• Biographical and Critical Essay
  • Statues of the Grass
  • "Looking for a Home in the South"
  • Following Gravity
  • "The Mary Tapes"
  • Foreseeing the Journey
  • Seas and Inland Journeys: Landscape and Consciousness from Wordsworth to Roethke
  • Ode to the Chinaberry Tree and Other Poems
  • River Writing: An Eno Journal
  • "Constructing the River"
  • Lessons in Soaring
  • "A Place and a Voice"
  • "Back Then"
  • "A Conversation"
• Writings by the Author
• Further Readings About the Author
• About the Essay

James Applewhite's poetry concerns the tension implicit in the relationships between language and landscape, past and present, childhood and maturity, and the rewards and limitations of his love for the narrative and family traditions of the South. Applewhite works within and against these dualities, writing in both traditional meters and free verse. An accomplished critic as well as a poet, he notes that his work is influenced by such diverse figures as William Wordsworth and Jackson Pollock.

Born on 8 August 1935 in Stantonsburg, North Carolina, to James W. and Jane Elizabeth (Mercer) Applewhite, James William Applewhite,Jr., was the elder of two sons in a farming family. At the age of seven he contracted rheumatic fever and spent a year in bed. His family situation has been characterized by his wife, the former Janis Forrest, as one of "overwhelming tension ... created by the juxtaposition of his father's strong, capable, practical qualities against the fearful, dependent, and emotional qualities of his mother," a dichotomy that recurs often in his poetry. Because of his illness, Applewhite became an avid reader and inventor of stories, encouraged by his mother and her brother Almon, a bachelor uncle Applewhitedescribes as "his first literary influence" (quoted by V.S. Naipaul in A Turn in the South, 1989). Almon told the young Jimmy stories from the Odyssey, pretending they were his original inventions.

Although Applewhite's first full-length book was not published until 1975, his apprenticeship as a poet began in college. He received a B.A. from Duke University in 1958, and an M.A. there in 1960. As an undergraduate he was a classmate of Fred Chappell and was significantly influenced by Professor William Blackburn; both were later to become the subjects of poems in which Applewhitemeditates on the literary vocation. On 28 January 1956 he married Janis, and they were to have three children--Lisa, Jamey, and Jeff. The family resides in Durham, North Carolina. After earning his M.A., Applewhite became an instructor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he studied informally with Randall Jarrell at a time when Jarrell was writing The Lost World (1965), his last major collection of poems. Applewhite acknowledges his debt to Jarrell's work, as well as to the writings of Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath. But Applewhite's major influence is unquestionably Wordsworth (the subject of his 1969 Duke Ph.D. thesis), as later evidenced in his criticism and in such major poems as "Ode to the Chinaberry Tree." After receiving his Ph.D., Applewhite taught again at Greensboro and held visiting positions at Duke and George Washington University before settling at Duke, where he is now a full professor.

Although Applewhite published some poetry early in his career, including a poem called "The Journey," which won second prize in the 1966 Virginia Quarterly Review Emily Clark Balch contest, he did not begin to publish regularly until the 1970s. By the time his first major collection appeared (Statues of the Grass, 1975), his work had appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Poetry, Shenandoah , and American Poetry Review, among others, and a substantial selection of his work had been anthologized in Paul Carroll's Young American Poets (1968).

Statues of the Grass is remarkably mature for a first book, and it announces many of the characteristic subjects Applewhite would return to with greater facility and understanding in later volumes. Poems such as "Looking for a Home in the South" are expressions of the deep ambivalence he feels for the eastern North Carolina tobacco country of his childhood, a place in which "a few houses cling, through camellias and columns, to an illusion / Whose substance of grace never ruled within a South which existed." Alongside these elegies for a vanishing and beloved landscape are poems in which Applewhite confronts deep and often painful memories of his childhood illness and of the sense of loss and triumph he feels about his escape from an enforced invalidism. His concern with family stories, what he later calls "Fictional Family History," is evident in "My Grandfather's Funeral," the first of a series of elegies written for W.H. Applewhite. These poems are courageous, but one senses an overly patriarchal view in them, a limitation the poet becomes aware of and struggles with in later volumes. Since the poet and the speaker in Applewhite's poems are often the same, his development as a poet is closely linked to his personal development.

