That corporate industrialism separates people, places, and products from
their histories and cultures while also systematically destroying the
environment is a fact some areas of the mainstream American media finally have
come to recognize. Given that American thinkers and writers have been studying
the problem now for over a century, the concession is long overdue. An unlikely
and complex matrix of artistic, intellectual, political, and vulgar economic
forces inform the contemporary commercialization of environmentalism which one
may witness readily on television screens, computer monitors, magazine pages,
etc. Among writers of the American South, Wendell Berry came to inhabit the
role of literary statesman for the phenomenon of local environmental and
cultural destruction long before it was fashionable to do so. He now finds
himself joined by scribblers from countless regions of the world who are
seeking to maintain--or at least record with dignity--their places, cultures,
and peoples as they struggle in the face of faceless massive multinational
economies hungry for their resources and markets. In the blurry region known as
Appalachia a number of memorable literary meditations which deal in some way
with the byproducts of this sort of exploitation have arrived in the last
couple of decades, taking as their foci air pollution, logging, tourism, water
quality, dams, and that persistent old bugaboo: coal. Another generation of
writers now grapples with the manifold problems of their region, and the best
of their work will offer the joys and agonies of their localities while also
teaching us how to notice similar dynamics in our own places—wherever we
may be. In perceiving the local the best regional literature serves as a lens
for the world, affording an acuteness of vision both near and far.
*
Readers who had encountered Jim Minick's poems and nonfiction in various
periodicals and newspapers were treated in 2005 to a compilation of his prose
pieces entitled Finding a Clear Path.
It is perhaps unusual for a writer who is primarily a poet to publish first a
book of nonfiction, but the result has proven favorable for Minick's readers in
that Finding a Clear Path situates
him in a literary tradition of local environmental and subsistence concerns
while also serving as a kind of compass for navigating his poetry. Thus
Minick's 2008 collections of verse, Burning
Heaven and Her Secret Song,
afford perspective to and further elaboration upon the place-based topics of Finding a Clear Path.
Minick's topical and lived-in region is an eastern locality of southwest
Virginia, hilly and precariously rural but not so far west as to fall beneath
the ever-lengthening shadow of coal. The final section of Finding a Clear Path, entitled "Following Myself Home,"
embodies the primary task Minick stakes for himself both in that book and Burning Heaven: his self's recording of
the everyday natural world surrounding his domicile. As a result one may read
with profit the poem "Trying to Tell Time by Splitting Wood"
alongside the wood-chopping prose piece "Hitting the Mark"; the lines
of "The Bear to the Hunter" in conjunction with the essay
"Health, Hunger, and Hunting"; the eight-poem verse section
"Wings" with the eight-piece prose section "Flying"; and so
on. These are companion books, siblings or friends on a journey toward the
artistic identity of their maker and the nature of his lived-in place.
Yet Minick's imagination is not limited to his own place and time, and
the collection Her Secret Song spans
back into the lives of his ancestors, guided by the inspiring and sturdy
example of his Aunt Ruth. This collection, different from Minick's other two
books in focus and in form, nonetheless is connected to them through its
various portrayals of the natural world. Indeed, in placing his contemporary
environmental concerns beside the rural practices of his ancestors, Minick
establishes an important indirect association between current manifestations of
organic and sustainable living and traditional methods of country subsistence
often identified now as quaint.
Minick's work to date thus reflects an interesting and sometimes uneasy
contemporary dialectical relationship between cutting-edge environmental
concerns and rural folkways of the past. Undoubtedly, this dynamic likely goes
all but unnoticed by individuals who have not lived or read about the
historical part of the equation. By way of example, I will note that though I
am a decade younger than Minick, my father was the tenth child of a Smoky
Mountain farmer born in 1897. As a result, my family-based knowledge and
associations place me closer to a male Appalachian in his sixties or seventies
than a Generation Xer entering his mid-thirties. I can recall many an occasion
when a schoolmate responded with incomprehension, fear, or ridicule when I
recounted to him or her my family's traditional methods of gardening, cutting
wood, or managing varmints—to say nothing of my easy familiarity with
guns, physical violence, and the cycle of life and death. Yet it slowly has
become politically favorably—and, for some, downright chic—to embrace numerous elements
of the rural methods so recently viewed as politically unacceptable or
"backward." So it is not terribly uncommon to hear of soccer moms
frequenting organic goat milk stands and avowed pacifists beating on man-drums
before taking up their shotguns to help bring balance to the local deer
population and venison to their families' tables.
Ironies aside, these developments are favorable and necessary ones for
American society. As contemporary sustainable practices become more familiar
while many of their rural antecedents pass into family myth and/or historical
record, it is well we have writers like Minick to give indirect articulation to
the deep connection between the two and make us think about where we stand on
the matter.
Books by Jim Minick: Burning Heaven - Wind Publications, 2009 | Her
Secret Song - Motes, 2008 | Finding a Clear Path - West Virginia
University Press, 2005
