanding tendency to privilege fiction over other literary genres. Of course, his fiction certainly merits attention. His novels and short stories balance observational objectivity with linguistic expressiveness, simplicity of narrative presentation with thematic complexity—by any standard a commendable aesthetic achievement. Still’s fiction never garnered a sustained national readership like some of his contemporaries (such as Eudora Welty) who similarly set their work in specific American regions, probably because Still focused on an often-stereotyped, long misunderstood region and regional culture, a choice of subject that limited his national appeal. Nonetheless, his fiction has secured for the author a lasting reputation as a central figure in Appalachian literature.

  Collecting all of Still’s mature poetry within a single, chronologically arranged volume should elucidate an over-arching irony in his career: that Still’s literary voice—nowadays associated primarily with his fiction—evolved through his writing of poetry. Approximately one-third of the poems in From the Mountain, From the Valley: New and Collected Poems had already been written—and many of those poems had already been published—when, in 1936, Still’s first significant piece of fiction, the short story “All Their Ways Are Dark,” was accepted for publication in Atlantic. The degree to which Still’s poetry went unnoticed after his emergence as a fiction writer is evident from the phrasing of a 1983 letter sent to Still by James Dickey (another author whose poetry has been overshadowed by his later work in fiction), in which Dickey related his excitement over recently discovering Still’s first poetry volume Hounds on the Mountain, published in 1937 by Viking Press: “I had known from your prose work that your vision is essentially that of a poet, [and] I wanted very much to see what happened when you got it [Still’s vision] into lines.”

  The tendency to overlook—or at least undervalue—Still’s poetry can perhaps be traced back to the mixed criticism that Hounds on the Mountain received upon its publication. Two major national periodicals (Atlantic and New Republic), for instance, featured negative reviews of Still’s book; both periodicals characterized his poetic voice as “monotonous,” and one of these reviews chastised Hounds on the Mountain for not featuring a wider variety of conventional verse forms. Certainly, Still’s poetry little resembled the kind of poetry promoted by either of the two opposing groups then dominating the American literary scene—one group influenced by high modernism (a literary movement favoring a self-consciously sophisticated poetry), the other group governed by neo-Marxist or Socialist ideologies (which expected poets to take social and/or political stands in their poems). The aforementioned reviewers, representatives of the American literary establishment then centered in the northeastern United States and sympathetic with High Modernist aesthetics, felt obliged to distrust Still’s calm, quiet, unmannered, minimalist poetic voice and his open-hearted embrace of an Appalachian culture widely felt among the American elite and popular cultures of that era to be marginal.

  Perhaps affected by such criticism, perhaps recognizing the limitations of poetry as a vehicle for objectively chronicling the complex cultural milieu he was encountering in his adopted home of Knott County, Kentucky, perhaps pursuing the more lucrative market available to authors through publication of stories and novels, Still after 1937 turned to fiction as his primary mode of literary expression. Over the next several years, he wrote much of the work on which his literary reputation currently rests—River of Earth as well as short stories that filled three book collections: On Troublesome Creek (1941), Pattern of a Man (1976), and The Run for the Elbertas (1980). As the critical reception of these four books was largely positive, critics—and eventually scholars and readers of Appalachian regional literature—increasingly viewed Still primarily as a fiction writer.

  Still’s poetry has had its champions throughout the years. In a 1937 edition of Saturday Review of Literature, William Rose Benét, greeting the publication of Hounds on the Mountain with a supportive review, asserted that Still’s poetry “is all very simple and direct, but also natural and authentic. But that is not to be taken as meaning that it is not the language of poetry as distinguished from the language of prose. It is, in fact, the sure speech of poetry.” In a more qualified review printed in a 1938 issue of the literary journal Fantasy, Winfield Townley Scott observed that Still’s technique “inclines to the loose and easy; it is the thing sensed and perceived rather than thought that is recorded, and his dominant mood at this stage of his career is ‘impressionistic.’ ” In a 1987 letter to Still, May Swenson, effectively defusing lingering notions that his poetry is “monotonous” and lacking variety in terms of form, stated that “poets today try too hard to outdo each other—they strain. Your poems are very satisfying for being simply natural.” The most ardent supporter of his poetry in recent years was Jim Wayne Miller, who wrote that, while “rewarding in themselves,” Still’s poems “also belong to any assessment of his overall achievement. The poems establish themes, . . . imagery and motifs beautifully and subtly elaborated in the fiction.”

