This April Day: Talking to Georgia's Poet Laureate

Poet Shanna Conway Dixon talks to Judson Mitcham about his role as poet laureate and notions of Southern harmony in his work (poem included).

I first met Georgia’s state poet laureate, Judson Mitcham, during a reading he gave at Macon State College (now Middle Georgia State College) in the spring of 2012. I was surprised that he read – not poetry – but a lovely excerpt from his novel, “Sabbath Creek.” “Sabbath Creek” tells the story of a teenaged boy, Lewis Pope, traveling with his mother as she meanders through South Georgia after having left Lewis’ alcoholic father. Mitcham’s effective use of simple language moved me to purchase his novel along with his poetry collection, “This April Day.”

So, in addition to serving as poet laureate of Georgia, Judson Mitcham is an award-winning novelist. He’s the recipient of the Townsend Prize for his novels “The Sweet Everlasting” and “Sabbath Creek.” Mitcham’s poems have been published in Harper’s, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review and Southern Review. His collections of poetry include “Somewhere in Ecclesiates,” “This April Day,” and “A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New.” Currently, Mitcham lives in Macon and teaches at Mercer University and Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.

I was fortunate to have the chance to interview Mitcham about his role as state poet laureate of Georgia during National Poetry Month. We also conversed about the influences on his early writings and notions of Southern harmony and race.

JM: I’m working with the Georgia Council for the Arts to cultivate new audiences by building awareness of and appreciation for the art of poetry. We have several programs in the works for doing this, and we’ll be making some announcements about them in the near future. My intention is to find various means of showcasing the many good poets who live in Georgia.

SD: I’ve read that you began writing poetry in your thirties. How long were you reading poetry seriously before you began writing poetry? Also, what poets did you find influential to your style and craft in those earlier years?

JM: I actually tried writing poetry before I began reading it seriously, not something I’d recommend. This happened because I was first trying to write songs for the guitar. I was much better at writing the lyrics than I was at writing the music, and I began to focus on the words alone. I did soon discover that you can’t write poems of any value without also reading poems. My main influence in the beginning was the poetry of James Dickey. I admire his “Poems, 1957-1967.” I imitated his line and his use of narrative. David Bottoms was also an influence.

SD: Your poetry often incorporates a sense of tension that complements a tender affinity to Georgia’s culture. As a writer and poet from the South, is it difficult to bridge the past to the present, disappointment and acceptance? I ask because I find your work converges these seamlessly, many times with gentle language, even when exploring controversial themes.

JM: Well, I guess one always has to quote the Faulkner character who said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ The past of the South is very much alive, and as I get older, I feel an urgency to say something about certain aspects of the living past. It seems to me that there is a need to guard against a kind of cultural amnesia. We ought to know what happened in the era of Jim Crow and to be honest about it. There has always been revisionist history that not only denies the terrorist past, but replaces it with the mythology of Southern harmony between the races. Of course, there were harmonious relations sometimes — I certainly experienced them — but there were also deep subtexts to those arrangements called harmonious. There were many things left unspoken and unacknowledged and, to some extent, that’s still true today.

An Evening of Poetry: Georgia Poet Laureate Judson Mitcham
April 25, 6 p.m.
Harris County Library
Hamilton, Georgia

An Evening with Southern Poets
April 30, 7:15 p.m.
Decatur Library Auditorium
Decatur, Georgia

Judson Mitcham photo courtesy of Gerald Lucas.

Shanna Conway Dixon is a senior New Media and Communications major at Middle Georgia State College and plans to return home to Biloxi, Mississippi, after graduating. She currently serves as content editor for her college’s literary magazine, The Fall Line Review, and showcases the life and works of modern women poets from the Deep South on her blog Swamp Skirts. Her own poem Lagniappe is our poem of the day today. 

 

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