Following Gravity (1980) won the Associated Writing Programs award in poetry and was praised by Donald Justice (in his introduction to the book) as coming "deeply from character." The volume is notable for its increased formal command, greater specificity of memory and description, and most significantly for an identification with the feminine viewpoint that is not present in the earlier volume. The long poem that ends the volume, "The Mary Tapes," is a dramatic monologue supposedly spoken into a tape recorder by a Mary Woods, whose meditations on southern language, religion, and sexuality provide insight into the dilemma faced by the weak or the womanly in the South: "it's what we grew up with, that red-neck / Way of not respecting a woman or kid / Or some little animal because life's been too hard / And men have to work in the sun / Till they hate anything that's weaker than they are." Mary's struggle to understand and forgive men's compulsive drive for power echoes Applewhite's own struggle with his tendency to accept an uncritical view of his father as the practical "saviour" who rescued him from his imaginative but unhealthy mother. The poem presages Applewhite's attempts in subsequent volumes to question the strictures of language and sexuality as they operate on people's awareness of landscape, history, and self.

Foreseeing the Journey (1983) is Applewhite's first fully realized volume of poems. The overarching narrative of a transatlantic plane flight allows the poet to confront the materials of his past in a more coherent and formal fashion. As in the epigraph from John Keats that he chooses for "Returning from the River," Applewhite comes to see that "a Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory." The adult Applewhite still values that Proustian moment or Wordsworthian "spot of time"--in this instance, a moment that, he feels, saved him from illness--the memory of his father mowing the lawn while young Jimmy was bedridden: "The shape of his strength / Would save me from fever, by mowing forever." But darker, less pietistic memories intrude. Applewhite's recollections of selling gold-foil condoms at his father's Esso station and his poems about awakening sexuality prefigure a more disturbing "American Actual" of the present in which "Ills bequeathed as to children / Infect robot and alien." Applewhite's desire to affirm "the incorrigible imagination's pastoral" is severely tested in the volume, though not abandoned:

Still, we voyage toward Eden.
Blue planet, Earth-like, hidden
In coordinates, how beautiful you are,
Dangled against backgrounds of stars.
Eyeball seeing no evil,
We prick you against our will.

Applewhite's critical study Seas and Inland Journeys: Landscape and Consciousness from Wordsworth to Roethke (1985) is notable for his argument that modern and contemporary poetry should be seen more clearly in light of their Romantic precedents, an argument expanded in his recent essays "Modernism and the Imagination of Ugliness" (Sewanee Review, 1986) and "Postmodernist Allegory and the Denial of Nature" (Kenyon Review, 1989). Applewhite's reformation of his attitude toward Wordsworth and the Romantics in light of contemporary poetry occasions his engagement with current critical theory, serving also as both foil and inspiration for his later poetry. Likewise, his essay "Children in Contemporary Poetry" (South Carolina Review , Spring 1985) concerns his thinking about his childhood as a subject for poetry. This subject matter culminates in one of his strongest volumes, Ode to the Chinaberry Tree and Other Poems (1986).

The title poem of that volume paradoxically endorses and deconstructs Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Although Applewhiteretains the Wordsworthian faith that childhood is indeed the site of poetic inspiration, his own ode is distinctively post-Freudian in its recognition of the violence and terrifying sexuality that inhabit the world of the child. He remembers the humiliation of being punished ("And I was a kid little as his body, / Spanked for the sneakiness I did") and the self-conscious guilt about juvenile sex play with his cousin. Despite such humiliation, however, childhood is indeed a "separate country," one that Applewhitebelieves worth preserving.

