In celebration of National Poetry Month, Jesse Graves joined us at Lawson McGhee Library for a reading of his work. Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, the forthcoming A Little Light in the Grave, and a book of prose, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, as well as two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves has served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poetry of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.

Links:

Jesse Grave's website

"Jesse Graves and the Cosmic Appalachian Boogie," in Salvation South

Six Poems by Jesse Graves in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature

"Two Stones" in New Verse Review

"Above Johnson City" in As the Crow Flies

Three poems in Cutleaf

Welcome to The Beat. Today, we’ll hear a recording from our monthly book discussion group, All Over the Page. On April the thirteenth, in celebration of National Poetry Month, Jesse Graves joined us at Lawson McGhee Library, and he read from his book Merciful Days. Jesse Graves is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays called Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. He is also editor of several volumes of poetry and scholarship, including The Complete Poetry of James Agee by University of Tennessee Press. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and he teaches at East Tennessee State University. Here’s Jesse Graves.

[Audience applauds]

Aww. Well, I’m delighted to be back in Knoxville. This is forever my home base, so I always feel so great to be here. I feel really good to be in this library again. My old friend, James, said it was the old book house. So, I spent a lot of time here when I was an undergrad student, living right across the street behind the church over there in Maplehurst. So, I would walk over here, you know--undergrad, as broke as a convict, as my mom would say, and check out books. But mostly I checked out movies. I got more movies than books here, because of course, you know, there was no streaming back then. There was nothing like that. So, I probably saw my first Ingmar Bergman movie. I probably saw my first Kurosawa movie from the shelves here at Lawson McGee, so I love this place. I'm really glad to be here. Merciful Days, my book that came out in peak pandemic. This is not what I would advise, to release your favorite of your own books right in the middle of a pandemic, but that's just kind of how it came to be. So, Alan, I really appreciate you arranging this and giving me this opportunity to talk about this book. Which I thank you all for being here, too. It's a Monday night. I know some of you have stayed over from work, and I know some of you have driven in to be here, so I'm very grateful. Well, I thought we'll focus on this book on Merciful Days with a couple of brief interludes into other things, if that's okay. I think of this as the book of my mother's voice. A lot of these are elegies for my dad. These are poems written as my dad was failing and after he died, which has been 10 years ago now. But my mom keeps going. I was just up there this past week. It was my birthday a week ago and I went up and saw my mom, and she sang me happy birthday every day for about a week leading up to my birthday. I saw her, and we had a great time. But I'm going to start with the poem that... It's not the first poem in the book, but it's the title poem. I feel like it kind of situates us into this collection and really just kind of into the kind of work that I've been trying to do.

“Merciful Days”

My mother and I walk the cattle trail alongside the family cemetery fence. Mid-February feels like late May, with grass in the fields turning green. At a distance, a faint red tint appears along the branches of bare trees, like a chemical mist settling among them. False dawn promising new leaves. Just you watch, she says. Everything will bloom out, thinking springtime is here, and then we'll get a freeze. We make another round, circling the ones we love and have lost, separated by the breath we breathe and the dirt that covers them. She sighs, almost a word emerging through the air she pushes out, almost saying she is tired of it, the way it keeps moving through her. "Merciful Days," she says, meaning something I feel but cannot begin to shape into words.

So this phrase is one of many from my childhood that I've heard my mom use and other relatives use. I don't find them out in the world that much, and they mean something different depending on the context and the tone in which they're said. If somebody does something really ridiculous--it happens a lot in the country in Sharp's Chapel, and somehow, they survive. My mom will say, “Merciful days, can you believe they did that?” But then it can also mean if something really horrible happens, if something really, like worst thing you can imagine, “Merciful days, that just happened.” So it's one of those phrases that to me encompasses a lot of my world and a lot of the world as I've found it. I'll read one that sort of brings my dad into the equation.

“Except in Memory”

My father stands by the leaning tobacco barn in the pasture field above our house, shaking mineral salt out of a fifty-pound bag into a long iron trough as his herd of white-faced, red-coated Herefords crowd around him. I will not see that scene again, except in memory, and wish I had a photograph of it, or better still, film that shows him park his pickup at an angle 30 feet from the barn in the cattle. Then he lifts the bag out of the truck bed, throws it over his shoulder to carry to the crib, and cuts the braided string with a pocket knife. The cows know the sound of his voice. They come when he calls. They bob their heads. They lick the salt.

