Jesse Graves in Conversation with Valerie A. Smith
Jesse Graves’s first collection of poetry Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine was awarded the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College, the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association, and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. More recently, Tennessee Landscape was celebrated with a tenth Anniversary edition, one that included new poems and an introduction from acclaimed poet Matthew Wimberley.
In early fall 2023, Graves visited Kennesaw State University to discuss his work and speak with students on the art of poetry writing. In a follow-up to this visit, he was interviewed by poet Valerie A. Smith. Their discussion holds a particular emphasis on place and identity.
A sample of his poetry, works first published in The Journal, at Ohio State University, is offered below.
Jesse Graves’s other collections include Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, and Said Songs. He is Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University.
Valerie A. Smith’s first book of poems, Back to Alabama, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She has a PhD from Georgia State University and a MA from Kennesaw State University, where she currently teaches English courses.
—Andy Plattner
Darker Realms
Your mother has taken you into the estate of her dreams,
where you may not travel alone, following steep slanting
trails from summits down into the hidden viney coves,
wet always from the mist, the dew, the seepage of roots.
She has your hand in hers, yet you feel no warmth,
no pressure of pulse beating time against pulse.
You will pass through the darker solitudes of the past
like a pilgrim over foreign terrain, eyes open in the murk
but seeing nothing, then eyes closed seeing only what
her voice recalls from times before your life, recreated
through tiny forms against the back of your eyelids,
relations you have seen before in black and white pictures.
Your mother leads you out of the cold, the furrowing rain,
into a room you have never beheld, unfamiliar to her, too,
except in dreams, yet she comes here often, for the dead,
to walk arm in arm again with those she loved as a child.
Stop clinging in fear, you tell yourself, she guides
you always to safety, but it does no good, gives no relief.
The room has a floral couch, broken down and slanting.
Two candles burn on an end-table, raising shadows
along the wet wooden floor, and there stand the figures
your mother brought you here to see, to clasp their hands
before they vanish into the mist, abandoning even
those stories the aged living continue to tell about them.
Pulse
Fathers bleed into sons, and you must stand
under them, under their siring shadows,
mountains casting down their glory or their gloom,
and all the finer shadings of their enfolded spirits.
Surely you have looked for striations of color
in the glistening surfaces of your father’s irises,
old now and clotted as King Lear’s,
pale blue, orange-flecked, opalescent.
Aeneas crossed no mountains when he
returned for his father, his frail and befallen,
his second pulse draped over his shoulders,
all former debts lofted and saved from fire,
but not forever. Even Anchises does not live
beyond his time, whatever the life on earth,
whatever the strength of the son,
who looks always in dreams, always in clouds
for the father he could not save across time.
The young man looks into his father’s eyes,
listens for a voice thundering from the peaks,
watches for the signal, a falling, flaring star.
