Louisville Magazine

MAR 2013

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Literary Writing Home PATCHWORK By Mitchell Douglas Missing her, I think of mrst-stitch music, the sound of cutting denim, sheets & shirts for a family���s honored nag. When did she birth her vision? Did it rise like waves of heat from Sardis cotton melds, grow from girl to woman in dusty winds of unpaved paths in Selma? Patchwork reminds me of her hands, country-mile mngers, masters of needle, thimble, clink of dimpled metal like castanets for Southern dances, our partners poised for one last spin. On a cold and sunny Saturday morning in January, poet Mitchell Douglas and I met for cofee and conversation about his newly released collection, \blak\ \al-f��� bet\, which explores his family���s history with innovation, rhythm and courage. Let���s start at the back of the book. In the acknowledgements, you write, ���Te places that raise you never let you fall.��� Te book is in part about the place that raised you ��� Louisville ��� and in part about the place where your grandparents were raised. If you would, talk about the dialogue between those two places, those two generations, in the book. ���I was really fortunate as a kid because I used to take the Amtrak from Louisville to Alabama to meet that part of the family and walk the same gravel roads. I was always thinking about how my grandparents got from there to here and what that did for the family. I was a kid with a big imagination, and this was one of the best things you could do for someone who was going to be a writer. On the train trips I thought about By Lynnell Edwards Photo by Nicholas Karem all the things that were so important to me in those summers: the cousins that I met, all the music that I listened to and the food ��� everything is still right here. Sitting in the observation car with my granddad and looking out over everything really felt like I was on an adventure. It was a great source of poems.��� Te poem ���Patchwork��� is about that Alabama part of your family, and specifcally your grandmother Mamie, who came to Louisville from Selma. What, thematically, comes together in this poem? ���Quilts are symbols of families and where they come from, geographically and ideologically. A quilt is a plot of land and a coat of arms. My great-grandmother Matilda Gohagan, who lived in Selma, made me quilts that I took back to Louisville as a child. She passed the art of sewing on to her daughter, my grandmother Mamie Lee Green, who in turn passed it on to her daughter, Gloria, my Aunt Sissy I refer to in the book. Tis is a crucial part of my family���s legacy as artists. ���Patchwork��� attempts to answer how the gift began for my grandmother with images of the land and how a quilt is pieced together.��� Music pulses through the book ��� not only topically but in the strong rhythms, the allusions to jazz and blues forms, and particularly in your invented form, the fret, which resembles the fret of a guitar in the lineations and breaks of the stanza. What can you tell us about that form and how it holds the sense of the poem ���Te Sorrows (A Fret in Tree Chords)��� and why you wanted to present familiar content in a new way? ���My grandfather was an invaluable resource in piecing together family history for this book. Te more questions I asked him, the more I knew I wanted to write poems about his work as a sharecropper. Sometimes I use music to alter my mood when I���m writing to take me to a place that���s emotionally necessary for the poem. I was listening to Skip James and Son House and trying to get to the bottom of blues. Because the guitar is the heart of the music, I started writing in a six-line form that looked like the neck of a six-string guitar and its frets. Te frst word in each line begins with the name of a guitar string as it appears on the neck: EADGBE. I promised myself that I would try some innovation of craft with each new book, and it felt like something that had to happen with what eventually became ���Te Sorrows.������ You���re a founding member of the Afrilachian poets, a coalition of poets of color from Appalachia that includes Frank X Walker, Nikky Finney and many others. How has being in this group afected you? ���I believe in this kind of communal art model. Te initial creation of something may happen privately, but I don���t believe that artists should stand alone when presenting their work to the world. Mentors lift you up to new places. We, as a group, do that for each other and our work is better for it.��� What���s important about the regional component of the Afrilachian identity? ���Within this family, there is the understanding that individually and collectively we are ambassadors for the place we call home. It���s a responsibility that raises the bar for our art. Our existence says this region is more culturally rich than some give it credit for.��� Mitchell L. H. Douglas spent his childhood on the block of South 24th Street between Market and Jeferson streets. He is associate professor of creative writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) as well as a Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for PLUCK!: the Journal of Afrilachian Arts & Culture. His debut collection, Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry category and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. \blak\ \al-f��� bet\, his second book, is the winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor���s Choice Award from Persea Books. Douglas will read from \blak\ \al-f��� bet\ on April 12 at 7 p.m. at the Bard���s Town as part of the InKY Reading Series. 3.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 117

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