Unattended pushcart advertising “frankfurts” with sauerkraut or onions, ice-cold soft drinks, and pies for 5 cents on a rain-soaked wharf.
I was pleased to receive a wonderful holiday package in the mail today: four copies of Poetry South, with my Pushcart-nominated “Etheree for Heather Heyer” among many other works I am looking forward to reading.
In the interim between my nomination and the arrival of the journal, I have been reading poems from 2017 that are published at Poetry South’s website. They couple a dreamy, lyrical sensibility with a sense of the urgent and ominous in a way that seems at once traditionally Southern and reflective of our current fraught moment in history. Although I was born and raised in the North, my mother was originally Southern, and I seem to have, perhaps through her, a taste for lyricism and a sense of tragedy that fit with strong themes running through Southern literature, from Faulkner through Tennessee Williams, and again, in different form, in Poetry South. However I acquired these, I am happy that my poem partakes of them and is out in strong, distinctive company.
Photo credit: Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Overseas Operations Branch. New York Office. News and Features Bureau. Picture Division. Exhibit Section. (1942 – 1945). Unattended pushcart advertising “frankfurts” with sauerkraut or onions, ice-cold soft drinks, and pies for 5 cents on a rain-soaked wharf. Ca. 1939. PD. Wikimedia Commons.
Reblogged this on Landscape Photo Arts and commented:
I ignored my heritage as a “southerner” until I lived in Jersey for a few years. Like a fish in water, I couldn’t see it as part of my identity. But the Yankees did not give me much of a choice : I had to acknowledge it. That said, the single genre of fiction that interests me most, now, it’s Southern Gothic : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic
I like the intersection of The Twilight Zone and Gone with the Wind!
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