William Woofitt’s third poetry collection, Spring Up Everlasting, crosses Appalachia, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Newfoundland, and Mali to reflect on environmental crises, natural disaster, and human violence. I want to focus on what feels so unique to this book, namely, the poet’s portraits of underprivileged Appalachians and rural Americans.
Woolfitt lives and teaches in Cleveland, Tennessee, a small Appalachian town. His poems decline to judge their narrators or speakers; they attempt to see them in their own mirrors. Borrowing from a pentecostal and traditional mindset, the poems occupy an ongoing present rather than a linear temporality.
Eschatology complicates time, hope, and ideals of restoration. I mean to suggest that even hope, that winged abstraction, is feathered by how one construes human agency and guilt. It requires humility to know that there are those who believe no human ethics of liberation can save them from poverty, suffering, and the broken bootstraps of American dreams. For the fatalist perspective (which often coincides with the conservative religious one), Progress is a false deity that promises linearity where no such line is possible.
Struck by the lives of those who exist outside socioeconomic privilege, college education, critical theory, and adequate leisure time to reflect on the appalling ignorance of others, I reflected more on my optimism, its valuation of action and protest, its visibility in a world where barricades are drawn in images and hashtags. I found myself wondering if any hope is innocent of its assumptions, its locale, its particular ecology.
The first poem, “Slurry Spill,” takes place in Inez, Kentucky, where the Martin Coal Slurry Spill of 2000 dumped millions of gallons of toxic arsenic and mercury into local creeks, resulting in mass fish kills and permanent damage to the eco-systems. For a sense of the magnitude, consider that the spill was 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster, and it contaminated the water supply for over 27,000 local residents.
Woolfitt builds a tight, single-stanza descriptive collage of this event as experienced by local residents:
It could seem like mercy, like good fortune,
a passing over: that when the slurry
breaks the waste pond’s bottom, it oozes down
two creeks, not one, divides itself between
Coldwater Fork and Wolf Creek, doesn’t rise
very high. Dead fish, but no people died.
The boundary between mercy, good fortune, and blessing is blurred here. One might take the dead fish as a Biblical gift, the parable where Jesus killed fish in order to save humans from starving. In this vein, a tone of authentic humility and wonder insinuate that God’s ways cannot be known. Supernatural justification emerges as an alternate form of justice:
The thickest chocolate shake, people say.
Smells like hydraulic. A slow-moving black
smothering. Children throw rocks at the creek,
busted cement bricks, old tires, just to find
what else will float. Around here, you don’t
have to be Jesus to walk on water.
By layering adult interpretations with the actions of curious children, Woolfitt presents what appears to be a terrible accident, something stitched into the nature of human existence by unseen forces. This sense of fatedness characterizes the tone throughout this book.
As for responsibility and agency, something permitted by God cannot also be a criminal act for which a corporation could be held responsible. In an essay on fate and character, Walter Benjamin suggests that religious guilt and atonement occupy separate soil from legal guilt. To outsiders, the inflected, recurring fatalism might be mistaken for stoicism or ignorance.
But what if ignorance is a word used to refuse understanding? What if knowledge of the world as represented by science and politics cannot protect us? This question animates multiple poems about Appalachian spirituality and its pentecostal rituals. A camp meeting, for example, is a traditional form of outdoor revival that originated in 19th century frontier towns where traveling Protestant preachers would stop and preside over baptism.
In parts of Alabama, camp meetings are still treasured. My friend marks each month by its distance from the annual camp meeting where family, old friends, and strangers meet on land somewhere mid-state for a weekend of feasting, praying, baptizing, testifying, and speaking in tongues. She describes it as a space where she “feels known and understood”–an environment in which the things she believes don’t have to be spoken, prefaced, or defended.
In the second section of “Camp Meeting in a Grove of Sycamore Trees,” a local mountain women is overcome by the spirit, unbinding the tongues silence with ecstasy:
her hair comes loose.
When she gets the blessing, she drops
under the oaks, rolls over acorn shells
and dead leaves. She forgets sores,
burrs, blisters, muddy shoes, ugly things.
Freshets of new speech pour from her,
a dream that petals in her mouth.
The turn on this powerful trochee, freshets, thickens the meaning of the metaphor. Freshets, defined as the flood of a river from heavy rain or melted snow, becomes a vehicle for the creation of something extraordinary, an act of nature combined with an act of spiritual possession.
The long poem, “Grassy Branch Pentecostal Church” begins with an intimate description of glossolalia, the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues. The poet mobilizes the energy of local vernacular and daily objects into a dissociative swirl which resembles leaving the body:
caught in Hazel’s throat, prayer language,
blood of the lamb, spirit touching spirit,
gush of vowels. Sweat inside a shirtsleeve,
an itch, tears blinked back, bearded iris bulb
by the slab steps, greeting the stony earth.
Each alliterative syllable builds tension on the tongue. The reversal and odd positioning of subject-verb combinations seem to place objects inside the subject’s body, blurring the boundaries between tools, things, flora, and those who use them. The mystery of glossolalia implies deliverance through the sacralization of all. There is no golden chalice or robe in this church. It is the ordinary flesh, the implements of poverty, that hold place for divinity.
