Diane Gilliam Fisher

This Outstanding Voice of a Master Poet , Diane Gilliam Fisher, is a contemporary of poetry as song, of the stature of the traditional Scottish Folk Ballad of the American Southeast, West Virginia. The famous Scottish ballad "Edward, Edward" has its communal match for tragedy. Where "Edward, Edward" bears all the hallmarks of genuine Scottish speech, theme, rhythms, in what we today wrongly denigrate when we think of Folklore and Folklife as a downgraded form of something magisterial called literary History, Fisherʻs Kettle Bottom -- every single poem -- flatly contradicts. Its clear integrity of form, substance, tone undercuts the tags that the catalogers of [Librarything], reflecting a presumed superior position of socio-economic-historical value, cite after Appalachia "Abuse," "Incest," "Poverty," as though Appalachian literature is of Cross Family violence alone not only in the past but in the present and for the future and, unlike "Edward, Edward," which is a ballad of a tragic young Scottish Aristocratic family murderer, understood as one character in the ballad,condemned from Coincidence AND Will, not History. The Scottish Ballad "Edward, Edward" is also deeply ironic in being intra-family self-condemning; but the narrator, a reportorial member of the West Virginia Coal Mining community by historical reconstruction, in KETTLE BOTTOM is about a community that is a family, and a victim, not an aggressor and victim, of what occurs. KETTLE BOTTOM is about different individualsʻ tragedies And "accidents" -- confusing the two has made proper classifying of the actual life events problematic for the literary classifications. In the Ballad, there is a self-awareness of the enormity of the crime by the individuals; in the poems, the awareness is mainly on the side of the miners, and their surviving families and friends, who generation after generation, are virtually sacrificial offerings when mines are, after warnings from past events, left dangerous by accident but mainly from deliberate "neglect" and arrogance of the Business Means Profit view to judging the value of a coal minerʻs life, including his presumed way of life. There is a cover voice, in these poems, that takes on the viewing position of the miners, of individual members like a teenage son, or a recent newly wed husband, of a middle aged father of many children. It does not know the mind of the Owners, even of the Middle Managers, but one might infer them, or they may be implied -- proving disinterest, neglect, hard-headedness, hard hearts is beyond the discovery powers of any of the ordinary members of the community; hence, the tone of Lamentation. In the Bible, Lamentation is addressed to God, from whom succour is not expected but may be delivered; this Christian view is extremely humbling -- the position of the person/community of no resort and utterly abject, yet whose sheer faith is a saving grace. In Fisherʻs poems, there is no such faith that extends the workings of the Christian God to the Management of the Company. Certainly there is not much reason for faith in the government, which has a murky because hidden relationship with the Owners. In the context of the events, the Government is rather like the fairy in Fairy Tales, especially the Grimmsʻ. The quality of the poems, however, comes not only from the helplessness of the miners and the family members and the entire community simply to provide AGAINST ACCIDENTS, incident after incident, but from the KNOWLEDGE that SOMETHING CAN BE DONE TO ALLEVIATE CONDITIONS and NOTHING IS DONE, until after each fatal occurrence. In poem after poem, that is the story line; but with so many variations, the inescapable conclusion is not only that the Government is/was/continues to be The Fairy in Fairy Tales, it is also the WITCH that shares its bed with Evil at home, domesticated. Every family memberʻs good fortune -- of simply having a family and such a community of members of families in themselves virtually standing as one, united entity -- turns every terrible ending into a social ending. Hillary Clintonʻs "It takes a village" (to bring up a child) can have no better application than any Coal Camp, like that of the mighty, First Nation Among Nationsʻ own KETTLE BOTTOM, let alone a town, as the example of her words, now a universally acknowledged proverb. There is no preachment. Exposure is how the poem deflects self-righteousness and self-pity. There is a stern acceptation in the camp residents themselves that All Work is Good, and Hard Work deserves what the circumstances for success require for any work: caring, because caring is a shared interest in outcomes and for both, production that is remunerative, which is life-giving, life-supporting, not life-threatening, not life-denying, life-consuming.

