Listen Here (17 page)

(September 15, 1885–January 12, 1960)

A native New Englander, Ann Cobb arrived in Kentucky in 1905 at the invitation of May Stone, a former classmate at Wellesley College. Stone and a fellow teacher, Katherine Pettit, had established the Hindman Settlement School (a school for mountain youth) in eastern Kentucky in 1902. Cobb was so impressed with the fledgling school that she joined the Hindman staff and remained there until her retirement in 1957.

Cobb's poetry, based on her experiences with mountain people, appeared regularly in national magazines such as the
Saturday Evening Post
and
St. Nicholas.
In 1922, the Houghton Mifflin Company published
Kinfolks
, a collection of Cobb's poetry about mountain life. The book's heavy reliance on dialect (which was much admired by critics in the 1920s) makes the material rather ponderous to modern ears. However, scholars continue to regard
Kinfolks
as a groundbreaking work, and Cobb is generally credited with having produced one of eastern Kentucky's earliest collections of poetry.

Books for children:
An English Christmas
(1978).
Poetry:
Kinfolks & Other Selected Poems
, ed. Jeff Daniel Marion (2003).
Kinfolks: Kentucky Mountain Rhymes
(1922).

Kentucky in American Letters 1913–1975
, Vol. 3 (1976), ed. Dorothy Townsend, 77–81. Jess Stoddart,
The Quare Women's Journals
(1997), 28, 36, 300. Jeff Daniel Marion, Introduction,
Kinfolks & Other Selected Poems
by Ann Cobb (2003), ix–xi. William S. Ward,
A Literary History of Kentucky
(1988), 89–90.

from
Kinfolks: Kentucky Mountain Rhymes
(1922)

Everything's predestined,
So the Preachers say—

Wisht I'd been predestined
To be my brother Clay.

He's the only man-child
Mammy ever bore.

Four of us that's older,
Sev'ral young-uns more.

Eats with Pop and Grandsir',
While we women wait.

Has his wings and drumsticks
Waiting, if he's late.

Rides behind with Poppy,
When he goes to mill,

Fun'ral-meetings, anywhar
Hit suits his little will.

Folks delight to sarve him,
Let him come and go,—

No! he's not so pettish,
Hit's a marvel, though.

Everything's predestined,
And hit's not so bad.

We'd ‘a' been right lonesome
With nary little lad.

from
Kinfolks: Kentucky Mountain Rhymes
(1922)

Put your purse up, woman,—you'll never need hit here.
Lees don't foller selling a mouthful of good cheer.

We'll not miss the chicken, nor yet the bite of cake.
(Sence my baby married I throw out half I bake!)

“Hit don't cost you nothing,” I was raised to say,
“Nothing but the promise to come again and stay.”

from
Kinfolks: Kentucky Mountain Rhymes

I've brung you my three babes, that lost their Maw a year ago.
Folks claim you are right women, larned and fitten for to know
What's best for babes, and how to raise 'em into Christian men.
I've growed afeard to leave 'em lest the house ketch fire again.
For though I counsel 'em a sight each time I ride to town,
Little chaps get so sleepy-headed when the dark comes down!

A body can make shift somehow to feed 'em up of days,
But nights they need a woman-person's foolish little ways
(When all of t'other young things are tucked under mammy's wing,
And the hoot-owls and the frogs and all the lonesome critters sing).
You'll baby 'em a little when you get 'em in their gown?
Little chaps get so sleepy-headed when the dark comes down!

from
Kinfolks: Kentucky Mountain Rhymes
(1922)

Yes, I've sev'ral kivers you can see;
'Light and hitch your beastie in the shade!
I don't foller weaving now so free,
And all my purtiest ones my forebears made.
Home-dyed colors kindly meller down
Better than these new fotched-on ones from town.

I ricollect my granny at the loom
Weaving that blue one yonder on the bed.
She put the shuttle by and laid in tomb.
Her word was I could claim hit when I wed.
“Flower of Edinboro” was hits name,
Betokening the land from which she came.

Nary a daughter have I for the boon,
But there's my son's wife from the level land,
She took the night with us at harvest-moon—
A comely, fair young maid, with loving hand.
I gave her three—“Sunrise” and “Trailing Vine”
And “Young Man's Fancy.” She admired 'em fine.

That green one mostly wrops around the bread;
“Tennessee Lace” I take to ride behind.
Hither and yon right smart of them have fled.
Inside the chest I keep my choicest kind—
“Pine-Bloom” and “St. Ann's Robe” (of hickory brown),
“Star of the East” (that yaller's fading down!).

“The Rose?” I wove hit courting, long ago—
Not Simon, though he's proper kind of heart—
His
name was Hugh—the fever laid him low—
I allus keep that kiver set apart.
“Rose of the Valley,” he would laugh and say,
“The kiver's favoring your face to-day!”

Author's note: In the Kentucky mountains for generations the chief outlet for the artistic sense of the women has been the weaving of woolen coverlets, many of them of elaborate pattern and rare beauty.