  In spring of the year 2000, James Still, reflecting upon his life’s work in poetry, informed me that most of his poems had been written unself-consciously and rather spontaneously (often in a matter of minutes), though he admitted that he later “pranked” with many poems to strengthen phrasings and sharpen meanings. Still also expressed his belief that his poems are all thematically interconnected–that they grew from his individualized experience living in his particular place and time (specifically, the mountains and valleys of Knott County, Kentucky, during the last seven decades of the twentieth century).

  Acknowledging to me (with no visible trace of self-pity) that his chosen place has changed and that his time has passed, Still claimed that, because he composed most of his poetry while residing in what he described as “a traditional kind of community that hardly exists anymore in Appalachia,” the subjects of his poems “don’t have much resonance today.” Surely Still underestimated these poems. His poetical works–finally grouped together in this volume–will no doubt appeal to readers seeking a truly distinctive body of poetry. Those who happen upon this book in future years will be rewarded with these poems’ all-too-rare literary qualities: wisdom; humor; a richly figurative and musical, though natural and understated, use of language; a precisely and objectively yet humanely rendered sense of place; and an affectionate yet unromanticized glimpse into an often misunderstood culture. Like the hand-crafted Appalachian musical instruments that Still has celebrated in his poetry, Still’s poems will endure and be valued by future generations.

  The editor would like to thank the following people and institutions for their help with this project: the late James Still; Sam Linkous, Hindman Settlement School; Clara Keyes, the James Still Room, Camden-Carroll Library, Morehead State University; Kelly Hensley, Sherrod Library, East Tennessee State University; Norma Myers, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University; Jean Haskell, Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, East Tennessee State University; Gordon McKinney, Appalachian Center, Berea College; Loyal Jones; the late Dean Cadle; the late William Terrell Cornett; and the late Jim Wayne Miller.

  A Man Singing to Himself

  An Autobiographical Essay

  James Still

  Who we are, where we came f
rom, what our ancestors did before us, and where and how we lived has much to do with what we might compose in verse and story.

  Of English and Scotch-Irish stock, my ancestors settled in Virginia during pioneer days, the Lindseys at Berryville, the Stills near Cumberland Gap. A roadside marker at Jonesville, Virginia, denotes the birthplace of Alfred Taylor Still (1828–1917), who conceived the medical system of osteopathy. He was one of our “set.” On my mother’s side my great-grandmother was a Georgia Lanier. Tradition has it that some of my ancestors on both sides fought in the American Revolution and that wilderness land was allotted them as a reward, the Lindseys first settling in north Georgia, the Stills in Alabama. In my mother’s childhood the kitchen floor was beaten earth. Grandpa Lindsey mined enough gold on his land to fill his teeth. (The gold rush in Dahlonega, Georgia, predated Sutter’s Mill by twenty years.) The move to Alabama when my mother was sixteen was occasioned by a cyclone’s destruction of the family home. An often-heard account was the tale of Uncle Joe surviving burial under the rocks of the chimney.

  When my parents married in 1893 they homesteaded in Texas, where two of my sisters were born. Papa’s farm is now a part of the Fort Hood military reservation. Moving back to Alabama, he ran a drugstore for a time and boarded the schoolmaster in order to be taught the requisite Latin. Papa always trusted he would return to Texas, though it never came about, for a sister died of scarlet fever and Mama would never agree to leave her. He generally wore “western” boots and hat, and we ate sourdough bread. I recall bits and pieces of Texas lore passed on to us, and I’ve always thought of Texas as a distant home. My collection of Texas writings reflects this nostalgia. I soldiered at San Antonio during World War II.

  Papa undertook his life’s profession as a “horse doctor,” a veterinarian with little formal training, along with farming and horse trading. “Short courses” at what is now Auburn University fitted him for a license to practice veterinary medicine. He once told me, “I’ve never cheated anybody in my life except in a horse trade. That doesn’t count. It’s a game.” Papa appeared to know every equine in the county by their dubbing, having been present at their procreation or birth, or having ministered to them. Passing these horses, he always spoke to them and sometimes raised his hat. Papa was fair of countenance, eyes blue as a wren’s egg, redheaded, and he never lost a hair to his dying day. I recollect an aunt informing me, “Too bad you’re not good-looking like your daddy.”