The viewpoint is that of a fellow camp resident observer, in fact or by family extension or historical association, a single personʻs voice used to inhabit multiple persons
storied livesʻ stories. The whole is a Modern Ballad, less thorough than the old Scottish self-immolating (Lowlandsʻ Scotch version) sense of tragedy, but equally brilliant. Of a Coal Mining communityʻs history in a modern history of the United States (we should shift out of calling the U.S.A. "America" for it is merely one of three parts of North America --which means the effects are diffused and so easy to romanticize as though we are still living in the times of the first immigration -- and so excuse our failures) we should place this book at the head of Succinct ethnohistories of Modern U.S.A. For mine shafts still collapse -- not only in the U.S., we have seen recently, but in larger socio-economic communities like that of Chile. The Chilean tragedy was world news, long before which, in the English speaking world, was the Celtic singing Welsh. Coal Mine tragedies occurs in many countries, from which we have yet to hear, even as history, leave alone poetry. Fisherʻs subject is therefore far more than Appalachia.

The marvel of Fisherʻs writing is in her finely nuanced ear for the Rhythm and Diction in the music of the West Virginia speech -- the clarity of her Coal Minersʻ grammar. They are sifted out of a mind that is rare for its breadth of understanding of how the people behind the speakings think in their speakings. There is also irony and humour in the views and in the language -- the language captures the dialect selectively, it should be said, so that the poems may be easily understood by any entrenched Standard English reader of the numerous Englishes extant in the world. The subtle handling accompanied by an obvious understanding of Language itself is instructive for poets and scholars alike, of which Fisher is one.

"After Harlan, I donʻt hardly remember,/Like the brain fever when I was five-- / I come out the other side not able to walk/ nor talk nor, Mama says, even cry. / Mama and Daddy brung me home./ I told Mama, I said, ʻI canʻt bear it.ʻ ʻ No, you canʻt, Ina,ʻ she said. ʻ But you will.ʻ / And she give me a basket to hunt sang/ . . . Thereʻs hardly any left/ with perfect roots -- theyʻll be missing both arms/ or a leg below the knee or a piece of the face./ You canʻt find a whole man. Still,/ the work feels good . .
. ." ("Sang")

In "What History Means to Me (Robert Davis, Grade 4) ":
"History is the story of what has happened, like when Papaw Clyde tells about Mother Jones in ʻ02. It is also now, like when Baldwin-Felts knocks on folks door to put them out when their Daddy joins the union or gets killed in the mine, and says, Your history."

In "Henry Burgess Decides to Go Back In":
"It donʻt do to think too much about it./The others is all going back in./ First you got to eat, then you can think / about thinking. Deal with the gun/ thatʻs aimed at you, is what we say./Things got set up this way/way back before I was born./Whoeverʻs great-granddaddy first swindled/somebody elseʻs great-grandaddy/out of his land and his life -- / may he rot in Hell. / At least we picked up out guns. / . . ."

In ("Sheepskin"):
. . . I did/ not tell him my learning come nights, / from the ragged, rocky-chested racket/ of my daddyʻs cough and the only/ Latin we got to show for it/ is on his stone." . . . . ("Sheepskin")

Because Global Warming puts fossil fuels in the dangerous list of energy sources, the coal miners life belongs to the past. Kettle Bottom is a testament to that life. The tags we need for poetry like this are: Appalachia: Courage, Appalachia: U.S. History. Appalachia: Life Without the Stereotypes, Appalachia -Family Stories. KETTLE BOTTOM is a collection of modern poems with the tenor of Appalachian ballads, in the tradition of Scotlandʻs keen, haunting "Edward, Edward," which all the world knows is a traditional ballad that is a Classic.

Leialoha A. Perkins… (altro)