I’ve noted before that one of my favorite experiences as a poet was the opportunity to give a reading in the Composers’ Union Hall in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia, with Ivan Zhdanov. Zhdanov, only two years my junior, was born & raised in Siberia, although much of his adult life has been spent in Moscow. We come from radically different social & historical contexts, yet find ourselves not so terribly far apart in how we have chosen to live our lives. Contemplating the parallels (& the divergences) is one of those lovely mind-bending processes with which I’ve been known to wile away an afternoon.

 

To my generation, of course, Siberia is not merely a geographic region in the eastern portion of Russia, but represents much more. Synonymous with Stalin’s gulag, the name connotes a region so distant & forbidding that simply to be sent there proved an irrevocable mode of exile.

 

Yet Russia & the United States are also countries with more than a few similarities. During the Cold War, they were the two so-called Super Powers. Each has a heritage with important roots in European culture &, at the same time, feels a deep ambivalence about that heritage. Each nation is a diverse society, a fact about which each has also expressed more than a few ambivalences. Our “melting pot” mythology may have employed different tropes than their “Socialist Man,” but the deeper reality was that each was intended to construct a post-multicultural world that would pave over what in both instances was often a brutal history of inconsistencies.

 

I’ve been thinking about Zhdanov & Siberia, because on my desk is sitting the anthology Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, edited by Bill Lavender, recently published by the University of Alabama Press. It was John High, poet & one-time editor of Five Fingers Review, who explained to me that it was his own Southern heritage that had first attracted him to Russian writing & translation.* “We both understand failed civilizations,” were John’s more or less exact words, equating the collapse of Czarist Russia – this was before the later collapse of the Soviet one – with the South’s defeat in the Civil War.

 

That’s only one of several frames that one might apply to this collection of 34 post-avant poets. But, as with virtually all of the other potential master narratives, this one is complicated & problematic. A substantial number of these writers – Hank Lazer, Lorenzo Thomas, Mark Prejsnar, Joel Dailey, Thomas Meyer & Dana Lisa Lustig – did not grow up in the South & have no organic sense of having been raised within that framework, or even in its echo, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s & ‘60s. Further, over half live in exactly two metropolitan areas – New Orleans & Atlanta – suggesting that the South is just as scene-centric as the rest of the nation. & suggesting that the “agrarian” framework has little to do with what this volume rather unabashedly calls “Experimental” writing.**

 

One of the half-hidden presumptions of any regional anthology, of course, is that, by their remove from “major” literary centers, the poets involved do not receive their fair share of recognition. Yet many of the writers here will be known to readers of this blog – Lazer, Thomas, Lustig, Prejsnar, Meyer, Bob Grumman, Skip Fox, Jim Leftwich, )ohn Lowther, Jake Berry, Randy Prunty & Skip Fox all publish widely. Perhaps it is partly the geography-erasing features of the Internet, but it is also true that the South of today is as urban, metropolitan & connected as any part of the nation – and more so than some. From the perspective of literary access, if no other, would you rather be a poet living in the Dakotas or Atlanta?

 

Is it possible thus to use this book as a means to identify a “regional” style? Hank Lazer makes a case for what he calls kudzu textuality, which he characterizes as a “rich, generative, polyvocal, over-determined, hybrid kind of textuality.” That does seem pretty accurate as a description of about half of the writing in the book, where one finds constructed languages alongside vizpo elements very much in a palimpsest. But that seems to me less a function of new Southern writing than it does of Bill Lavender’s inclinations as an editor. If one adds such poets as Dale Smith, Bobby Byrd, Hoa Nguyen, Jonathan Williams, Mark Scroggins, David McAleavey, or any of the other writers who would qualify with just the slightest aesthetic &/or geographic expansion of the volume’s horizon, you would get a fairly different book. That, too, would be Another South.

 

 

 

* Indeed, the one book of John High’s on my bookshelf is a 1993 volume published in Moscow & translated by the late Nina Iskrenko.

 

** The state with the largest number of rural residents is actually Pennsylvania.