| Summary |
Coastal North Carolina's landscape was once dominated by small fishing villages. These villages are losing their fish-houses to million dollar beach houses. The natives of small places like Hatteras are losing control of their communities, both as a result of their own desire for tourism dollars and because of encroachment from outsiders with specific environmental and/or economic interests. The local economy that was once based primarily on commercial fishing is now based on tourism. The current generation of coastal natives is less likely to stay here; property taxes are high, wealthy outsiders are paying high prices for prime real estate, and even nature itself seems bent on decimating a style of life that's lasted hundreds of years. My collection seeks to capture a time and place that is fading away, to document with poetry some aspects of a sea change that is both difficult to witness and seemingly inevitable. There is a different sense of ownership for a place like Hatteras. How the natives, transplant, and tourist claim ownership create an array of views. In the tradition of Spoon River Anthology I'm hoping to address these different points of view. I'm hoping my poems can bear witness to the past while, also coming to uneasy terms with possible transitions to an uncertain future. I'm aware that the straightforward narrative style of these poems sets them outside of current period style. Stephen Burt's essay "Close Calls with Nonsense" points out that the "elliptical" style has come as a reaction to narrative poetry that provided "easy epiphanies" (Burt 8) as well as a "focus on personality and emotions." (Burt 8) My subject matter requires a medium through which its stories can convincingly be told. It was my intent to use a style that might seen by some as nostalgic, because there is a nostalgic element to the fate of this changing place. Poems about the coast place themselves easily in a category of beach poems, but small beach towns share connections to small towns everywhere; challenges, myths, and outside influences affect small towns regardless of location. This taken into consideration, the poems of my collection share traits with the landscape poetry of writers like Dave Smith and Campbell McGrath, whose poetry about, respectively, the Virginia and Florida coasts is topically similar to the poems in my collection. There is also a broader connection to writers like A.R. Ammons, specifically his North Carolina poems, who gives such reality to the landscape of southeast North Carolina. Poets like Smith, McGrath, and Ammons exhibit diversity in subject matter and style, but they, as is the case with many others, tell the stories of a place. They tell these stories through large themes and unique details. This is where my collection fits in. I hope that my subject matter can earn this collection a right to a place in within a larger body of work that attempts, as its underlying goal, documentation. We are losing small towns to the interests of people from the outside and, in many cases, from the inside. These traditions and rights need to remain a part of American culture. Hopefully poetry, including poetry of the sort I am making a case for here, can help preserve at least the memories that will soon be all that remains of these small, coastal towns. |
