"Dark" Art (why I'm glad to be a Southerner)

I am supposed to read something tomorrow night at our 5X15 night (15 artists sharing something for 5 minutes each). I feel pretty close to choosing a handful of my poetry and reading it (3 or 4 short pieces that I had previously strung together) ... I am just very aware at how stark and angry it sounds. I wonder how it will come across and what is more, most of my writing is like this. I don't know if it has to do with maturing or dispossession, but I find it incredibly hard to write about light and beauty and joy ... most of my writing is about sadness and loneliness and the unending (though often unnoticed) troubles in our country.

I take comfort only in coming across some great writers who seem to give credence to my way of writing and the topics I am always tackling with pen and lyric. I am thinking of Walker Percy and his belief in the novelist as diagnostic for the soul. And Flannery O'Connor and her grotesque and violent short stories that are able to push us to the edge and so our eyes are wide for even one brief moment of grace. In fact, let's start with her because I have the book out on my desk.

She quoted Walker Percy on why there were so many good fiction writers from the south: "'We lost the war.' [The civil war if you need reminding ... Flannery continues] He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we had had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence--as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country." Read that closely, it is very important, especially if you live in the south.

The south is the only piece of American soil that has lost a war and while the spectacles of progress and the American story dazzle and sparkle ... the southerner (with his inburnt knowledge of human limitations) knows loss and limits, knows sinful choice and wayward-wandering, knows blackened buildings and gut shots, knows failures and failed ambitions, knows defeated pride and egg-on-the-face. Flannery continues to say that the south is double blessed with having losted a war and having the means to interpret it, "Mencken called the South the Bible Belt."

"In the South we have a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols."

"This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York." Whether for lack of maturity or a meloncholly disposession, my best work is an attempt to pulverize our idols.

Here is a short example (from what I read at 5X15):

I. Mechanical Mother Bird

Everywhere,
the mechanical mother,
the fowl of orifices,
spits pre-chewed,
artificially flavored,
microwaved worm
into our mouths.

We have no need for a coup
since our wings rot with disuse.

Our civilization has arrived.

We have finally shed all meaning.

All men have the unaliable right
to government funded pleasure and happiness
and any other restless pursuit
of soulless America.