I'll do another childhood poem with my mom. My mom's the main character in a lot of these poems. This is one that's been on my mind. I don't always read this one, but I realized I was so nervous watching this Artemis II landing. My friends were having a party, but I was too nervous even to listen or watch. This poem is why. Some of you are old enough to remember what I'm talking about. “Challenger.” For my mother turning seventy-six. This was almost ten years ago, so this has been here a while.

“Challenger”

Remember when we fed the cows from the window of the barn loft? We had the jumpy black Angus then, years before the docile pulled Herefords, who mill meekly about globe-eyed. Today the sun is out and we celebrate in short sleeves in early November and watch for leaves to drop red-orange maples. But that morning, blowing snow kept me home from school. We fed the square bales then, misshapen as they were, and I loved to cut the twine with the short blade of my pocket knife, taut forms loosening and scattering apart on the way to the ground below. Our mistake was to call the cows too soon. “S’Cavs, S’Cavs,” just as my father had said it, (my father, who was on the road in hard weather, probably a thirty-six-hour run to Harrisburg, driving through ice to get home by midnight. In half a second it seemed the whole herd circled beneath us, grunting and jostling and you said, ****fire, which made me laugh so hard I lost my breath and could not even throw the hay out of the loft to distract them. We escaped, of course, and like so many other mornings after our chores you said, I think we need some biscuits, don't you? With apple butter, I said, and you held my collar as I climbed down the slick ladder. While cups of hot chocolate warmed our fingers, we turned to the one TV channel we could watch without static and saw a real rocket ship, like the model I wanted for Christmas, explode right on screen again and again in spiraling slow motion. I looked at you as I always did when I could not understand what I saw, and your mouth frozen in mid-gasp silently told me on the coldest day of the year that in a particle of that churning smoke departed the childhood I thought would last forever.

Yeah, I was so glad when I checked back in and they had land--they were in the water and the boats were coming and I was like, okay, all right, they can do this. It's okay now.

“Sage Grass Brushing Against My Shins”

I went to bed thinking about how my father died, trying to exhaust myself silently repeating his question. “How can you let them do this to me?” Sometime in the night, I fell into a dream where he was old and sick but alive and the family had gathered around him for Thanksgiving. After the meal, we went outside and wandered around the yard, scattering cornbread to chickens, scratching the heads of all the dogs we've ever had. I followed my dad past the barn to the pond we dug together, listening as he told me how to clear the pine saplings thickening along the banks. This dream carried me along like real life and I could feel the sage grass brushing against my shins as we walked back through the field. The kids had all lined up to play football which we haven't done since I was a child before my brother died, before my uncle died. My daughter Chloe, a girl again, picked the teams. “I want pap on my side,” she shouted making my dad grin and blush and say, “No, no, I'm too old.” “That doesn't matter,” my daughter said, and I loved her more right then even than the dream itself, and more than I hated how soon I would wake.

Well, I wish I could say this first interlude was into some happy, like, funny poems. I don't seem to write those. I think a lot of things are funny, but I don't seem to write many of those poems. One of my real, sort of, poetry idols, Jack Gilbert, has a short poem. I think it's called resume--one-word title and the whole poem is something like: “Greek fishermen do not play on the beach, and I don't write funny poems.” So, I guess that's the job. This is a brief interlude into a couple of new poems that are coming out in just a week or two weeks in an online literary journal, so you can look these up, called Salvation South. It's sort of an offshoot of The Bitter Southerner, sort of literary journal version of that, and they're publishing five poems and a really long interview. I felt like we talked all day to get this interview, and some old pictures of, like, childhood home. And some old pictures of me that I no longer look like and maybe even some recordings that I haven't made yet, so it's a pretty involved process. So, I thought I could read a couple of those, and hopefully you'll remember them and look them up. And this one, actually, had I written it soon enough, would have fit right into Merciful Days, and then the other ones, maybe, it’s a little different. But I'll read the first poem that that they picked called “Summoning the Creek.”

Many deep arteries surge underground toward the thick aorta of the creek, driving the inner life of the whole farm. All our water came from the cinderblock pumphouse where the flow rose up strongest, pushed to our sinks through buried pipes. That lowest swale was called the bear waller before anyone thought to build a house within reach of that pure and pulsing source. I was the boy standing beside that creek with a seining bucket, dragging minnows up for fishing from the deeper pools. Water snakes slid shiftily off the banks when my footsteps woke them, and frogs plopped in from both sides, all eyes on me. I was once the little prince of a peaceful kingdom of salamanders and crawdads and dragonflies, warm mornings that seemed to last all day.

