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    Mississippi
    Mississippi
    Mississippi
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    Mississippi

    By Maude Schuyler Clay and Ann Fisher-Wirth

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This gorgeous large-format hardback (11 x 9.25 inches) features 47 poems and 47 color photographs that explore the history, culture, and ecology of the state of Mississippi. The epigraph for the book is taken from Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence": "The imperishable quiet at the heart of form." This quietness to be found by contemplating the photographs of Maude Schuyler Clay was at the heart of Ann Fisher-Wirth's poetic process, which involved listening — listening to the voices that spoke their stories somehow in connection, however oblique, with the photographs. Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian; Fisher-Wirth has lived there for 30 years, so the images and words represent long, complicated accumulations and recombinations of visual and linguistic experience. In her recent memoir The Faraway Nearby, the environmental writer Rebecca Solnit writes: "A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there." Mississippi suffers from severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression. Yet the state also possesses great natural beauty and a rich and complex culture, one interwoven from the many voices that have made up its identity. Mississippi explores both this degradation and this beauty. The poems are explorations of voice in its Mississippi plenitude and variety, honoring the voices, no matter whose they are, whether white or African American, and exploring the rich orality of Mississippi culture. With one exception, the beautiful, haunting photographs do not depict people, but, rather, swamps, fields, trees, lakes, empty chairs, dilapidated buildings. They work with the poems to offer the spirit of place.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWings Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2018
    ISBN9781609405618
    Mississippi

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      Book preview

      Mississippi - Maude Schuyler Clay

      the imperishable quiet at the heart of form

      —Theodore Roethke

      Mississippi © 2018 by Wings Press for Ann Fisher-Wirth and Maude Schuyler Clay

      Cover photograph and all interior photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay. Used by permission of the artist.

      ISBN: 978-1-60940-560-1 (Cloth/hardback)

      E-books:

      ePub: 978-1-60940-561-8

      Mobipocket/Kindle: 978-1-60940-562-5

      Library PDF: 978-1-60940-563-2

      Wings Press

      627 E. Guenther

      San Antonio, Texas 78210

      Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805

      On-line catalogue and ordering:

      www.wingspress.com

      Wings Press books are distributed to the trade by

      Independent Publishers Group • www.ipgbook.com

      PRINTED IN CHINA

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

      Names: Fisher-Wirth, Ann, author. | Clay, Maude Schuyer, photographer.

      Title: Mississippi / poems by Ann Fisher-Wirth ; photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay.

      Description: San Antonio, Texas : Wings Press, [2018].

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017005581| ISBN 9781609405601 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781609405618 (ePub ebook) | ISBN 9781609405625 (kindle/mobipocket ebook) | ISBN 9781609405632 (library pdf)

      Classification: LCC PS3606.I79 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031775

      Except for fair use in reviews and/or scholarly considerations, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author, photographer, or the publisher.

      This book was made possible by generous subvention grants from the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and the Black Earth Institute.

      Contents

      Foreword

      Between two worlds

      The heron he come from beyond

      You may not have these cushions

      He comes to your door

      Had me a dog once

      Women     what do they want

      —Then lumbering across the field

      These August afternoons even the candles

      That’s me in my new silk blouse

      I said write me, Jig Jig

      We’re mostly headed for hell

      Pardon my French

      We read these books in 101

      You got it. Miss Physical Processes

      Well of course we don’t condone

      Sister Laurent made us memorize

      Sometimes I gaze at this

      This guy from Berlin came to our school

      —And the five o’clock sun

      You stand in Tree, vrksasana

      Why do you think you must have something to say

      I wonder if the chair’s still there

      Once we drove to the lake

      Just for a day     as if it could

      Well y’all knew Jimmy once he moved to Mississippi

      I do not like snake     he be mean

      When it commenced it come on fast

      Go ahead you stinkin

      Devil each night he come around my door

      He ain’t done right to whistle

      Well you know back then couldn’t no

      Yeah     man

      —Take that flag down,

      I’m scared, if I

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