Just as his critical engagement enriches Applewhite's autobiographical poetry, it strengthens his landscape poetry as well. River Writing: An Eno Journal (1988) grew out of poems Applewhite composed during his daily runs along the Eno River near his home in Durham, North Carolina, but it is not conventional nature poetry. Bearing epigraphs from Jacques Derrida and Paul De Man, the volume is as much concerned with the ways in which language reveals the possibilities of the landscape as it is with the ways the landscape echoes the formal structures of language. As Applewhite says on the dust jacket, the poems are "my repetitive song of belief of the possibility of presence in language." Yet the volume is most interesting when this belief is tested, as in "Constructing the River," in which the presence of the poem itself is "an illusion." Recognizing the insurmountable gulf between sign and material object, Applewhite hopes, nevertheless, to "almost join ... them":

Grandsons of Freud, we handle The mental toy, make it disappear like mother, Fort/da. fort/da. We visit our own funerals with Huck Finn. The word-river cherishes time that was, That is, that will never again be. Is elegy.

Applewhite's most recent volume of poetry, Lessons in Soaring (1989), shows him consolidating and refining the insights revealed in Ode to the Chinaberry Tree and River Writing. In the book, he continues what the jacket blurb calls his "lover's quarrel with the South," but he does so with increased maturity and a renewed sense of himself as the maker of his own family history rather than a passive inheritor. Two poems are remarkable--"A Conversation," addressed to his father, and "A Place and a Voice," addressed to his mother. The latter is a major poem for Applewhite in that he is finally able to view his mother's "emotional claim" on him with a degree of empathy, admitting that "I knew everything / except for you." As in another poem in the collection, "Back Then," a self-indicting, ironic catalogue of male clichés about women--written in heroic couplets--the poet recognizes the reductiveness of his view of his mother as imaginative invalid. "A Place and a Voice" ends wistfully yet affirmatively: "If your voice traveled far enough, / I might inhabit the earth."

In "A Conversation" Applewhite renders the most complex portrait of his relationship with his father. The poem's controlling metaphor is a long-distance phone call over lines crackling with static; despite their "deafness" to one another, the son, at least, is able to hear the father to whom he had often turned a deaf ear. Recognizing their "connection still uncertain as prayer," and recognizing the child alive in his unconscious, the poet understands that what had seemed incalcitrant religious zealotry ("No son can accept a pure / Commandment as in stone") has instead been a necessary and sustaining belief for his father. What the poet gains is a hard-won tolerance for his father's belief:

How can I feel but elegy
For the figure of language you've left with me?
Help me father, I say as in prayer, to hear
A son's new testament, fairer writ. As the wire's
Voice, heard last, crackles with the old fire.

James Applewhite's work has received little critical attention. In the era of the literary carnival, his poetry develops a quiet engagement with personal history that must be proclaimed almost tentatively. Yet his remarkable growth as a poet since 1983 and his increasing critical acumen promise him a valued place among contemporary poets. Like his early mentor Jarrell, Applewhiteidentifies himself with flawed humanity, with what Jarrell calls "something that there's something wrong with--something human" ("The One Who Was Different," The Complete Poems, 1969). Like Jarrell's work, Applewhite's poetry finds its sources in what Naipaul calls "his intense contemplation of the physical world of his childhood.... Out of his separation from that first world of his, Jim Applewhite ha[s] gone beyond the religious faith of his father and grandfather and arrived at a feeling for 'the sanctity of the smallest gestures.'" Applewhite's resolute affirmation of these gestures may not call great attention to itself, but it may well be more enduring than the pyrotechnical displays of more fashionable contemporaries.


Writings by the Author

Books

War Summer (Poquoson, Va.: Back Door, 1972).

Statues of the Grass (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975).

Following Gravity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980).

Foreseeing the Journey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

Seas and Inland Journeys: Landscape and Consciousness from Wordsworth to Roethke (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

Ode to the Chinaberry Tree and Other Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).

River Writing: An Eno Journal (Princeton & Guildford, Surrey: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Lessons in Soaring (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).

A History of the River: Poems(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).

Other

"Children in Contemporary Poetry," South Carolina Review, 17 (Spring 1985): 66-72.

"Modernism and the Imagination of Ugliness," Sewanee Review, 94 (Summer 1986): 418-439.

"Building Confidence in Yourself as a Poet," Writer (August 1988): 22-25.

"Postmodernist Allegory and the Denial of Nature," Kenyon Review, new series 11 (Winter 1989): 1-17.

Further Readings About the Author

V.S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 267-307.

About the Essay

Written by: Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 105: American Poets Since World War II, Second Series, 1991, pp. 11-18.

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