Actually, it was kind of a happy poem wasn't it? All right! I've got one. Okay. I'm gonna put a little check, a little star on this one. This one's happy, too. This one also has some, well I don't know, maybe it's happy. I can explain it. I think it's a happy poem. The title is an allusion to a band that is my wife's favorite band and one of my favorite bands, and a shared, sort of, experience for us. The title is "Life's Rich Pageant.” Does anybody know that band? R.E.M. Georgia's finest.

“Life's Rich Pageant”

Tonight there is only rain tapping glass and the cats restless and prowling and my wife sleeping in another room. The decades have moved through us, swept us along, willingly or not, like water released from a pressure valve. Like steam from a blown radiator hose. The lean years turned into decades before we knew it, and time worked on us. Love, though, is time's antidote and time is the nemesis of all who ever fell in love, who were ever so happy they let the hours drift on past, without counting their minutes. She sleeps, and I am still awake, night owl patrolling the shaded corners of my own heart, hoping I imagine to find words that show proper gratitude for more than half a life spent walking, talking, cooking meals together. She loves the ginkgo tree in its deep golden moment of letting go, the leaves as they spiral downward in unison like falling snow. She loves any film with Betty Davis playing lead, and she can sing "Betty Davis Eyes” in a slow gravel voice and recite the end of “Now, Voyager.” We saw R.E.M. on the Monster tour, and she knows the lyrics to their first eight records, and we have lived life's rich pageant in full. Love is the anti-venom to the bitter sting of time. Time is the whole tree of leaves descending. Love is the mirror reflecting death's long shadow. And death, death is the old marriage of love and time.

I think it sounds kind of bittersweet. More than more than happy. That one's maybe bittersweet. Well that's the end of the first interlude. Let's jump back into Merciful Days with a Knoxville poem, a poem about my mom in Knoxville, because like me, she grew up in Union county, about an hour north of here. This is called “Gingham.”

After seventy years, my mother still remembers the pink checked gingham dress her mother made with a petal pumped sewing machine. She walked downtown with her sister and cousins, up Gay street, and across to Market Square, each wearing a dress with a different color pattern, color, cut, and shape of hemline. Her face lights when she tells how strangers smiled at them, how they skipped and pranced past storefronts, their arms locked together like twirlers around the maypoles of ancient days. After seventy years, her hands lift as she threads her story once more, reaching up to take hold of that day and bring it down from the humming air.

And then I'll read another poem in my mom's voice, or at least my mom's--as I've taken in, my mom's voice.

“Beneath the Birch Trees”

Nearing 80, my mother's attention is drawn to focus by the several kinds of moss that grow in the woods above the pond my father dug when I was a boy. Have there always been so many colors of green, she wonders aloud, as we collect handful after handful of various shades as furry and moist as an otter's coat. Neither of us knows the names of these distinct species or the varieties of ferns that uncurl beneath the birch trees and thrive in the shadow of the cedars. She asks me what kind of hawk watches her chickens from the lowest branch of the pear tree, and which sparrow wears the yellow streak across its cheek.

All right, let's do one more interlude. So here's a labor of love project that I've worked on for many years with my beloved co-editor, editor in chief of this great series, general editor, emeritus now, Dr. Michael Lofaro. Uh, this is A Complete Poetry of James, who as I've said probably to all of you many times, my hometown literary hero. You know, Agee was one of the first writers that ever kind of registered with me as a kid. I didn't really read him then, but my mom had his novel A Death in the Family. It's one of the books that I remember on her table when I was little. And I would walk by and see these titles like Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The Land Breakers and A Death in the Family. I wasn't all that tempted to read them at that time, but I was certainly intrigued by the titles, and, eventually, I came around and read them. And I thought a lot about Agee, in my life, and, uh, you know, this seems like the place to say a little bit about Agee. I thought I'd read--RB Morris is here, too, a great champion of keeping out there where people can find him, and know about him, and know that there's a park now that you can go to, named for him. I thought I would read just two paragraphs from a prose piece. I published this book Said Songs, also, right in the heart of the pandemic. I feel like all my best work came out just at the time when you couldn't leave the house. But I've written a lot about James Agee , actually, through the years, essays of various... I published an essay with one of Dr. Lofaro's collections on Agee about James Agee and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and, uh, sort of parallel poetics course. They were on a very similar track I feel like. I still feel that. I've also had another idea that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and James Agee... There's so much there between them. I don't know that anybody's written much about that, but well maybe we'll talk about that at some point but... I wrote this little personal essay, too, and I'll just jump right into it. It explains itself. I’m just going to read two paragraphs. It's called "First Encounter: James Agee's 'Summer: Nineteen Fifteen.'”

