I was born and raised on a small farm four miles out in the country from Whiteville, N.C. I was born at home, the nearest hospitals being fairly long journeys away in those days. Three sisters, two surviving, had been born before me, and two brothers, one dying at eighteen months and the other at birth, were born after me. The sister who died before I was born had lived for two weeks.
I was nearly four years old when the Crash came. I have memories of some bright times before the Crash, and later I found old manila envelopes containing records of money we had once had in the bank. But a strict change occurred that was deepened and made permanent by the death of my brother in May 1930. I have images of him lying in his cradle covered with a veil, and I saw his coffin being made, and I watched as he was taken away, his coffin astraddle the open rumble seat of a Model A. I see my mother leaning against the porch between the huge blue hydrangeas as she wept and prayed.
The surviving son, I must have felt guilty for living and also endangered, as the only one left to be next. Mourning the loss of life, in life and in death, has been the undercurrent of much of my verse and accounts for a tone of constraint that my attempts at wit, prolixity, and transcendence merely underscore.
The Depression in the South was bleak. There was no money. There were no coins. We traded chickens and eggs in town for salt, sugar, baking powder, fatback. Cars were beached on wooden blocks, and the tires were transferred to mule- or horse-drawn carts called Hoover carts. The unpaved roads in my community bore the patterns of unsteady tire tracks. I can almost hear now the sizzle of the tires in sand.
In 1932 I took first grade with Miss Minnie Heaney at the New Hope Elementary School, a wooden structure that stood beside the old New Hope Baptist Church. There were seven grades, seven rooms, each with its wood stove. My sisters and I walked two miles each way to school, my oldest sister’s last year in elementary school my first. One game first graders played was fishing for words. The children sat in a tight circle, word cards turned blank side up on the floor, and each student reached in and “caught” a word, which he had to pronounce when he turned the card over. I remember being slapped on the hand and scolded because I couldn’t wait to say the word if anyone faltered.
In the second grade, I was the center one day of a good deal of energy and attention on the way home from school. A jealous cousin of mine questioned whether I had actually written the letters of the alphabet on my paper or whether an older person had done them for me. This imputation angered one of my sisters and caused a fury of mutual accusation. I have been impressed with controversy ever since and have avoided it whenever possible.
The only book we had at home was the Bible, and it was almost never touched because it held important documents of births, marriages, deaths—and mortgages and promissory notes. I heard plenty of words at Sunday school and preaching, and I heard the hymns whose words merely went with tunes, but now, as I look back, I see that I heard the meaning of the words, too, because they are the content of my own poems. “Oh, they tell me of a home far beyond the skies”—etc.
In the fifth grade one day, Miss Viola Smith offered an apple to the first pupil who could memorize “In Flander’s Field.” Ten minutes later, I stood before the class and recited the poem perfectly, and I still can recite it. That year the students drew names for Christmas gifts. I got Daisy Seller’s name and knew I couldn’t get her a present. But by Christmas, I had a nickel and bought her a candy bar, a “Power-house” I think. She cried. Humiliation can find a lot of definition in a single instance.
I was the valedictorian of the small class in seventh grade and delivered a speech in the auditorium. I had scored at the tenth-grade level on the test given at the end of that year. What had happened was Miss Mabel White, later Mrs. Powell, a marvelous teacher. Eighth grade began high school, and we were bused to Whiteville for that. I wrote an essay on miniature cows farmers were trying to breed, and Miss Ruth Baldwin, another splendid teacher, told everyone about it, even seniors. I was elected editor of the school paper, but it— perhaps consequently—never came out.
In tenth grade, I wrote a poem on Pocahontas, and in the navy at the age of eighteen, whisked away to the South Pacific, I began to write poems in a log I kept. After the war in 1946,I enrolled on the GI Bill at Wake Forest College, where the following year I met Phyllis Plumbo, whom I later married. Phyllis moved away for a couple of years but our correspondence included poems to each other, an exchange that deepened the life in words for me. I could I think show a retrospective track of incidents that might have produced me as an artist, preacher, singer, doctor, mycologist, etc., but the string of events I’ve listed brought me in 1955 to publish through a vanity press my first book of poems, Ommateum, and led nine years later to the appearance of my first accepted book, Expressions of Sea Level, which was published by Ohio State University Press. Nineteen years elapsed between the time I began to write continually in the South Pacific and the appearance of the Ohio book. They were years of working alone, while working at something else for a living, years in which I received little acceptance or encouragement. But I take no credit for the persistence. Writing poetry is what I did. I had no place else to turn.
From New York Times Book Review, 17 January 1982.