J. Scott Brownlee: Letter to the Critic Who Questions, Among Other Things, My Poor Use of Grammar
This is my pasture. Ride with me. Let’s tour it. I will teach you
enough to re-write your thesis if you ask me kindly
and use Texan grammar—properly requested. Cain’t we
read the poem in a thick dialect? is a valid question.
Cain’t we? Cain’t we? Cain’t we? (Repetition’s a gift
the same way silence is.) Please explain to me why
you took the train arriving years after settlers first pitched
their skin-thin pup tents. I want to understand
your position, though it feels distant now. You helped
the government Comanche chieftains feared—growing
fat on home-front, pillar-pocked and tiled, Romanesque
in its pomp—with its fields collegiate and green, cut
and well-kept. But most discouraging of all? You forgot
about me—assumed speaking in my accent meant “un-
worthy” of New Criticism. How can he describe anything
as beautifully as Shakespeare with his weed-tumbled,
Hill Country voice? you wondered. And fairly. It’s a thick
dialect, after all: full of shits, ain’ts, goddamns, and Amens.
But the true storm grows here, even so, deep in me. The real story
begins like a tree inside it—tale of this town, I mean—thick
mesquite maze of depth from which voices come, mist-filled
like river echoes on a cool morning skipping rocks,
cut on the wrist blooming red from a barbed catfish
caught in my youth bleeding out, now, ink-like—
language dripping from me just as poetry did the first time
it fell out of the sky, where it rained down freely a week,
once—between clouds and parched earth, wet and dry
perspectives—cattle lowing without provocation
high-pitched, called to congregate there at the center of it
as if Pentecostal: UFO of its glare and sharp gleam
and the beam it shot straight down, each night, into lit-up
pasture—storm-cloud-God-pronounced blue swallowing
ground it touched in the oncoming arc of its fast approaching
—many-mouthed void of it from which voices too humble
to ever have names told me simply, Be still for once, poet: quiet.
Listening itself finally occurred like a rain of great need
quenching desperation—and then in spite of me. Shit,
I didn’t have anything to say, critic—no clever gloss,
no elaborate reading. There was only blue light, then dark.
J. SCOTT BROWNLEE is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, BOXCAR Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and elsewhere. Originally from Llano, Texas (population 3,033), he writes about the people and landscape of rural Texas and is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class, both in the United States and abroad. His chapbook, Highway or Belief, won the 2013 Button Poetry Prize.
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