Author Archives: wendywelch

More Bad Language

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Jack continues to explore his native language –

Last week I explored the history of the Scots language and how it relates to English, and I briefly mentioned Robert Burns.

A few weeks ago people all over the world celebrated at Burns Nights or Burns Suppers remembering his poetry and songs. He is often referred to as ‘the ploughman poet’ and he certainly worked on farms at various times. But that suggests that he was somehow less educated and lowly. However his father paid for him to be educated by a tutor and he attended schools. So he learned French, Latin and Mathematics – so not uneducated at all.

At a traditional Burns Supper, everyone enjoys a hearty Burns Night meal, which includes haggis, neeps and tatties, rounded off with drams of whisky

But another part of his learning was from an old woman who lived with his family and was well versed in traditional stories and folk-tales.

He had his first book of poems and songs published in Kilmarnock and headed to Edinburgh, where he became the ‘toast of the town’. This has always struck me as a parallel to Bob Dylan heading to New York and becoming the toast of that town. What’s interesting about that connection is that Bob has often said that among his favorite songs are some by Burns.

Burns was always ambitious and wanted to be recognized both in Scotland and elsewhere, so he wrote in Scots, Scots/English and in standard British English for different audiences.

Sadly he was eventually dumped by Edinburgh society and they moved on. But when he died at the age of 38 thousands of his compatriots turned up for his funeral. That, I’m sure was because they all recognized what others around the world ever since did!

When I was a kid all schools in Scotland had annual competitions for songs and poems by Burns, and I’m sure that played a big part keeping the language alive.

This time I’ve just been looking at Burns’ connections to language. Next week I’ll examine the other well known aspects of his life.

The Monday Book – Revised Light by Sharon J. Ackerman

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Sharon Ackerman is a child of the Appalachian migration whose summer visits to Perry County, in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, affected her powerfully and provide the material for almost all of these poems.

Thank you Sharon for sharing an overview of your collection with us!

When asked what led to my poetry collection Revised Light, the word that springs to mind is ancestors. And inseparable from ancestry is place.  I am a child of the Appalachian Migration and though I’ve lived a good many years just outside Appalachia proper, the place I first identified as home calls me back to its doorstep. This collection of poems came about because the oral histories I’ve heard, the summers spent visiting southeast Kentucky, the particulars of old speech passed down to me through my parents, and the sheer pull of ten generations of ancestors rooted in eastern Kentucky, declared their presence in my writing and insisted that I tell the story of migration before anything else.

Around 1936 my grandmother was widowed with seven children after my grandfather died from digging coal. In many ways, all the migrations of her children and grandchildren stemmed from that event.  I had to reach across the many “dispossessions” as writer Steven Stoll once defined it and exhume that heritage and somehow knit it together with my current life in Virginia. It’s like reconciling cum laude and a country accent; the world at large just doesn’t get that. And though Revised Light is just a short meditation of heritage and displacement, I could not have written it if outstanding poets of voice and place like Ron Rash and Maurice Manning had not shown me how stories prop up the present, giving us perspective and meaning.

I think it’s fair to say that when you have roots in Appalachia, there are two voices writing inside you. There is the native cadence and then there is the public one brought about through schooling and societal pressure.

I think it’s fair to say that when you have roots in Appalachia, there are two voices writing inside you. There is the native cadence and then there is the public one brought about through schooling and societal pressure. I wanted to let the stories within the poems travel through the lens of their inherited vision and co-exist amicably with the migratory spirit that is also very much part of modern Appalachia.  If I’ve done that in some small way, then it is what I intended in this work.