Essay Archive:

Louisville writer Joe Schmidt brings us our first "City Profile." His essay on Frank X. Walker and the Affrilachian Poets is accompanied by callout notes on poets, journals, reading series, and other information, as well as some links at the bottom... This of course represents one view of the literary scene in Louisville. If you have another, why not tell us in our discussion area.

by Joe Schmidt 

The sad truth is that I’m probably best qualified to offer the reader a nostalgic gazetteer of the Louisville bar scene about five years ago, but that’s what happens when one hides away for a while to read and write seriously. Last I heard, bourbon is still the rave local drink, and if you can’t afford the good stuff, there are plenty of toothless underpass squatters willing to let you take a slug of Kessler’s Whiskey. The danger of bourbon, regardless of the quality, is it has the evil effect of making one imagine he or she is a poet.

So for starters, I would warn literary travelers to beware of the potent local distillation, and as well, our prestigious racetrack Churchill Downs, as these Derby City institutions have probably destroyed many would-be talents. If those attractions don’t suck you in, the killer home-grown marijuana will. Be careful when you come to the Bluegrass -- this is not exactly a civilized place. Don’t let the southern accents and hospitality fool you. Hunter S. Thompson grew up here.

Some Poets: W. Loren Smith, author of Night Train (Plinth 1997) and former national slam champion, will have a new collection coming out in November. Bill, as his friends know him, is a remarkable poet who gives earth-shaking readings reminiscent of Dylan Thomas recordings you might have heard. Smith lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Frank X. Walker, author of Affrilachia (Old Cove Press 2000) will have a new collection this fall as well, a book of historical poems. Frank gave an excellent reading at New York City's Lincoln Center Outdoors music and poetry festival in August. Frank, a native of Danville, Kentucky, lives in Louisville. Where is Ron Whitehead? The Kentucky poet who has organized and produced over 300 music and poetry events keeps his readers and listeners posted on his whereabouts at his website tappingmyownphone.com. As of this writing, there is only a mysterious photograph of Ron, growing a long sage's beard in front of a breathtaking scene in Scotland. The photo is enscribed, "War Poets Tour, March 2003?" If you find Ron, tell him I said hello. It's been a while.

Louisville, despite its temptations, is an arts friendly city complete with an orchestra, a ballet, a small but long tradition of blues and jazz music, is a Mecca for bluegrass musicians from around the world, and is home to several respected theaters, particularly Actor’s Theater where many Broadway shows have found their first public audience. It’s not a bad place to be a poet, though many local poets would complain that there isn’t much of what one might call a “poetry scene.” Certainly, the cultural dominance of college basketball makes it difficult to distract many folks from fast breaks and three pointers, but there exists solid and dedicated communities of poets in Louisville.

Frank X. Walker, a graduate of the new MFA program at Louisville’s Spalding University, is an exciting poet and a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a group of African-American Kentucky writers who have cut out a new identity for Kentucky letters that transcends the traditional Southern Pastoral work of writers like Wendell Berry. In a state that likes its art White-Protestant, Frank X. Walker affirms a repressed but growing cultural pluralism. Though Frank is from eastern Kentucky, he makes his home in Louisville, which has experienced the recent immigration of various Latino groups, Sudanese, Bosnians, and Vietnamese, to give an incomplete list. This has begun to change the culture in Louisville, a city still marked by de-facto segregation some four decades after the Civil Rights Movement. If nothing else, Louisvillians have had to acknowledge the existence of a world view that is more complex than Black and White.

Walker, writing of a Bosnian refugee eager to embrace a romanticized notion of American diversity, recognizes the challenges of a European Muslim assimilating to American culture, yet also recognizes, “she would not understand our own un civil war.” 

she immigrated into our classroom
seeking asylum
carrying her own wounds
and none of our
ever present racial baggage
or our painful history
of abduction, slavery
rape, lynchings, castrations
our own north American
apartheid-flavored democracy

Aside from teaching, I work sometimes in a kitchen near the site of the old slave market in Louisville, near the Clarksdale projects. Living in inner-city Louisville, you have to be a damn fool not to see the way economics break down along lines of race. I also should mention the shooting of a fifty year old man by the Louisville police last year. The intoxicated man produced a box cutter while in custody, handcuffed in fact, and was shot eleven times and killed. The officers were cleared of any charges to the chagrin of many citizens, particularly those in the Black community. These sorts of incidents -- white cops shooting Black men under questionable circumstances -- has been a regular and disturbing part of Louisville life for years. Oddly -- people, even much of the African American community it seems, are complacent about such events. This is not exactly a civilized place, though politeness, reservation, and a Biblical patience with archaic injustice pervade the culture here.

