Dixie Babble

The poet (and fellow North Carolinian) Bill Griffin came up with the idea of the Southern Sentence Poem last August.  He explains:

“Last month after a poetry workshop we all went out for lunch.  Someone had been reading a book of Buson and Issa, and we got to complaining about how hard it is to transmigrate haiku from Japanese to English.  . . . At some point we came up with the idea – note here that no alcohol was involved in these discussions – that we Southern poets need a poetic form we can call our own.  I remember us laughing about what we might call such a thing;  the term “Bubba” seems to have come up a few times, with various prefixes and suffixes.”

You can learn more, and read some Southern Sentence Poems, at Bill’s blog or on the Southern Sentence Poem Facebook page.

My own contribution to the form goes like this:

The line at Stamey’s was so long that we
began to get a little antsy, scared
we might not get a seat, much less our fill,
before we had to cross the street back to
the Coliseum for the evening games,
but we had not been here since we were kids
and Dad brought us, back in those dark days when
the Deacons played their home games over here
in doggone Greensboro, and we believed –
had heard, at any rate – the barbecue
was worth the wait, and missing the opening tip.