Myth & Memory in Texas
What makes a person want to write a long series of thematically linked poems about various places in Texas, especially when quite a few of those places at first glance seem, um, immune to the poetic touch (ever been to Wink)? “I’m not sure I ever thought about that, actually,” says Dave Oliphant, the poet who has done that very thing. If his uncertainty seems dismaying, consider the facts: Oliphant, a professor at UT who has written numerous volumes of criticism, translation, and poetry, began with “Houston” more than 25 years ago and originally thought of it as a piece of its own. “After that, I guess somehow it occurred to me that I could write other poems on other places,” he says, so while the original impetus was not for a set of linked poems but merely an evocation of a particular place, soon enough other places took on verse form in Oliphant’s vision: San Antonio, Laredo, Uvalde, Johnson City, Paris, and a slew of others. Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (Host Publications, 290 pp., $12, paper) is the somewhat prosaically but accurately titled result. Memory (his own) is crucial to Oliphant’s poetry, but, in a master touch, he never uses the word “I.” He forces the personal to say something about place. In “Denton,” for example, Oliphant “talked Aunt Sis into taking a pilgrimage to its hallowed sounds/in summer heat to its celebrated tree-colored grounds.” In “Beaumont,” in fact, Oliphant raises the distinct possibility that, as his wife believes, what he has conjured is “a Texas this memory has turned to myth.” “In other words,” Oliphant says, laughing, “the way I remember things may not be the way they really were, but they meant something special to me.” But poets aren’t fact checkers, and it’s the impression Oliphant leaves that’s more important than his dates and numbers. Houston is “a stadium of voices from every state/urgent accents from East & West/a U. of Michigan graduate/once linebacker on a Rose Bowl team/turned a 9-to-5er in a bruising Bank & Trust.” That’s not the myth of Texas we usually hear about, and it feels like the truth. Oliphant will be at Barnes & Noble Guadalupe on Friday, September 29, at 7pm… Jan Reid, another commentator on Texas myths, will be at Barnes & Noble Arboretum to read from his new collection of articles, Close Calls: Jan Reid’s Texas, on Thursday, October 5, at 7:30pm… Winners of this year’s Violet Crown Awards include Steven Saylor for his mystery A Twist at the End: A Novel of O. Henry; Carl Woodring, in the nonfiction category, for Literature: An Embattled Profession; and San Antonio poet Wendy Barker for her collection Way of Whiteness… Zoo Press and The Paris Review announce the first Paris Review Prize in Poetry. The writer of the best previously unpublished book of poems written in English will receive $5,000, publication by Zoo Press, and a reading in New York City hosted by The Paris Review. There’s a $25 entry fee; entries should be postmarked on or before October 31. Winner will be announced in the spring of 2001. See www.zoopress.org for details.
This article appears in September 29 • 2000.