Reading Series: The University of Louisville hosts the Axton Reading Series which brings nationally known writers to the campus anually. In early November, Western Kentucky University will hold a celebration for the late Jim Wayne Miller, a former Kentucky poet laureate and husband of feminist writer Mary Ellen Miller. Readers include Frank Steele and Peggy Steele, long time editors of Plainsong, a now retired journal that featured poets both famous and obscure. The Steele's have nurtured poets in southern Kentucky for over four decades.

So it is with a hope that I see kids from “Little Vietnam,” a south-end neighborhood, playing hoops in ghetto-fantastic gear with killer cross-over dribbles, or blue-eyed Bosnian Muslim women in full veils riding the bus with bow-tied Nation of Islam activists, or any kind of social anomaly for that matter. As a native of New York City who has long resided in Louisville and proudly call it home, I am always saddened when Louisville lives up to the stereotypes of the Old South. Sadly, this city often does.

MFA Programs: For poets (and writers in general) there's only one MFA program in Kentucky -- the one at Spalding University in Louisville. Sena Naslund, the author of many books including the bestselling Ahab's Wife is the director. Aside from an excellent faculty including mentors in Fiction, Creative Non-fiction, Writing for Children, and Screenwriting, poetry mentors include Molly Peacock (who also mentors Non-fiction), Greg Pape, Jeanie Thompson, Richard Cecil, and Kathleen Driskell.

Omnipresent in Louisville’s daily bustle are the descendants of American slavery, who despite centuries of social subservience in the Louisville economy either by the slave institution, Jim Crow, or market manipulation by the wealthy white establishment, have had little voice in the arts in Kentucky. The J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, for example, is named for the Kentuckian who held more slaves than anyone in the history of the state, and its collection and programs clearly reflect a white middle class orientation -- this cultural institution is punctuated by the obelisk across the street that commemorates Louisville’s confederate dead.       

Frank X. Walker’s work offers hope that the projected image of the Kentuckian, and by extension, the Louisvillian, will be more than of the now over-emphasized white, Protestant agrarian, as crucial as that image is to a complete picture of this state. As much as I enjoy a measure of Wendell Berry’s work, he has cast a long shadow over the poetry of Kentucky. Joe Servant, another white man, a fine writer of rural themes, is the current Kentucky poet laureate. The late Jim Wayne Miller (the husband of feminist writer and teacher Mary Ellen Miller who taught me so many writerly virtues when I was a student at Western Kentucky University) is a former Kentucky poet-laureate who wrote great poems of Appalachian life. Frank X. Walker’s first book, Affrilachia deals extensively with rural life, but its people have, for too long, been rendered invisible by the great white wash of history. Yes, Virginia, there are Black folks in rural America.

Poetry Circles & Publications: David Bartholomy organizes the Brescia Poet's Club in Owensboro, Kentucky. The group publishes a little journal called Open Twenty Four Hours. The Southern Kentucky Poetry Salon meets in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Poet and amateur weightlifter, Mark Rudolph is the publisher of Full Unit Hookup: A Journal of Exceptional Literature. The journal is unique in that it publishes as much fine science fiction as it does poetry.

No established Kentucky publication would print my words, I suspect, since I have been, perhaps, too irreverent to too many revered Kentucky cultural treasures. The great thing about being a Kentucky Fried Yankee, however, is that if I can’t be part of positive cultural change in Kentucky, I can always go back to New York City, or take root somewhere else. I’m a rootless poet, I guess. Frank X. Walker’s roots are so deep in Kentucky, and to hear his voice read his poems in a lovely, rich Affrilachian accent, it has occurred to me and to many others that his career in the poetry of Kentucky is one of destiny. He has worked with hundreds of students, and has helped many poets (including this one) find public space to read their work, whether they are academic writers or street poets. Reading at Lincoln Center in New York in August of 2003, with a second book of excellent historical poems on the way, he seems pointed towards becoming Kentucky’s future poet-laureate.          

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