Featured Poet Fred Bassett with Interview by Eugene Platt
/Fred Bassett, Ph.D., Emory University, is a prolific poet and novelist, whose work appeared in Negative Capability 33 and 34. His well-crafted poems have appeared in more than eighty literary journals and anthologies. Dr. Bassett was a professor and vice-president at Limestone College. In retirement, he lives in Greenwood, South Carolina, where he remains active with the Greenwood Writers Guild. Link to his engaging Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/fred.bassett.923
(Interviewed via email by Eugene Platt, who was interviewed by Sue Walker in November 2019.)
Love and Death
Got word yesterday about Kitty Fisher.
In 1949, he owned a new, silver-gray Ford
with a glass steering knob, mounted left.
God, he could wheel that raging V-8,
while hugging Roselynn Beverley with his right.
Afternoons, he’d wait in front of Handley High.
She’d scramble across the front seat,
slide under his arm, and snuggle up
with her cheek on his chest, her right hand
in his open shirt with that tangle of hair.
And there I was tripping home,
desperate for Gwinn Rainwater to throw
herself at me with such sweet abandon.
Kitty had called an old friend with a dire request.
You better come over.
I just can’t live by myself any more.
The friend rushed over as quick as he could,
but Kitty had already killed himself.
I understand death, even its necessity.
No death, no birth. No birth, no me.
So, I praise death for my silver cord,
knowing that it, too, will snap one day.
But love? Why do we get entangled
as if the bonds were unbreakable?
And why do we long for love,
even with that sweet chariot swinging low?
Taking a Stand
How little I knew about racial injustice
before I turned fourteen. That year,
a black man refused to step aside
for our neighbor when they met
on the sidewalk in our little town in Alabama.
When curses did not move his stiff legs,
Mr. Baker stepped into Western Auto,
borrowed a big barrel baseball bat,
and brutalized the man with total impunity.
No charges were even filed.
Shocked from my slumbering ignorance,
I began to take notice of things.
There were no black kids in my school,
no black clerks in our stores,
no black police or sheriff deputies.
But there were restrictive signs:
Colored Waiting Room and Whites Only.
Who with eyes could not see?
Where then were the calls for equality?
I never heard a single voice decry
the evils of our Jim Crow ways,
until my freshman year at college in 1953.
There, I took a stand against my South—
full of words but with much yet to learn.
It was Richard Wright’s novel,
Native Son, featuring Bigger Thomas
on Chicago’s diced urban stage,
that first showed me the depth
of black alienation and the limitation
of the goodwill of a few white people.
It would take heroic confrontation
and massive civil disobedience,
that, far too often, was met
with bigoted violence, jailing, even murder.
Courageously, the legions
of civil-rights warriors persisted until hope
raised her beautiful smiling face.
No, racism did not die with the demise
of legalized segregation,
but don’t tell those like John Lewis
that nothing has been gained
by their sweat and blood. And yet,
the battle cry for justice and equality
still rings loud and clear from coast to coast.
Where do you stand? Where do you stand?
Deep Moments in a Mountain Forest
I lift my eyes toward the cry of a hawk
and catch a glimpse of the splendid creature.
Lingering alone in the moment,
I replay its magnetic cry
in the silent chamber we call memory.
Refocused on the tangle of life
anchored to the good earth,
I notice long gnarled surface roots
snaking across the trail.
They belong to a huge white pine,
a magnificent lifeform in its own right.
My eyes follow the tall trunk until it branches.
There, a crow rides low in its nest,
silently brooding a batch of eggs.
As often happens in such moments,
I am once again astounded
by that awesome ontological question—
why does the Universe exist,
when there could be nothing?
Undeniably, the Universe exists
as an ever-changing process.
Toward eternity? Death and rebirth?
Nothingness? Who could possibly know?
Ah, but there are hills yet alive and so am I.
Interview with Fred Bassett by Eugene Platt
Eugene Platt (EP): It is Sunday night here in Charleston in the Age of Coronavirus, and I am thinking of you there in pastoral Greenwood at almost the opposite end of our beloved South Carolina. When first given the interview assignment, I was hoping we could meet in Charleston and enjoy a poetic interview over drinks. Alas, the pandemic is precluding that, so email must suffice. When we became acquainted in 1998, your book Awake My Heart, aptly subtitled Psalms for Life, had just been published and you were living in Hilton Head, South Carolina. I thought you were in Hilton Head for the duration. So, what took you to Greenwood, and what fills your life there?
Dr. Fred Bassett (FB): Our son, Jonathan, and his wife, Lori, have our only grandchildren, who were just starting down the road of public education. With both parents working, Lucas and Ella hated after-school care. My wife, Peg, decided we could solve that problem for them. So, we moved to Greenwood, and for nine years I picked them up after school and brought them to Blue Haven, our retirement cottage that overlooks a creek that’s banked with old deciduous trees, a good place for birding from the tall windows of the den. The experience with our grandchildren is one I’ll cherish until my final breath.
EP: By the way, Greenwood is hundreds of miles from your hometown of Roanoke, Alabama. Does this reflect Thomas Wolfe’s dictum as expressed in the title of his novel You Can’t Go Home Again?
FB: I totally affirm my roots in Alabama and often write about them. The effort, however, has always been on me to keep my connections. I’ve been where my people are and I understand them. They, for the most part, have not travelled my road and don’t understand me, totally. So, I accommodate them.
EP: I have just re-read my 1998 review of Awake My Heart and, if I did not know otherwise, I would have to wonder if your publisher had paid me. Seriously, Fred, it was one of the most deservedly positive interviews I have ever written. Twenty years later, how do you feel about your book? Do you include selections from it as well as newer work in your public readings?
