Zeitgeist & Gristle: an Ecocritical Appraisal of Specter Mountain

Co-authored by Appalachian poets William Wright and Jesse Graves, Specter Mountain (Mercer University Press, 2018) traces the origins of its titular mountain back to the world’s first flush, before any deity sparked the generative smolder of sentience. Prologue, the collection’s opening section, harkens toward the colossal in scope: “And it was said unto gravity, / heave a stone / at the barren earth that a moon will form from it— / and the world survived, fractured into existence”. Paginated like a snake whose coil has been severed, the poem reimagines the miracle of creation as a thirty-car pile-up—synapses gnash, fields bud with flowerings of black pitch, whole continents turn to kindling while flood waves founder on mountainsides. But there is some semblance of order in this savage nativity, and if readers delve further into the titanic collision of landmasses, they bear witness to a seismic birth: “Appalachia rose / enfolded in a volcanic gown / stippled in sandstone / and the valley’s limestone”. 

Appalachia, our physical and metaphysical geography, is fretted into being by the poets-midwife. Wright and Graves’s iteration of the initial spawn is gruesomely sublime, and the rest of their gothic yield follows suit. We are constantly dared to forget, to repress the stormy thematics and happenings these pages hold. Yet something about the clarity and sagacity of image—the biblical bonafides of the voice, the diction that smacks of scripture—demands we linger, will not allow us to unsee.

As individuals, both Wright and Graves could credibly be called standard-bearers for contemporary poetry in the Mountain South. They each reside in the region and have enjoyed a great degree of success writing about it. What makes this collection unique in relation to the rest of their oeuvres, what makes it worth revisiting and re-acclaiming after half a decade, is its ecological and artistic humility. So much nature writing, particularly southern nature writing, aesthetically commoditizes the environment—co-opting its ethos, employing it merely as a romanticized allegory for the reified emotions of the speaker or lyric perspective. When the natural world is depicted, it is almost always meant to symbolize the high plights and harsh interior weather of the lone authorial psyche.

Wright and Graves eschew this egotism. By minimizing person-to-person interaction, by constraining the deistic omniscience and undisciplined navel-gazing of its narrators, they maintain a light human footprint, which focalizes the physical biome and affirms its agency. This humility is also apparent in the collection’s procedural arrangement, which resists some of the publishing sphere’s more careerist and status-seeking tendencies. A certain selflessness is reflected in the decision to omit author bylines altogether, leaving readers to speculate, based on tonal and stylistic breadcrumbs, whether it was Wright or Graves who wrote each successive poem.

Almost immediately, we are thrown into a landscape at odds with those who try to wrest a living from it. Indeed, while “truck-bed boys” reap crude vengeance on a culture and tradition they are estranged from by “piss[ing] in the gardens / of strangers and light[ing] cats on fire,” the physical setting plots retribution: “The mountain / will answer quick”. Over and again, we see an Appalachian citizenry that is either unwilling or unable to divine and translate edicts from the natural world. And in response to this blunt vulgarity the titular mountain, as Robert Morgan notes in his preface, “refuses to prophesy.” Both parties trudge forward—one in the fuming quiet of their own mortality and lifelong anomie, the other in the austere stoicism of time primeval.

Not many books of poetry are the product of multiple authors. Something about the mythos of the stalwart and unwavering individual vision seems to be perverted by sustained collaboration, at odds with the traditional writerly ethos. Of course, this sentiment is largely nonsense, as Morgan outlines: 

Elizabethan playwrights often collaborated on plays, and film scripts in our time are often the work of many hands. It is well known that Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford collaborated on more than one novel. There is no reason modern poets cannot work together on poems. Poetry can be a craft like other crafts […] Talents can be complementary and mutually inspiring.

This collection deftly synthesizes the distinct perspectives and preoccupations of two fully formed poets. Beyond any petty squabble about the merit, or lack thereof, of co-authorship and collaboration, this is an unequivocal triumph, and the circumstances that surround its creation only amplify that.

The poems are grouped in four main sections that bespeak the collection’s larger elemental undergirding, and chart a kind of coherent trajectory: Prologue, And It Was Said Unto Mountains, And It Was Said Unto Water, and Epilogue. These sections operate more as grand-gesturing signposts than devout directions to the thematic core of these poems, and should be interpreted as such. To shoulder the burden of encompassing a demographic as wide, nuanced, and variant as the Appalachian people, the two poets have not only divvied these poems into sections tethered to the primitive—instilled with a raw, rudimentary presence—but also affected multiple narrative personalities to guide the reader through the mine roads, steep grades, and mud-gutted ruts that constitute the manifold terrains, both corporeal and simulacra, of this collection.

Within the middle sections—And It Was Said Unto Mountains, And It Was Said Unto Water—the poems keenly depict natural landscapes that both spellbind and instruct. Specter Mountain, acting as a ghostly composite and manifestation of the ancestral twining of humanity to the Appalachian region’s flora and fauna, has many methods of communicating with area denizens: the wind “rasps,” trees “bleed,” gorges “yawn,” and the mountain ritually “emptie[s] itself” onto passersby. The hurt here is evident, but the characters in these poems frequently misinterpret, or altogether defy, this “branch narrative”.

