Photographs and Poems from Mississippi


By ANN FISHER-WIRTH and MAUDE SCHUYLER CLAY     |     PORTFOLIO     |     EXCERPT FROM VOLUME 50.1&2


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IN HER RECENT MEMOIR, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes: “A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.” Mississippi, where I have lived for the past twenty-eight years, suffers from severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression. Yet the state also possesses great natural beauty and a rich and complex culture, one interwoven from the many voices that have made up its identity. Mississippi, the collaborative project I have undertaken with photographer Maude Schuyler Clay, explores both this degradation and this beauty.

By now, I have written nearly fifty poems, which I have come to understand as explorations of voice in Mississippian plenitude and variety. Recently, on Facebook, someone snakily commented that though we hear people say things like might could and aks, “That’s not English.” I completely disagree. I honor the voices, no matter whose they are. I love the rich orality of Mississippi culture and have tried to express it. To write these poems, I listen—not only to human voices but also to Maude's photographs. Out of silence, they emerge.



—Ann Fisher-Wirth

VOLUME 50.1&2
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Women            what do they want

              she’s always hanging pictures of the ocean
                                      when we got a nice house
                         here in town

hardwood floors              Jacuzzi                     big magnolias in the back
                                                     the whole 9 yards

              and if she tells me again
                       how her daddy gave her an opal ring
how she lost it at the beach
                                      prayed all night to find it

                                                                         and next day
              just running her hands through the sand
there it was

                       her daddy         always her daddy
                                                          and his little fishing boat

Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market
Where Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant in 1955. Money, Mississippi.





He ain’t done right to whistle
and talk hi y’all baby and filth
to Carolyn Bryant even if he come

from away he ought to known
how we do around here and I sure
as hell don’t believe his uncle

shoulda stood up and pointed out
Roy and J. W. in that courthouse
I am so blessed tired of people

students and all coming down here
to interview us just because we
was alive then making out like this

is a bad town y’all don’t know
what we do for those who know
their place why just yesterday

Polly I said to the woman who
takes care of me my husband don’t
use this red tee and these shoes

take em for Brewster as for the rest
why that was a long time ago
most folks dead and store collapsed

to ruins why you raking it up again




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VIEW THIS ENTIRE PORTFOLIO IN VOLUME 50.1&2

MAUDE SCHUYLER CLAY was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, where she continues to live and work. After assisting William Eggleston in Memphis, she moved to New York City, worked at the Light Gallery, and was later a photo editor at Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Fortune. She returned to live in the Delta in the late 1980s and was photography editor of Oxford American from 1999 to 2004. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum for Women, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Her books include Delta Land, Delta Dogs, and Mississippi History.

ANN FISHER-WIRTH is the author of the poetry collections Dream Cabinet; Carta Marina; Blue Window; and Five Terraces; as well as the chapbooks First, earth; Slide Shows; The Trinket Poems; and Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll. She co-edited Ecopoetry Anthology. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and directs the university’s minor in environmenal studies.