Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Farm Talk” and discuss sharing your subculture in a poem.
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear “Farm Talk” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about sharing your subculture. Here’s…
Farm Talk
for Mary Cavitt
Bacon fat and sugar on a sting draws out the swelling.
Tobacco mashed with water soothes mosquito bites.
Boil poke greens till the water’s clear. Dip dandelions
in butter and fry them like catfish. You learn things
when you live in the country. Can’t nobody run to the store
every five minutes. And when the horse pulls for the barn,
watch out for the fence! Those creosote splinters, people
tell you pine pitch pulls them out, but that’s just farm talk.
Some things stay with you for years. The preacher’s eyes
bore into you like a bee on a porch railing, and no matter
how good your momma sews, flour sacks aren’t a dress.
Those Allgood vowels, your long i’s and a’s? You practice
for years, but they hang in the air like summer cicadas,
until the woods and hills are full of them.
Discuss:
Let’s talk about how to get your subculture or your regional or cultural or in-group knowledge into a poem. Now, there’s this popular idea in entertainment right now that goes, Well, you don’t have to like it. This book, this movie, this television show, you’re not the intended audience. I wrote this for other people who are just like me, right? I wrote it for my subculture.
And we have a word for that in the South. That’s preaching to the choir. Of course representation is healing. We ought to be able to see someone like ourselves on the screen and on the page. But the intended audience for your poem ought to be all human beings who can read or listen, because we can all learn something from each other.
So how do you invite people into your little corner of the world, whether that’s the world of my Southern mom, to whom this poem is dedicated, or a first-generation American, or a rock climber who lives in his van? Whatever your in-group, your small group is, you can do it with particular knowledge and particular words from that subculture.
So here, I’m using some words and some knowledge that are local to the North Georgia region where my mom and I both grew up. Bacon fat mixed with sugar and kind of squished into a little poultice is a cure for a spider bite or another insect bite that my mom learned from someone else who had learned it from an old doctor in Georgia.
Tobacco mashed with water is another of those mosquito bite remedies you could find in a lot of rural areas, probably not just the South. Poke greens are a really Southern food. It used to be a way of living close to the land, so families would go out along the roadways and gather poke weed, and then they’d boil the leaves and stalks in a couple changes of water to get out the toxins. It became less popular after the Depression. People didn’t want to look like they were poor enough to need to eat weeds, but it’s still part of our culture.
A lot of people don’t know that dandelions are edible now, even in the South, but the old people all still remember dandelion wine. And fried catfish, of course, is a Southern staple.
Then we’ve got the flower sack dresses. Like a lot of poor country people, my mom used to go to school wearing dresses sewn out of flower sacks. That’s a memory with some punch to it for folks from her and my culture, because you used to get made fun of for it. It was a sign that your family did not have much money, and they’d make them out of feed bags or flower bags.
And cicadas, if you didn’t hear cicadas singing where you grew up, it was not the South. It might have been a city that said it was in the South, like Atlanta, but it wasn’t Southern.
I’m not using dialect, which is local words that are only used in one region or by one group of people, but I snuck in some local syntax with that line, “can’t nobody run to the store every five minutes.” That double negative is a classic in country speech. I don’t want to do the whole poem that way, with that syntax, because most of my audience doesn’t talk like that, and it might feel confusing, or dense, or maybe even like I’m making fun of country people.
A little bit goes a long way, like seasoning. Your poem should be accessible to the readers of the majority where you’re publishing. It’s enough with some context clues to immerse them a little bit, like a foreign exchange student, in some of the words, but still make sure they have access to the poem.
When you share your subculture in a poem, whatever that subculture is, you’re becoming our tour guide. So you’re taking us into your place, and your people, and your life, and your experience of the world. And so you have to be a bit of a translator, both culturally and with the words themselves, which is a beautiful thing. You have to know something well in order to translate it.
Let’s hear “Farm Talk” again, and I might let myself read it a little more Southern, and you can listen for the local knowledge or local words that place us in the North Georgia area.
Farm Talk
for Mary Cavitt
Bacon fat and sugar on a sting draws out the swelling.
Tobacco mashed with water soothes mosquito bites.
Boil poke greens till the water’s clear. Dip dandelions
in butter and fry them like catfish. You learn things
when you live in the country. Can’t nobody run to the store
every five minutes. And when the horse pulls for the barn,
watch out for the fence! Those creosote splinters, people
tell you pine pitch pulls them out, but that’s just farm talk.
Some things stay with you for years. The preacher’s eyes
bore into you like a bee on a porch railing, and no matter
how good your momma sews, flour sacks aren’t a dress.
Those Allgood vowels, your long i’s and a’s? You practice
for years, but they hang in the air like summer cicadas,
until the woods and hills are full of them.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, write a poem that invites the reader into something only, you know. This could be regional knowledge; it could be cultural. It could be your beanie baby, or sneaker collection, or your obsession with a particular video game.
Use enough words from the dialect or from the jargon–jargon here means like a type of speech particular to one vocation or one hobby–use enough of those words to give us a glimpse into that world, but make sure it’s still accessible to outsiders, because you’re our tour guide. And also, at some point, write your mother a poem.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Poetry Professor Podcast with me, Stephen Cavitt. Today you heard “Farm Talk” from my book Noctis Terrores.
It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and the link’s in the episode description. I’ll read it all to you here for free, but it sure would look good on your bookshelf.
I’ll see you next week.