When these tensions appear textually, the blame is almost always leveled against mankind. Whether willful or accidental, when man cannot parse, or is unfamiliar with, the strange “grammars” of the natural world, knowledge of his helplessness and meager ineptitude in the face of forces that are eternal and unceasing primes him for self-destruction. As a result, the mountain feels “a pain beyond reckoning”. 

The people that populate these poems function more as archetypes than as singular, multi-sided individuals. Within this archetypal fabric, there exists two main strands of character: the striver and the defiler. Both subsets are afflicted by cognitive dissonance and alienation from past Appalachian customs, but where the striver—embodied chiefly by the first person speaker that appears in several poems—is self-critical, chiding his own gaudiness and impatience, seeking to revive a communion with his ancestral landscape, the defiler experiences only incoherent angst, frenzy, and soul-ache—a blind rage that renders itself in the family trees of trauma they sow. In less dexterous hands, this reliance on archetype as a load-bearing conceit could easily devolve into pat stereotyping—there is, after all, a well-documented tradition of writers portraying Appalachia as either a pre-capitalist, prelapsarian Arcadia, or as an anti-modern Sodom full of knuckle-dragging feudists—but Graves and Wright manage to put forth a genuinely non-anthropocentric perspective without engaging in any essentialist pigeonholing or timeworn tropes. 

The jagged contrasts between these two characters are juxtaposed in poems like “Mother” and “Questions for the Mountain.”  In the first poem, defilers befoul a stream with “runoff from [their] meth house,” indifferent to the “silt pond [it] slags,” and wittingly contribute to the strife and unrest, both bodily and environmental, that plagues the region. Conversely, in “Questions for the Mountain,” the striver/speaker engages in a kind of interspecies dialogue with Specter Mountain, seeking not only supplication, but advice and acumen as a balm against the unending ennui of modern life:

What will I see in your creeks in warmer seasons?
You will see what I allow you to see.
What may I witness?
Trout-curve and moss, one reading of water, one reading of stone.
What will you keep hidden?
All readings of worm, carcass, tree flux. Any true reading of water.
Why would you hide anything from me?
Because you are a mite that forms one particle of all refraction. […]
Where can I hide from the fear that gnaws within me?
There are many deep swales here. There are many yawning gorges. 
Have many hidden here?
Many have hidden here.
Are you then a gravestone reared up by those many sorrows?
I am a cradle, an engine, a cenotaph. […]
Are there phantoms here?
Yes, and you are one them.

By checking his ego, accepting that he is but a “mite” in the larger cosmic scheme, and forgoing the same insecurities and spitefulness that catalyze the defiler’s vain thrashings, the speaker is granted solace and security in the “deep swales” and “yawning gorges” of the mountainside. By welcoming the knowledge of his insignificance—by embracing his finite mortality—rather than bucking against it, the speaker is able to recoup what once was lost: a kinship with the natural world. To put it colloquially, he is back on speaking terms with the Mountain. Sadly, no such consolation is granted the defiler, who lumbers on in the wake of his own god awful wanting.

In the collection’s closing section, Epilogue, the narrative style of both writers melds into a unified first-person. Across the first three sections, the narration can be grouped into two broad categories: a loose poetic I that acts as both an everyman-esque striver, and a more specific embodied consciousness that is distinctly autobiographical in makeup, and includes threads from both writer’s pasts. Otherwise, the poems are steered by a detached, omniscient third person perspective—presumably Specter Mountain and its subsidiary presences. But, in the Epilogue, the narrative, aesthetic, and craft-based idiosyncrasies of both poets coagulate to form a singular vision. 

In poems such as “Mother,” “Father,” “Brother,” and “All Kin,” Wright and Graves’ first person narrator personifies the different facets of Specter Mountain in familial terms—addressing each iteration of the Mountain in turn as an individual entity and an indivisible whole in a tone of hard-won camaraderie and comprehension:

Father, I love you. You are not a wilderness.
You are not the fox that lopes away. The valley is not
a cradle. The valley is silence so complete
it blares through the hills a woeful howl.

Using this selection as a composite for the Epilogue entire, we find the narrator is more earnest and engaging than in previous poems. One could interpret this newfound confidence as a candid exhibition of the speaker’s successful attempt to reweave himself into a rough quilting of the natural world. However, this nascent assuredness does not appear to stem from autonomy or perceived dominance. The speaker is still very much aware of his inconsequence in the overall celestial design. On the contrary, it is the admission and subsequent embracement of that reality that has seeded this fledgling inner-peace for the poet / striver. 

Regrettably, the defiler’s condition of constant flux and disharmony is only exacerbated at collection’s end. In “The Estranged,” Epilogues third/second-person outlier, we watch as those same “truck-bed boys,” still locked in untenable silence, try to outpace the shadow of their own futility:

They lurch
through woods,

come to the trailers and shatter
glass bottles against their own walls
until they settle back into their traps,

paths that circle
round and round the same place,
that cuff their scarred hands to home.

This is not a fiction; this is hidden
fact, the petrified senses of those
who look away for good.

By “look[ing] away for good,” the defiler shutters himself from the natural world and, as a result, loses touch with his physical dwellings as well as the wilting blooms of metacognition and self-consciousness that might transfigure his bitterness. The collection closes on a truth that time and again the narrator, in his fearful piety, has labored to avoid: when all is said and done, the mountain grants no quarter to those who refuse to respect its dominion.