Philip Kolin Interview by John Zheng

JZ: You have published extensively about the Mississippi Delta both in your scholarship and in your poetry books. How has your work on Tennessee Williams (8 books) helped you to write about the Delta?

PCK: I have lectured on and written about Williams now for over 30 years and have traveled extensively throughout the Delta researching his life, plays, and short stories. He is often identified with New Orleans in large measure because of Streetcar, both the play and its film adaptations. But he wrote as much if not more about the Mississippi Delta where he was raised in Clarksdale by his Episcopal priest grandfather. Not surprisingly, many of his works are set in the Delta from his early plays Spring Storm, Battle of Angels (which became Orpheus Descending), and This Property Is Condemned to later ones such as Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Baby Doll, and Kingdom of Earth. Unquestionably Williams’s Delta with its pervasive symbolism, myths, and characters influenced the way I see the Delta. He portrayed the Delta in highly symbolic terms, capturing both the fading nostalgia (Moon Lake) of the South as well as its Gothic horrors. I can remember one trip to Clarksdale visiting St. George’s Church, where his grandfather was the pastor, and then driving a few blocks away to go to the jukes, the sacred and the profane, the poles of Williams’s universe. His Delta plays are filled with so much geography, history, and rituals that have seeped into my own poetry—the Mississippi River with its floods and lure of romance, the blues (one of his most famous characters, Val Xavier, a blues playing Orpheus), sexual taboos (Baby Doll’s assignations with Silva Vacarro; Chicken Ravenstock’s relationship with a white woman in Kingdom of Earth), psychic and physical diseases (e.g., the fever clinic at Lyon and Alma Winemiller’s doppelganger in Summer and Smoke), and the tortures and lynchings of the Other, whether Italians or Blacks. All these are part of William's Delta.

JZ: Your Emmett Till in Different States: Poems was published in 2015. Why did you write on Till’s tragic death and how do these poems reflect your continuing interest in the Civil Rights movement and the Delta?

PCK: I don’t think you can understand the Civil Rights movement without knowing the history of Emmett Till. His horrific murder in 1955 has haunted me and America. It has been seen as the event that galvanized the Civil Rights movement. In fact, Rosa Parks and Dr. King both were powerfully influenced by Emmett’s death and its aftermath. His tragic history is tied to both Chicago, my hometown, and to the Delta. Though Till was several years older than I am, I often wondered if I ever walked passed him in the Loop or on the southside where he and I grew up. I published a one-act play—Emmett Till Goes Skip-Stopping on the CTA—in Callaloo about his riding the L trains (on the Chicago Transit Authority) as I did I dedicated my poems to his mother, Mamie Till—who attended the same college I did Chicago Teachers College, South, today Chicago State—and included poems about her, Emmett’s cousins, and his great uncle Moses. The collection begins with Emmett’s boyhood in Chicago and progresses to his fatal journey to the Delta and his murder in Tallahatchie County and the heinous trial of some of his murderers in Sumner, Mississippi. Bitterly satiric, the Delta poems pummel residents who contributed to the murderers’ legal fees (“The Slop Jar”), the totally biased jury, the “white” lies told about Till, and the eternal punishment reserved for Carolyn Bryant, the white woman whom he supposedly flirted with. Later poems trace key events in the history of Civil Rights as Emmett’s ghost comments on and laments the fate of the Freedom Riders, Dr. King’s murder and Virgil Ware’s as well the fate of Black soldiers who died in Vietnam, Trayvon Martin’s death, and Emmett’s Southern brothers whose “sole obituary is etched” in the horrific Jet photo his mother insisted the world see to give her son justice. For me the poem that most powerfully expressed Mamie Till’s pain is “Triolet” with its key lines: “No, the Delta shall not keep my son / Though they tried to hide him in the river’s misery,” referring of course to the Tallahatchie where his body was sunk and attached to a cotton gin fan after he was pistol whipped and shot in the head. I was honored to have these poems on Till published by Third World Press, the oldest, independent publisher of Black thought and literature, founded by Dr. Haki Madhubuti.

JZ: You have a long-standing interest in capturing both the beauty and tragedy of the Mississippi Delta. Which Delta landscape for you most reflects these divergent characteristics?

PCK: Beyond doubt, the Mississippi most powerfully defines and powerfully describes the Delta. Any poetics about the beauty and terror of the Delta can never ignore or minimize Big Muddy. In fact, I have written more about the Mississippi than any other iconic Delta location. Several years ago, I co-edited with Jack Bedell, an anthology of more than 100 new poems about the Mississippi’s paradoxical identity. Entitled Down to the Dark River, the collection included lyrics, satires, fantasies, and meditations exploring the dangers of and to the river as well as its majesty and beauty. My own poetry about the river has primarily focused on its eco-theological significance. “The River Burial” explores baptisms in the Mississippi where “sinners in cotton whites, some with wavy caps, march forward” but were “submerged sins keep coming back to shore.” Some of my poems lament its endangered beauty. In “You Can Trust a River,” I think the one stanza that aptly summarizes the precarious existence of the Mississippi is “A river is the longest tear duct in America / filled with unshared sorrows / and lost dreams—pearls coated in silt.” The last two images capture the beauty and terror of the river. Other poems of mine decry the pollution that threatens the river’s survival. The wetlands, for instance, are vanishing as “fish, fowl, and dreams” are in the process being destroyed. In “The Elegy,” included in this issue, the speaker bewails the loss of the river’s once magnificent painters—the warbling birds—by the encroaching “rigs” with their oil spills and slime. An eco-system unto itself, the river is vital to the sustainability of the Delta.

