Hal Crowther
Hal Crowther is the author of four collections of essays, including Unarmed But Dangerous, Cathedrals of Kudzu, and Gather at the River, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s prize for criticism. He just published a book on H. L. Mencken.
The most obvious thing I have in common with Charles Wright is myopia. When we were children nearsightedness was rare enough to inspire playground humor—the kids who wore glasses were “Four Eyes” or “Mr. Magoo.” Wright, seventy-nine, still wears them and is invariably photographed behind them—his eyes, unlike his poetry, giving nothing away. But if any poet has looked harder and seen more of this world—seen it literally, tree by tree, bird by bird, moonrise by moonrise—and responded to it in verse more distinctive and indelible than Wright’s, I’m waiting to see the poetry that proves it.
"Sherman burned his path through the South with bullets and torches. Fifty years later, the acerbic Mencken burned a wider path through its ego, through the fragile self-respect that the South had rebuilt during the painful passages of Reconstruction. Mencken, the legendary cultural arsonist, set his fires with words only, but with language so barbed and contemptuous, so marinated in disdain that it may have left deeper scars than Sherman’s regiments."
Since the dawn of introspection, which predates Homer at least, what collective mind has been more exhaustively or passionately psychoanalyzed than the Mind of the South?
