HATING THE SOUTH

______________

Hating The South
Deep South Siberia
The Old South
The Golden Eye
Pulp Fiction
Miss Lawrence
The Critics
Queer Theory
Isolation
Tennessee Williams
Southern Gothic
Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone
______________

HATING THE SOUTH

“I don’t hate the 
South: I don’t hate it”
—William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom

Faulkner hated the South—
And so did Carson McCullers

She said she’d go back—
To Georgia for one thing

To refresh her sense—
Of Southern Gothic Horror
______________

DEEP SOUTH SIBERIA

The Deep South was an—
Intellectual Siberia

That’s why McCullers moved—
From Savannah to NYC

To study writing at—
Columbia University

After she got married—
They moved to Fayetteville

North Carolina during—
The Great Depression

Fort Brag the hell-hole—
Of the Golden Eye

THE OLD SOUTH
______________

The Old South was—
Bad Seed for McCullers

She hated Fayetteville—
Its dreary Dixie ambience

Living in its backwater—
Literary wasteland

Seedy white trash—
Dismal Southern Gothic

Absorbing every detail—
For her two novels

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—
And Reflections in a Golden Eye

THE GOLDEN EYE
______________

“Reflected from my golden eye
The dullard knows he is mad”
—T. S. Eliot,  “Lines for an Old Man”

She hated the South—
Scorning its grotesqueries

Hardly admiring it—
She satirized it instead

She had the Eye of a—
Giant proud Peacock

One with a Golden Eye—
Reflecting all the Ugliness

All the Gothic horror of—
Decadent Dixie Deep South

PULP FICTION 
______________

Miss Fadiman the critic—
The New Yorker queen bee

Trashed the novel as—
As a D. H. Lawrence rip-off

The queer “Prussian Officer”—
Meets Southern Guignol Noir

His wife as muzzy-minded—
Nymphomaniac slut

Plus a Filipino gay houseboy—
A cuckoo lady next door

A Dixie Denouement—
Rape, queens, bestiality

Ho-hum, the usual Faulkner—
“Sanctuary” pulp fiction

MISS LAWRENCE
______________

“The Prussian Officer” found—
Parallels in McCullers novella

The usual repressed sexuality—
The boring, lonely military life

Miss Brando has her own—
Young handsome horsy orderly

An enlisted man played by—
Construction worker Robert Forster

He works in the base stable—
Taking care of the horses

He rides nude in the woods—
On a horse to forget things

The ogling Brando a typical—
Uptight str8t closet-case

THE CRITICS
______________

The macabre critics—
Couldn’t help opining

Obsessed with then 
Usual obsessions

 Pressed to put their—
Straight moral spin 

On the literary merits—
On McCullers’ novella

So easy for them—
Douchebag male sexists

QUEER THEORY
______________

Even today the—
Esteemed QT queens

Like David Halperin—
In “How To Be Gay”

Plagiarizing divas—
Like Mildred Pierce

Belittling drag queens—
As too feminist satirical

Trashing McCullers—
For festooning fags

With contrived—
Nutty aberrations

And gothic gruesome—
Deep South whatever

ISOLATION
______________

“Spiritual isolation
is the basis of most
of my themes”
—Carson McCullers

This grand guignol—
Little Puppet Show

This masquerade—
She saw all around her

The mortgaged heart—
That rules us all

Incapable of returning—
Or receiving love

We’re all grotesqueries—
Spiritually isolated

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
______________

The antebellum South kept—
Spitting out these queens

Like Tennessee Williams—
And Carson McCullers

Beguiled and battered—
They clung together

Mentors and Fag-hags—
Helping each other survive

Many ocean summers—
They spent together

Typing and sharing—
Talking and dreaming

SOUTHERN GOTHIC
______________

Tennessee Williams wrote—
A New Directions preface 

For McCullers’ “Reflections”—
Reassessing the novel

Years had gone by—
New altitudes prevailed

The old critical altitudes—
Toward gay subjects

Adultery and morality—
And homosexuality

Moral condemnation—
The old critical attitudes

It wasn’t Deep South—
Str8t Truth anymore

It was New South Goth—
McCullers’ golden eye

ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE
______________

Imbued with a new sense of—
Southern Gothic literature

Williams wrote a novel—
Similar to the Golden Eye

Later a Vivien Leigh film—
Set in Rome not Big Easy

An aging actress falls madly—
In love with an Italian youth

Pimped by a dyke gigolo—
Coy Contessa Lotte Lenya

Full of ennui and boredom—
Like Brando in “Reflections”

A twin of Carson McCullers’—
Macabre gay masterpiece