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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.
Read
more...
Elegy for the
River
The river is never random.
It is history's ledger,
scribbling
the obituary of reeds and moss,
the thinning of birch and brake,
receding marshes,
the invasion of rigs—
spills, slime traps, smoke.
Once the river conducted a
symphony
of painters: red-winged
blackbirds,
blue streaked herons, yellow
warblers,
egrets as white as clouds.
But their colors leached
as they thrashed, wailed, and
lunged for
scraps of oxygen
in the suffocating air.
There are no feathers today to
take home
for reliquary boxes.
Silvered rain used to propagate
the river
multiplying luminous dawns, silky
dusks.
Once the incarnation of time, the
river
has no more seasons to mark.
Now the river is on a journey to
emptiness,
snaking through a desert of owls
and cactus,
the moon, a forsaken memory.
The King is
Dead. Long Live the King
Blues boy, sharecropper's son,
for nearly
ninety years your heart beat like
a hammer
even as your hands shimmered with
electricity.
Each day you woke up, you got the
blues
and then played them each night.
Starting off in dirt-floor jukes,
you performed
in Itta Bena, Kilmichael,
Belzoni, Indianola,
Blue Springs then on to Beale,
Chicago,
London, Moscow, and Japan.
You and your woman Lucille put
the Delta
on the map of heartache, two
hundred
mournful miles long and a
lifetime wide.
You sang of love gone wrong,
cheatin'
men and cheatin' women, and the
lying hope
of seeing them return. Instead
came stormy Mondays
and sunglass nights, comfortless
phones, welting tears;
blood and promises seeping
through old
floorboards; and roadsides
littered with broken bones
and bottles just because someone
opened the wrong door.
Your solos with Lucille made our
souls tingle.
And those vibrato improvisations
with single notes
went on forever and brought your
fans back
into the fold of Gospel, jazz,
rock and jump blues.
The thrill will never be gone.
Bluesmen at
Dawn
The last note of the night
escapes
their throats then flies south
before
the Delta sunrise. They gather
outside
the locked juke with their brown
sugar mash and tales about the
women
whose hips swayed to the snare
drum,
their laughter like a high
pitched clarinet.
The more sugar they swill, the
more memory
takes them back to those nights
on the levees
and taffy-colored arms so soft
and inviting.
A sax man brags about the night
he fathered
his first son long before the
Delta stubble froze.
The moon that night tasted like
sparkling wine.
Like Mande griots, they keep the
dead
alive with stories of mothers who
cried over
their teen sisters raped on
Resurrection Day
and brothers with stretched
necks, each memory
peeled away with swigs of amens.
And when
the morning sun blared like an
alarm clock
they return once more to the
plantations,
their stories ploughed under, or
carried
in poke sacks that grow heavier
with the years.
Delta Winter
South of Cairo,
the place where shadows go
to die. Nothing soft stirs
in the Delta Winter.
Not even the sky lingers
in blue calm but hides
in mock cotton clouds,
their prickly bolls left behind
to greet the thick grey day.
Creeks freeze
and cash crops go bankrupt—
spurs, choke weeds, rotting
rocks,
a market for despair.
Yellowed groundwater
withers thirst but is still urned
in mason jars against spring
drought.
The Delta has become a colony
of Maude Schuyler Clay's dogs,
burred teeth and shedding skin,
hearts beating only for survival,
roaming like the foraging wind,
their eyes ready to catch
anything alive.
Always ahead the gloomy mud river
bumps into ice-coated levees
like drowned, bloated corpses,
embalmed memories of summer’s
commerce.
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Philip
C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English
(Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly
at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has
written or edited more than 40 books, including nine
collections of his poems, the most recent being Emmett
Till in Different States: Poems (Third World Press,
2015), Benedict's Daughter: Poems (Wipf and Stock,
2017), and Reaching Forever: Poems (Poiema Poetry
Series, Cascade Press, 2019). He has also co-edited,
with Jack Bedell, an anthology of original poems on the
Mississippi River, Down to the Dark River (Louisiana
Literature Press, 2015).
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