(August 14, 1963–)

Poet Lisa Coffman grew up in East Tennessee. Her mother's family lived in Glenmary, Tennessee, a once bustling logging and mining town. She completed her B.A. in computer science and English at the University of Tennessee in 1985, spent a year in Germany as a Rotary Exchange Scholar at Universität Bonn, and then earned an M.A. in English from the creative writing program at New York University in 1989.

Her first book of poems,
Likely
, won the 1995 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, a national first-book competition sponsored by Kent State University Press and judged by Alicia Ostriker. Coffman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Bucknell University, where she was resident poet. The Pew grant allowed her to spend six months in Rugby, Tennessee, studying family history and writing. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, including the
Southern Review
and the
Philadelphia City Paper.

She has worked as a staff writer for the
North Jersey Herald & News
(1989–1990), as a freelance writer (1990–1998, 2001–present), and as an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College (1998–2001). She has been writing poetry for more than fifteen years. She says, “Place and landscape are enormously important in my poetry, and no place more so than the Southern Appalachian Mountains, where I grew up and lived until I was 21. When I'm away from the mountains—which has been for most of my adult life—I'm often trying to conjure the place in my poems, to fasten down what it is that I love about the region, perhaps so that I won't miss it too badly. The color and cadence of Southern Appalachian speech has been the strongest influence so far on the lines of my poems.”

Poetry:
Likely
(1996).

Scott Barker, “Poet sings songs of human heart” [review of
Likely
]
Knoxville News-Sentinel
(22 June 1997), F7. Patricia M. Gantt, “A Level Gaze Trained at Life: The Poetry of Lisa Coffman,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 69–81.

from
Likely
(1996)

1.

The new American Fabricare laundromat
built from an out-of-business ribs place
keeps its lights on until late
and fans flicking underneath the lights
and women outside leaned against the thick storefront glass
and children orbiting those women's laps.

2.

I was home when the starlings crossed over.
The flock settled and lifted off the yard as it passed.
Always they were calling ahead, behind.
They seemed to have great news.
I think it is pride iridescing their black wings,
pride of the Many-in-One,
like the stand of oaks when the wind starts
or the many impeccable bones of the foot.

3.

The femur prepares for journey
for years: long mineral additions in secret.
Then it can slacken over the shapes of car seats
or chairs in offices
or porch stairs during a joblessness,
or I have seen it part the china color of streetlight
under one left walking when the night is on us.

from
Likely
(1996)

In 1960, my grandmother's cousin Curtis Roberson was one of two men assigned by the Appalachian Power Company to find and move all graves in a four-county area near Roanoke, Virginia, that would subsequently be flooded by the Smith Mountain Dam Project. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Curtis and his partner Herbert Taylor, both APCo employees since the 1930s, supervised the relocation of 1,361 graves
.

1.

Rely on old maps: they hold a place
just as our faces retain who we have been
and will shine with us now in who we will be,
so dearly does the flesh love us—

its palm lines are said to be a map
of our wanderings under the stars,
then into the root-starred earth.

2.

Ah, lo—
What was the little song you would sing at evening
free from the burden of work
when all paths led endlessly into the green ease of the world?

lo lo Lord—
Did you sing of the good Christians going to heaven?
Of the sweet one leaned forward on the porch
until all but your white shirt was gone in the dark?

Lord, Lord, Lord—
Or did you sing of the forgotten dead
pocketed in the green hills of Bedford County
of Franklin and Roanoke Counties?

Some later resting above the flexing rim of Smith Mountain Lake
some dissolving with the soft lake bed
most the Company moved—

some having left as witness loose buttons,
teacups alongside a thigh, wedding bands,
some unmarked, attended by periwinkle

said to grow of its own accord over the dead.
But by then you were getting on,
a good Company man, instructed to watch

each moved to a two-by-two-by-one-foot box.

3.

My father is photographed above lit-up Roanoke Valley,
age fourteen. This face shows up later in my brother.
Curtis is photographed with his prize roses.
Smith Mountain Dam floods more light into Roanoke.
Maps are changed. And so on.
Proof of the grave is a stain left in the earth
from the corpse, the clothes it wore. Sure, girl
all the grave holds is a little colored soil
he says, peace of old men on him,
straightens his prize roses. Old maps, inaccurate,
still tell the sites of graves. But flesh maps
what we lose, and all traces of a body's music.

from
Likely
(1996)

Pelvis, that furnace, is a self-fueler:
shoveler of energy into the body.

It is the chair that walks. Swing
that can fire off like a rocket.

It carries the torso, it sets the torso down.
It connects the brother legs, and lets them speak.

Trust the pelvis—it will get everything else there:
pull you onto a ledge, push you into a run.

It is the other spine, prone, like the fallow field.
Here are the constellations of the pelvis:

Drawn Bow, Flame-of-One-Branch,
Round Star, and Down-Hanging-Mountains.

Here is the dress of the pelvis: crescent belly,
and buttocks shaken like a dance of masks.

Forget the pelvis, and you're a stove good for parts:
motion gone, heat gone, and the soup pots empty.