| In Pratt’s fourth collection of poetry, Walking Back Up Depot
Street, we travel to a land we have lived in, but never seen. We are led by powerful
images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a woman
named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. As Beatrice searches
for the truth behind the public story—the public history—of the land of her
childhood, she hears and sees the unknown past come alive. She struggles to free herself
from the lies she was taught while growing up—and she finds others who are also on
this journey. In these poems, Beatrice searches for another country, the shadow land
that has always existed within her own country. In her travels from the rural South to an
urban North, she seeks the place of hope and struggle that has been hidden under a surface
of alienation and despair. She has been raised in a place and era where fear and hatred of
those who were foreign, "different," "queer," "strange" was
the norm, where white supremacy was both public and private belief. To find a new country,
for her, means to make a new country, since much of her past still repeats in the
present, from the white hoods of the KKK reanimated in the camouflage fatigues of neo-Nazi
militias, to mountains ravaged by coal company strip-mining which reappear in the hazy
shimmer of skyscrapers.
Her journey parallels that of millions in the 20th century, a long migration from rural
life into the city. Dislocated by economic and political upheaval, or driven out by
prejudice, they search for somewhere that can safely be called home. At first Beatrice is
able to traverse the past into the present armed only with words, images, and stories from
in her childhood—a language that defamed and despised others. In the land where she
was raised, her people lived in doubleness but would admit only one face. In every word,
an opposite was hidden and denied. But during her journey, Beatrice comes face to face
with "the others" and the otherness within herself.
In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of
Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers—and of
sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and
white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union
organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to
Selma.
Walking Back Up Depot Street is an epic journey, in the original sense of epic
as a story rooted in folk song. Its poems reinterpret the epic that poets invented in
order to remind the folk of their history—the story of their journey, how they got to
where they are, where they came from, and where they are going. In literary tradition, Walking
Back Up Depot Street embraces Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body,
Jean Toomer’s Cane, Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, and Nazim
Hikmet’s Human Landscapes, as well as the epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante,
and Milton.
In "The Role of the Poet in a World of Demagogues," Lillian Smith said,
"Your poet and demagogue—and mine—inhabit the same terrain; poet
transforming, bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day, one or the
other wins a small battle inside us." Walking Back Up Depot Street is the act
of one poet attempting to reclaim her land and her history from the hands of the
demagogues of the 20th century.
In "The Role of the Poet in a World of Demagogues," Lillian Smith said,
"Your poet and demagogue---and mine---inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming,
bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day, one or the other wins a
small battle inside us." Walking Back Up Depot Street is the act of one poet
attempting to reclaim her land and her history from the hands of the demagogues of the
20th century.
 Selections
from Walking Back Up Depot Street in English |
|