JZ: You also have written several collections of poems about spiritual matters. How does your interest in matters of faith and religion surface in your poetry about the Delta?

PCK: Scripture and my own Roman Catholicism have infused almost everything I write. Many of my Delta poems contain Biblical allusions and/or analogues that help shape the structure of a poem, characterize its speaker, or provide appropriate symbolism and imagery. Like other parts of the South, the Delta is anchored in religion, and so the connections between the Bible and Delta landscapes seem natural, inevitable, but I have tried to intensify the irony and heighten the region’s tragedy by incorporating Biblical subjects. Contextualizing Scripture, “Noah’s Neighbors” paints these miscreants as Delta rednecks owning “rusty cars and outback stills” and shooting from “brazen deer stands.” In “Uncle Moses’s Dream,” Till’s heroic uncle fantasizes that Emmett has escaped the “thirsty fists demanding to be quenched in his blood” while connecting last lines to both Old and New Testament prophecies—“he almost found the train tracks which might have / led him out of the Delta / out of Egypt I called my son.” In “What Emmett Would Have Sung” had he lived, a Scriptural allusion to Christ’s last words on the cross-links Emmett’s martyrdom for Civil Rights to the Savior’s death—we learn Emmett’s “voice might even had been heard / on a Gospel station crooning / Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani.” In my Reading God’s Hand Writing (2012), a poem entitled “At a Blues Church” is set near Midnight, Mississippi where the Lord’s Supper tastes like “molasses poured / over collards and coughs.” For me the spiritual here is expressed through Southern signifiers of the quotidian.

JZ: In addition to your scholarship and poetry, you have done a great deal of editing over your career. Please describe your work as an editor, and how it relates to your writing and teaching?

PCK: I started editing while working on my Ph.D. at Northwestern studying under Prof. Sam Schoenbaum, the celebrated Shakespeare biographer. At first, I was his editorial assistant on Renaissance Drama and then became the assistant editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama. A few years later, during my second week at Southern Miss, the then chair, Marice C. Brown, informed me I had been appointed to be the assistant editor of the Mississippi Folklore Register. When I told her I knew very little about Mississippi and almost nothing about folklore, she quipped, “You will learn,” and so I did over the 15 years I was on the masthead, finally becoming the editor. Over the years, I also have served as a guest editor of a host of journals, including Names, South Atlantic Review, Mississippi Quarterly, POMPA, Valley Voices, and Arkansas Review. In 1987, I co-founded and co-edited a new journal, Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, and subsequently served as the guest editor of two special issues of the Southern Quarterly (on Tennessee Williams and on Emmett Till) before being asked to edit the Quarterly, which I did for about seven years. Reading and editing hundreds of essays for these journals encouraged me to write better and more especially about the South in general and the Delta in particular. Happily, I built a network of scholars I could call on as reviewers and potential contributors.

           I also co-edited three volumes of eco-poetry—on Katrina with Susan Swartwout; on the Mississippi River with Jack Bedell; and on the magic of the moon with Sue Walker. Poems in each volume have focused on the Delta. I must have evaluated thousands of poems for these three anthologies, not to mention the poetry submissions I received for the Southern Quarterly. Editing poetry, of course, is very different from preparing a scholarly manuscript for publication. Changing a comma, semicolon, or a single word in a poem may have deeper consequences than it might in an essay. My editing experience unquestionably allowed me to give students firsthand advice in my seminars on scholarly publishing. I showed them how to identify publishable topics, do meticulous research, write clearly and convincingly, and then find the most likely publications for their work. I am happy to report that many of my doctoral students were able to get at least one and, in a few instances, several publications from manuscripts they submitted in my seminars.

JZ: How does your new collection, Reaching Forever: Poems, continue your interests in the spiritual, Civil Rights, and Southern landscapes?

PCK: Reaching Forever is indeed a continuation of a lot of my earlier work. Many of the poems in this new book have been inspired by a sacred South. In the first section, “Where Water Flows,” poems deal with the personification of the Mississippi as it provides an exegesis of the Book of Genesis, and on loss and redemption that are linked to the river; and laments on ecological dangers. Other poems turn to “Pentecost on the Florida Gulf Coast,” and the ways ponds, too, reflect divine messages. Inescapably, water evokes Scriptural and sacramental symbols. In Reaching Forever, as in my other poetry books, I have tried to read ponds, creeks, rivers, and the Gulf itself in theological terms. In subsequent sections of Reaching Forever entitled “Wolves and Sheep” the poems describe the land and its inhabitants are through a Biblical lens. Moreover, several poems are set in Southern churches, one in particular celebrating the holiness of a congregation where “Old ladies in white, wearing wide-brimmed hats, sit on the front row . . . They leave their prescription money in clinking plates and leave with platters of Psalms.” Another looks at a New Orleans funeral in a church named in honor of the Holy Ghost; I include poems about Civil Rights as well as poems about the homeless, prisoners at Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary, or men with AIDS infecting “daughter Africa.” I was blown away by Father Anthony Schueller (the former editor of Emmanuel Magazine) blurbed that in reading Reaching Forever “I felt I was on holy ground,” proving that every poet is also a theologian. 

