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Excerpt
From Nights Under A Tin Roof: Recollections Of A Southern Boyhood Foreward When I first read some of these pieces to a fellow Mississippian, a writer now living in Virginia, she said "I'm astonished that you look back with such benevolence, with no bitterness. It was then I realized that I was not sticking to the mode of the expatriate Southerner who tends to pass judgment on "the magnolia mentality" or to scorn the southern social structure. Well, I thought, there's nothing I can add to what's been said already. And if there were I still wouldn't do it here. Not in these recollections, because they were not seen with the adult eye or filtered through the sensitivities of the educated. All that stuff came later, found its way into prose now tucked under papers in old college footlockers or into speeches made in the sixties and seventies. Instead, here are the forties and fifties, not as an examination of forces shaping the South, rather as forces shaping me. Personally. Just me. Mississippi boy, adolescent, teenager. Maybe I'll take my turn at all that professional southern introspection one of these days. Certainly it's in me, but it would not be, were there not also a nurturing presence from an earlier, gentler time. I suppose I've needed for many years to express that earlier time in a form which could somehow paint the place and character and people and language with the generosity and gratitude I feel. But until 1977 I was unable to come even close to doing it. Then I heard James Dickey reading from his own work one evening; it was so powerful, so full of what I wanted to create that I returned to my hotel and scribbled seven short poems before the night was over. They were terrible but represented a change of form and, more important, a change in my thinking. For that I thank James Dickey, whose work sets a wonderful standard for us all. I'm not sure my early poems were poetry, and some people have asked if the work in this book is really poetry. Each reader can answer for himself. I call these writings "pieces" because their shape comes to me as stories and then as pieces of a larger story. Their form began to emerge in 1980 when Betty Sue Flowers, friend and mentor, scholar, professor, and poet, took it upon herself to help my understanding of, thus my writing of, poetry. We met at the Aspen Institute in 1980, and Betty Sue has carried on a mostly long-distance seminar with me ever since, a gift I can never repay. As for making a book, the thought never occurred to me until late one night in Oxford, Mississippi, when I ended up at the faculty house of Willie Morris who, at the time, was writer in residence at Ole Miss. He read one of his essays later to be published as Terrains of the Heart. "Your turn to read something," he said, much to the disappointment, I'm sure, of a couple of students who had been swaying with his every word. I had some poems in my briefcase, and after I read two, Willie pointed to me and said, "Come home, Autry. Come home and publish." That late-night performance led to a meeting with Larry Wells who listened to a few poems, read others for himself, then wrote a letter saying he would like to publish a book of my poetry. Soon after, I met his wife, Dean Faulkner Wells who told me that my work reminded her of her childhood near Oxford. Then it unfolded, as these spiritual connections seem always to do, that several of these poems were written about the same places, the same people, the same church experiences - for her grandfather (mentioned by name in one poem) and my father were songleader and preacher, respectively, in the same church at the same time. By my romantic vision, that coincidence makes this book a project of spirit. Nothing less.
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Nights Under A Tin Roof by James A. Autry. |
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