In our last episode we’d stopped at the ridge of ironic narratives and considered Skip Fox and editor Bill Lavender’s work. Yet another example would have to be Christy Sheffield Sanford’s “Rachel’s Recovery (Fucking with the Angels)”, an exercise in Kathy Acker-like prose. Like Kathy Acker, there are blocks of text hewn out of original sources, twisted out of context, tricked into a jagged narrative, tricked out in CAPITAL LETTERS, fragmented, disjointed, kitsched-up, and larded with oh-so-knowing feminist critique. This is a text meant to be sung and shouted and performed with larger than life puppets, and where have we seen this all before? Sanford provides us with some helpful footnotes about Racine’s Phaedra so we can “get” what this send-up of Romanticism (the scene is set in 1849) is all about. Though I laughed myself silly over Acker’s Black Tarantula, twenty years later this type of writing leaves me wondering why Christy Sheffield Sanford wants to reinvent the wheel:

UNREPENTANT

the animated gelatinous substance “There’s nothing like the feel of hot sand beneath your soles.” Rachel loves walking barefoot on the beach. THE SCARLET FEVERS A fish gasping for breath, beached over and over by the tide. A body–with gaping mouth, heaving chest–repeatedly rescued by the waves. “I’m an actress; I know I can break their hearts I thrill them.” Her breasts are bare, her hair tied with a black ribbon…

Who was it who said “Make it new”? We get it! Christy Sheffield Sanford! We get it! Been there and done that, Christy Sheffield Sanford! (With pioneering work on the internet.) Two other names Sanford might consider before hammering the keys again are Lucie-Brock Broido and Cynthia Macdonald–poets who cover similar territory, but are fine writers–crafted writers–as well. Not only can we admire their intelligence, we can admire their sentences, and their line breaks, something that we cannot do with Sanford, even though she is the recipient of many local and regional grants–including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Poetry, as the ever-helpful notes at the back of Another South tell us.

Is this truly “experimental writing in the South” as the cover of Another South tells us, or is this an exercise in nostalgia? Thomas Holley Chivers lifts his trembling finger at a UFO.

Now we climb higher towards the lights in this anthology. What constitutes the good work? What attracts me, personally, is writing that does not reek of hubris, that shows craft and thought. In addition I am looking for writing that does indeed speak of place–of the conditions of the American South, and could not have been written any place else.

To be continued.