The first-person narrates from inside local lives. “Canaan Land,” for example, follows Ava through her widowing, her daily activities, a woman surviving in a culture where expressing pain or hurt feelings is superfluous. Pain, here, is assumed, knit to life, common, predictable. Pain is an ordinary artefact. The third part begins with Ava staring in the mirror, seeing “the old cheat’s last plaything.” As the poem continues, the loveless marriage is sparsely, as silence, as a napkin. The poem turns when Ava suddenly asks her spouse to “give” her a child, and he responds:
I’m not God, he says. She keeps trying;
opens pots, tubes, and tins;
chooses pale whispery stuff
to powder forehead and cheeks,
and for her mouth a burnt red
like the poppies she planted in a tire.
Traditional gender roles remain intact: it is the female’s job to foment desire, it is the man’s choice to respond, and it is a God who blesses the woman with a child in reward for performing femininity. Ava’s longing for a baby feels timeless, or cut from an ancient fabric.
Because so many of these poems feel legendary, I was drawn to “Jawbone” for its use of plural collective pronoun:
No strangers to grief, the bluesmen rub
the bleached teeth of jawbone clubs
with willow stalks, shake the teeth loose,
rattle their grief. Like the bluesmen, we rub
the blisters on our hands, swill corn juice,
chew sugar stalks till our teeth come loose.
Note how Woolfitt defines the “we” with respect to shared actions and the stigmata of poverty on physical appearance. One imagines, again, a deliverance.
“Water Shrew as the Apostle Peter” is an extended metaphor celebrating the water shrew, a creek’s most unlikable creature. An old tin can is “rusted to razor-lace, fine as a riffleshell,” and spectacular in the use a shrew makes of it.
The northern riffleshell is an endangered freshwater mussel that was historically found in various states, including Kentucky. Because mussels filter water, malacologists use the presence of certain mussels to determine the water quality and health of a stream. Here, the filtering mussel is absent, remembered as a disjointed similie binding trash to memory. It’s a brilliant poetic gesture, this ode to the least likely.
6.
Woolfitt’s attention to language enacts the brevity of communication in small Appalachian communities. Agency and autonomy remain uncertain. Causality feels external; things happen to people.
Using portmanteau words to combine subjects and verbs (see weed-wrapped, tree-choaked, nozzle-wash, steam-fizzle, bucket-clank etc.), the poet localizes the motion, makes the lines speak their language. By removing the articles of speech, Woolfitt enacts sparsity, to compress language while reversing the subject-verb combinations so that syntax joins diction to assert kinship with things, to displace agency, to complicate modern notions of autonomy, the province and proving-ground of innocence.
And sometimes the poems end in this brilliant, complex images, as we see at the end of “Jarena Lee Preaches At Buffalo Village”:
sorrow’s gulf, the few words that quicken.
God never forsakes. Milkweed strand,
silver hair, thread of a spider.
I imagined an icon combining these pieces of nature and under it, the caption composed of the words in italics, and perhaps, a sense in which the poet establishes on Appalachian iconography.
Coming across words like limberjack, I found myself looking for definitions. A limberjack is a dancing doll made from wood; it is a traditional handmade toy that has been consigned to the realm of folk art. Like Walter Benjamin’s description of “folk art,” where local language cloaks the mundane, the fantastic, and the grotesque in the same fatalist tone, where the individual exists as part of the collective lore, the larger story, Woolfit’s poems situate themselves in a language outside judgement.
At a time when the rural working class has been deeply politicized by association, poems that give voice to their experience and worldview feel radical. The ability to humanize the dispossessed in their own language, without reference to values outside that language, requires humility. Part of me craved an indictment of humans for their complicity in systems of poverty ecological destruction. Instead, humans exist as a species inside nature, in a neutral, unpredictable relationship.
Always, this sense that rapture is near — rapture as deliverance from the wounded body, the poverty, the grueling labor, the invisibility of stoicism — and kin to religious ecstasy. The innocence of religious fundamentalism is its escapism, the space in which one’s voice is valued, found worthy; and one’s suffering is not punishment but privilege.
Time has a legendary quality, an unchanging irrevocability that is not linear, not a progression, but what Ernest Bloch calls “the immutable,” that time-space unique to legend “where people endure what befalls them and are obedient.” I don’t want to romanticize this worldview (and I don’t believe Woolfitt does this), but it seems fair to acknowledge how early pastoral forms engaged religious questions of agency, and often located the human relationship to nature in supernatural transcendence.
There is no turning point or fulcrum in this book, but there is something close to an epiphany in the envoi of in “Brush Arbor,” where the Woolfitt speaks in a loose first person:
Say it plain, I tell myself. That in the hollows,
in the gaps, you believe.
This belief, this audacious hope, is poetry’s most difficult gift. I am holding it close, reckoning with the harrow and poignance of Woolfitt’s deliverance.
[Published March 2, 2020 by Mercer University Press, 80 pages, $16.00 paperback]