JZ: Do you have any future projects in mind about the Delta?

PCK: Yes, two of them. I will be guest-editing another special issue of Valley Voices for the Fall 2020 issue exclusively devoted to cotton which will contain scholarly essays, poems, and short stories, memoirs, and photographs, many of them focus on the Delta. And I hope to edit an anthology of Delta poetry, with both previously published and new ones, similar to but geographically far more restricted than Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright’s Hard Lines: Rough Southern Poetry.

Review of Philip C. Kolin's Reaching Forever: Poems

Eugene OR: Cascade Books, Poiema Series, 2019. www.thecresset.org

Here is a remarkable collection of new poems, each one starting out within the finite world but extending itself in metaphor and rich verbiage toward the infinite, the eternal. The image on the book’s cover shows a human figure holding up a star as if ready to launch it into space. The poet seems to be standing on some sort of beach, some margin where land, sea, and air join in a fluid boundary that represents the fluidities of existence on this God-ordained planet.

     This has been Philip Kolin’s life-long attitude as a poet-Christian—firmly grounded in the realities of human existence but open to infinite possibilities that celebrate the transcendent, the miraculous. The verses are like searchlights, picking up images from a dark sky and illuminating them into our own vision.

      Reading poems like “Breaking Bread with the Gulls,” I love how he describes his Maundy Thursday, by telling us, “bread is theology” and the birds mendicants. He says, “I am called to feed these birds, / to be their host—note the word ‘host,’ the human equivalent of the presence of God in the Host—and the gulls harvest the air.” A minute later, three little girls show up, and he gives each a slice. “They break it into wafer-size/pieces for the birds to snatch up” thus celebrating a beach Eucharist, mirroring the acts of a generous God, and concluding “There’s no inflation in God’s economy.” The mystery of divine provision is grounded in a chance encounter that shows the grace of God’s frugality.

      In the poem “January on the Gulf of Mexico” this beach is peopled with pigeons and pelicans, but more importantly by “a blind man with dark glasses,” an army veteran with “a brisk mustache and hair like sleet” reflecting on his “stainless steel life,” a tattooed teen, and women sharing secrets about their dead husbands. Words resonate, vowels and consonants rubbing together with an almost electric energy.

     But the poems are far more than skillful, spirited verbiage. The images challenge the imagination. We see the un-seeable in the visions the poet projects in “the white comforter of winter / above a crypt of cold, dark seeds.” And, in “Baptism,” the exquisite array of colored corals that await for the artist “whose canvas must be submerged / to be seen.” It is this wide spectrum of creation that seems to mesmerize the poet, and us, as he brings his images to life for us to enter and see, along with him.

     Again and again the gift of contrast is evident—distinctions made clear, essential differences revealed. Kolin writes from real life—humanity experienced, with warmth, vitality, conviction and the authenticity of personal experience. He has lived his poetry. Throughout this volume he shows the effectiveness of economy, saying no more than is necessary to describe an event or scene, allowing the imagination of the reader to summon a mental image, in itself a creative act. In his description of an aborted baby, in the poem “A Simple Ten-minute Procedure,” he imagines that the infant had only “memories of forceps / cradling him down /a sterile sink.” The word “sterile” is significant, referring to the negation of new life.

     A keen observer of the varieties of the human condition, in another poem, on a Mississippi river baptism, Kolin projects verbal photographs: “sinners in cotton whites,” “a young mother, her womb full,” whose tears “will further salt the wetlands.” The trouble is, though the preacher “rinses wrath and lust out of each of the convicted,” the “submerged sins keep coming back to shore.” The economy of these descriptions adds to its effectiveness.

      In “Old Men at Funerals” he enters the imaginations of the ancients who fear “too much light, too much darkness, / then the silence of dirt.” And for them “Heaven was always a comforting thought...but not today when it creaks close on pallbearer wheels and crinkling crepe” as they are hauled in “a bronzed box car/towards a frightening eternity.”

     These authentic poems all spring from a storehouse of personal experience, human wisdom, insight, and a profound penetration into Scripture. With each turn of a page, I’m nudged and often launched into new understandings. It is like opening a window so that the three-dimensional life of the spirit opens up—a varied and lovely landscape of both lights and shadows, colors and contrasts.

     Speaking of God, the poet tells us: “He lives in infinity, and his voice is / an octave higher than silence. / His word thrum.// He speaks in endless vowels."