Childhood is full of secrets, mysteries, and disguises. I grew up in a remote, essentially, eerie place, way out in the country with no neighbors or lights from other houses in sight. The evenings were quiet, and my mother and I often sat on the front porch and listened for bob whites and whippoorwills in the summer. If my father was home from work, he would join us, or my uncle Gerald or my brother or my sister, both half a generation older than me and soon with children of their own. There was so much I did not understand about the adults in my family, about the fears I experienced when I went too far in the woods by myself, about noises and shadows and changes in the atmosphere. I sensed that I was surrounded by mysteries of every kind. I had all this uncertainty, even though I lived with kind and loving people, a family that cared for me and gave me little reason for worry. The first time I read James Agee's brief poem-essay “Knoxville: Summer Nineteen Fifteen,” I felt I'd seen through a window back into my own boyhood. The essay opens with an unforgettable in-medias-res sentence (I'll quote just that) “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” That description caught me with such force, such immediacy, that it might as well have picked up in the middle of my own life. The house I was raised in and where my mother still lives today was built in nineteen fifteen. The house was less than forty miles from Knoxville, in the tiny Union County community of Sharps Chapel. Not only did Agee's place hold a deep personal resonance for me, but so did the date of his essay. I first read “Knoxville: Summer Nineteen Fifteen as a first year college student at Lincoln Memorial University, when my English professor David Worley advised me to read the writers who came from my part of the world. He mentioned Agee, in particular, along with Thomas Wolf and Wilma Dykeman. I knew a good deal of my own family history and a bit of the history of East Tennessee, but I did not know much about the rich literary background of Appalachia. I did not realize, at the time, that I was in the perfect setting to learn about it, the academic home place of Jesse Stuart, James Still, Don West, and George Scarborough. When I read Agee, I could not believe that something so beautiful had been written about my part of the world, about a place I knew so well, and the people who lived there.

It goes on a little, and I quote some more Agee. I've quoted enough Agee, probably. You don't want to quote too much Agee when you’re reading your own work. A bit overshadowing, I would say. I do have a poem about Agee, though, and I forgot to print this one off, so I'm going to do this thing that I've never done, which is to read a poem from my phone, if that's all right. It took me a long time to write poetry about Agee. I'd read him. I'd studied his manuscripts with the magnifying glass, as Dr. Lofaro told me I would need, and he was right, and I'd spent so much time... But I'd written a lot about him in prose. I've not written any poetry, really, about him, so I wrote this one. It came out in a new southern literary journal called Porchlight. I think some of you have seen Porchlight. It's very good. I like that journal a lot. So, this poem is there. It's nowhere else yet, but it's called “Agee in Memoriam.”

He rolled a fresh cigarette while the old one still burned between his clenched lips. He kept a goat at a rented house in Brooklyn, St. James Place, where a neighbor painted “The man who lives here is a loony” on his door. He sometimes wrote 800 words on each side of a page thin as a fly’s wing with a pencil that was never sharpened, half cursive, half print, rarely added a date or a title to what he wrote. To read him now is to feel that your skin is too tight to contain all your inner turmoil, that every pretention and pomposity he punctured somehow belonged also to your subconscious. Agee was a saint with the devil’s habits. He brought an east Tennessee way of being with him to Fortune magazine and long dinners beside Charlie Chaplin and John Huston. He died in the backseat of a New York taxi, age forty-five, thrice-married, stone broke, his best work unfinished, soon made famous for the same suffering that killed him sure as a heart attack.

James Agee. I mean, since I brought this heavy book with me, I just wanted to show it again. It is almost 700 pages of Agee's poetry. When we turned in our word document manuscript, it was slightly over a thousand pages distilled down to seven hundred. I thought it would be nice, though, to just share with you a few lines of Agee's poetry. Agee's poetry is... It's a special area in his work. It's not maybe as approachable as his prose. It's a labor of love, as I said about this book. So, these couple of stanzas were made into a beautiful choral piece that you can find on YouTube. It's by, um, what's his name? Morten Lauridsen, a contemporary composer. So, I would encourage you, if you like this, look this up and you can find some recordings of it. It's so beautiful. There were lots of pieces of music written, of course, around Agee's work. It just had that lyrical quality.

Sure on this shining night of star-made shadows round, kindness must watch for me this side the ground. The late year lies down the north. All is healed. All is health. High summer holds the earth hearts all whole. Sure on this shining night, I weep for wonder, wandering far alone of shadows on the stars.

