Friday from the Archives: “Imprinted with Place: A Conversation at Home with James Applewhite” interview and photographs by Rob McDonald
To lightly adapt a saying: “You can take the author out of North Carolina but you can’t take North Carolina out of the author.” Some of our authors leave but write about home, other stay but write about elsewhere as a way to contend with home. Then, there are those authors, like James Applewhite, who both stay and grapple with home.
In our 2016 25th Anniversary issue, interview Rob McDonald visited poet and Duke professor Applewhite in his home in Durham. As part of their discussion, they discuss staying and how place and people impact artistic endeavors. Applewhite was a student at Duke with Fred Chappell, Joe Taylor, Roy Varner, Keith Davis, as well as Reynolds Price.
McDonald: So that reclamation, that renovation is a kind of nice metaphor, isn’t it?
Applewhite: It is. It’s like what writers do. Writers take their memories and they try to bring them into the present. We try to make some sense of what might have seemed chaotic or incomprehensible when you were a kid. It’s like writing a poem, it’s like encountering data as a scientist, or it’s like an investigator of a crime scene. You come on the site, where there’s a certain configuration of elements, where it’s impressive and it’s enigmatic, and your rational mind wants to read it, wants to interpret it. Your emotional self feels the impact of it. So as a writer, for me, I encounter landscape, place – the cemetery where townspeople would come across that winter, bleached grass toward the burial of my grandfather – and I see their faces there and their individuality. I want to put down those figures and faces in language, as they were, in relation to the place.
What a fascinating idea, that somehow these really smart people, these really innovative people, find themselves in the same place at the same time – and the flames go.
That’s right. Yes, Reynolds Price was there as a senior when Fred and I were freshmen. We didn’t much like Reynolds then. He was very affected. He walked across campus in a tweed jacket with a muffler, with a rolled black umbrella, and his ambition was already to go to Oxford – and he did go to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. Everybody just wore cotton t-shirts those days, and Reynolds wore
his English-style clothes.
[On his friendship with Fred Chappell] I think I influenced him toward writing those iconic poems wherein the mountain characters of his home environment are the figure in the landscape. I think
I helped him get to that. Fred influenced me, I think, toward continuing to use literary form. I mean, some of my early poems were in rhyme and slant rhyme, and both of us work in and out of formal measures in a way whereby the language is flexible but yet ordered, full, yet amenable to the objects and the people, impressed by the things we see and feel and hear and smell.
Read the rest on ProQuest. Add the 2016 issue to your collection today!
