Red Room Where the Writers Are

George Scarbrough in 1996

I regret to note that long time Iris Press poet and novelist, George Scarbrough, died quietly in his sleep in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the morning of December 2, 2008. George had celebrated his 93rd birthday about six weeks earlier on October 20. He was mentally sharp until the end of his long life, but has been declining physically for the past few years. George was a unique and important voice in 20th century American poetry, and he was known and admired by many of the best known poets of the last 60 years. A poets poet, he was never widely read by the general public, but he was highly regarded by most of the major American poets and critics of the last half of the 20th century. His work was a major contribution to the understanding of his native rural east Tennessee homeland. His importance in the history of southern literature cannot be overstated.

The first thing poets notice about Scarbrough when they encounter his work for the first time is that he doesn’t sound like anyone else – at all. There is a unity to George’s writings (if I pick up a passage of his work that I am not familiar with, I can almost immediately identify it as Scarbrough), but there is also variability. The second thing poets notice about George’s poems is the wide range of form and style. While no two of his poems look alike, his voice is unique not only in it’s diction and music, but in the precision with which his language attacks his message. And what a message it is! Nine years ago he wrote:

The world as we had known it disappeared. Yet, essentially, the southeast corner of Tennessee remained the same. The earth remained dearer to some of us because of its remoteness. During the war years, those of us who for one reason or another never left the county because of the love of it and of family grew even closer to the old landscapes, which fortunately no battles had scarred and no factory smokestacks disfigured. Polk County remained off the beaten path, becoming more isolated as the interstate highways by-passed it on their way south. I was one of the few who never packed up their roots and left home.

And no other poet captures in such a precise and vivid way the flavor and texture of rural east Tennessee. As Rodney Jones wrote in his introduction to the second edition (1999) of Tellico Blue,

Scarbrough is that rare twentieth-century American country poet who never left home, nor took to writing regional pablum. He has instead , for the better part of this century, engaged in a resplendently lyrical dialog with his homeland and ancestry.....  In Southern country poetry, Scarbrough’s early work is a lonely representative of the generation between the Fugitive Poets and James Dicky. At its best, it deserves comparison with Hardy, Robinson, and Frost more than with Ransom and Tate. It is of such precise focus that it does not seem to represent any place so large as a region. Its emphasis is on the natural order more than the aesthetic landscape, and community relations more than regional politics..... Scarbrough’s exile is within the language that his countrymen reject, in a place that he calls Eastanalle, in body, and most notably, in his exacting and musically compelling intellect.

We will miss George Scarbrough, but fortunately, in a way we will still have him with us. He has left a rich legacy of language that will last for centuries, to use Jim Wayne Miller’s phrase, a rich “vein of words” that we will continue to mine for many years to come. George’s body of work is extremely complex. Iris Press has been working for some time on two new collections of poems and that work will continue. These will be published posthumously starting this year. I predict that this work will attract new readers and will increase in importance for many years to come. We have lost George Scarbrough, but his gift to us is strong and enduring.

A poem by George Scarbrough

Death Is a Creek, Backward Flowing

For my Father, W. O. Scarbrough, who died May 10, 1950

Running Back along his tributaries to his source,
Feeling among his ferns and grasses, where the blue
Flag sings to his willow in the headlands, the course
Is upward here, he comes once more to view
The dripping springs that fed his downward fall
Into the lower hills, onto the joyous plain
Where in his summers lay a golden pall
Hiding the broken path, from roar to hush again
Concealed. Stalemated, staggered, now he comes,
Out of his arms the waves retreating; nearer birth,
The full, fine flowing of him stilly hums;
Left of his presence, only his lines on earth.
Make no mistake about it, in his climb
Passed upon pastures was a change of time.

First published in: The Course is Upward, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1951