It's pretty good, isn't it? You can see why I devoted most of my adult life to working on this book. I might just read one or two more. This is the last part of the second interlude, okay? I'm going to read one poem from... This book is a little bit of an odd bird, Specter Mountain. It's co-written with my poet friend, William Wright. We wrote it kind of feverishly over a couple months, back and forth, back and forth. Then we edited it for, like, five years, and then finally decided on how it would come out. We didn't name any of the like... We didn't claim any of the poems. They're just all in here, and his poems and my poems are just all kind of woven together, so you could read the whole thing and possibly not know who wrote which poem, which was probably our intent. But it's, uh... Specter Mountain is not a real place. This kind of speculative, imagined Appalachia. It's an imagined place, a place of spirits and haunts. But this is maybe the most autobiographical poem I have in the book, and I think most of you who have read even two of my poems would probably recognize this as one of mine, so I will give away the secret now that “Wing” is mine.

“Wing”

I followed my own mother here. She sang to me the whole way, just as she always did, wherever I traveled, with or without her. The voice that guided, that cautioned of steep turns in the road before I got to them. The future foretold in the words of her plaintive hymns. She took the huddled form of a sparrow, shrinking within her closed wings, her chalky, sibilant calls meaning something I can never know. Nothing like her airy song, which always says “Come, follow, come, follow.” Down from steep bluffs, toward the sloping pastureland of my birth, into the true south of home. Her body grown so thin, her voice thinner, her portrait hangs on the wall in the house of memory. An upstairs room catching light from uncurtained windows. Her hair dark as a deep anthracite seam, burnished black by underground pressures, her face talc-white, so young it’s another life. Her arms hover around me, as a boy, when I wore a light-blue jacket, too long in the sleeves, my curls combed straight, gazing untroubled into the camera’s eye.

That one’s a little bit of a precursor, I think, to Merciful Days. I feel like they are of the same fabric. “The Kingdom of the Dead.” I should say this is the first poem in the book, so we’re kind of ending where we began. And “The Kingdom of the Dead” is an allusion to The Odyssey, Homer’s Odyssey, and maybe this is a little bit that’s not quite explained in the poem. My brother died in two thousand nine, and this is right after I moved to Johnson City. I was on the road, back and forth a lot. And I wasn’t finding any solace in any of the things that I normally loved. Music didn’t sound good to me. The books that I loved, the poets that I loved didn’t hold my... They didn’t reach me. They didn’t hold me. And so I went to the public library in Johnson City, and I was looking at the audio books because I was in my car so much. This was even before podcasts were much of the thing. And I checked out a huge volume of The Odyssey on CD, and it’s something like 36 CDs. I mean, this is a big book. Probably not that many, but... It was read by Sir Ian McKellen, and this was like Gandalf reading Homer. But it was what I needed. It was what I needed to hear, somehow. That journey was the journey that I needed to go on, and the journey that I needed to follow. So, “The Kingdom of the Dead” is one of the books in The Odyssey.

I have no crew nor fleet ship to carry me, no ewe nor sleek ram to offer for bloodfeast, but I seek no counsel with kings or warriors, only the humble dead, those well-known to me and few others, who reach out in dreams, who call back from wherever they dwell. I would guide my uncle out of the shadows to tell again of his pastoral boyhood, running through fields of burley tobacco leaves. My brother hangs back, still new to his ghost-life. How to bring him forward, will he speak to me about parting the veil between our worlds? Not one shade who greets Odysseus and drinks from the blood of his flocks bears welcome news. Their lesson is slow suffering, awaiting hidden signs. As in life, so in the burdened House of Death, even those who walked in glory suffer here. I fear what I will see, yet still long to see.

Well, good for you. If you keep reading after you read that poem, you’re a trooper. This is the last poem in the book, and it’s a little different in tone. That’s where the book begins, this is where the book ends.

“A Blue Tractor Passing”

It was a New Holland or an older model Ford that we could hear coming for half a mile before it reached the house. When I asked my mother if she recognized the driver, a stranger to me, she said, “I wish it was K.O. Campbell and that your daddy was standing down there beside the road to throw his hand up at him.” K.O. drove my school bus, in addition to the one blue tractor on Cain Road, and some years for Christmas he brought us a bottle of his homemade wine—apple, pear, elderberry—which were the only spirits we ever kept in the house. K.O. outlived my father by just about a year, and now the Beasons tend his orphaned herd. His bull still jumps the fence sometimes, and my nephews cross him back over while our cows bawl—like my mother and me, these cattle keep looking for the old farmers who softly spoke their true names as they scattered salt into empty feed troughs.

Thank you.

[Applause]