FB: The book was published by Paraclete Press, an ecumenical press on Cape Cod. Fortunately for me, they have a good marketing department and set up signings in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. I also did a lot of readings from it before and after I published my first poetry book.
EP: Once while visiting a comatose friend in a hospital, I read to her this particularly poignant psalm from your book:
How long, O Lord? How Long?
How long must I bear pain in my soul?
Every day I call to you, O Lord:
I spread out my hands to you.
For I am severely afflicted;
I am utterly spent and crushed.
My days are like an evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.
My bones burn like a furnace,
and my eyes grow dim through sorrow.
The joy of my heart has ceased;
I have forgotten what happiness is.
Do the beasts of burden bray
over their grass,
of the oxen low over their fodder?
Answer me, O Lord my God!
or I will sleep the sleep of death.
Heal me, O Lord,
and I shall be healed;
save me, and I shall be saved.
You are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all day long.
Fred, have you ever had occasion to read from Awake My Heart or from your newer works to patients in hospitals or, in general, to people who feel their faith is flagging?
FB: Yes, a few times, and I would welcome more. A scattering of readers have shared with me how my book has helped them.
One of the reasons I composed the psalms of lamentation was because I never hear them read in Church. Nor did that change after the book was published, although I’ve given it to various ministers.
For me, the lyrics of those old psalms, especially the laments, are compelling, and I wanted to pull together various verses into new psalms for today’s readers. These old psalms also validated, for me, the need for humans to share their sorrow, verbally – a need that modern culture tends to suppress.
Although I consider myself a stoic, the Biblical laments taught me that it’s okay to share my sorrows, which I do in my poems. I’ve thus learned that I can lament and accept the sorrows that come my way.
Awake My Heart has been, by far, my bestselling book. It went through two large printings (sold more than fourteen-thousand copies) and is now out of print.
EP: One of the blurbs on your book’s cover, Valerie Sayers’, reads like a poem itself. Gee, Fred, I wish I could get a blurb from Valerie for my own forthcoming book. How did you manage it? Her novel Due East, which seems to be set in Beaufort, quite close to Hilton Head, is quite touching.
FB: I first met Valerie Sayers at a literary workshop in Beaufort, where she was one of the presenters. During the evening hours, there were open mikes at various places. One night she and her son heard me read. He was so taken by my reading that she had to bring him back the next night to hear me read at a different venue. From that confession, we began to converse and then kept in touch by email. She also did blurbs for my first novel South Wind Rising and my second book of “found poetry” Love: The Song of Songs. I’m very fond of her first novel Due East and often used it in a course I taught on Lowcountry Novels.
EP: You taught religion and philosophy at Limestone College for many years. How has that influenced your creative and scholarly writing?
FB: After I got to Limestone, I soon discovered that my students didn’t need a professor who spent hours digging deeper and deeper into smaller and smaller matters. So, I set aside that kind of research and developed several interdisciplinary courses for the humanities curriculum, like The Future of Mankind. This course pulled together theology, philosophy, sociology, and the literary arts.
Inspired by my expanding knowledge of the literary arts, the novels in particular, I began to imagine myself writing a novel – its setting, issues, characters, etc. I thought I was writing it in my head, but I was only envisioning it. I learned there’s a big difference between the two when I started writing the novel.
It was not an easy journey for me to switch from scholarly writing to creative writing. Fortunately, one of my co-workers Peg Hamilton was a fine poet.
After hearing so many of my stories about growing up in Alabama, she encouraged me to craft some of them into narrative poems. I finally took her challenge. As she promised, writing those poems helped me to find my creative writing voice.
With a bit of validation by various editors of literary journal, including Sue Walker, I returned to the novel, South Wind Rising. Now, two of my novels have been published and I’m editing the third, The Winter is Past, with plans to publish it and the second novel, Honey from a Lion, this fall under the title A Time to Love Anew: Two Novels.
Lately, I started writing creative non-fiction and it has proved to be a good genre for me. I’ve more to write in all three genres than the time allotted to me, but that’s okay. I’d hate to finish everything on my bucket list, just to sit and wait for death.
EP: As a writer, I imagine you read a lot. What books are you reading now or have read recently? Care to comment on any?
FB: I read widely from most genres. I’m very fond of E. O. Wilson’s books on sociobiology and bio-diversity. The most recent memoir I read was John Lewis’ Walking with the Wind, excellent in every way. Both men grew up in Alabama and are two of my Alabama heroes.
I’m always reading poetry and usually have a novel going. The latest was The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson, about the “blue” people of Appalachian Kentucky. Before that I read Lady Baltimore, by Owen Wister, to fill in some of the gaps in knowledge of Southern novels.
EP: You lost Peg, your wife of many years, whom you described as a sojourner who shared your joys and sorrows. How has that loss affected you as a writer? Have you found catharsis in writing about her or about your loss of her?
FB: Peg was a very private person when it came to our relationship. She did not like for me to write about her or us. Only two of my poems written before her death in December 4, 2016, reference her. They are “On First Seeing My Future Wife” and “The Old Stoic Faces the Mirror.” She approved the first and consented to the second. Her grief over her mother’s death was the trigger for that poem. For the first time, I stepped out of my stoical shoes and wept with tears falling down my face.
Since her death, I’ve struggled with my need to write about her and about us. I’ve finally convinced myself that she would have understood my need and given me a green light. So, I’ve written a few of those poems.
EP: Your book The Old Stoic Faces the Mirror sounds like something an octogenarian like I might have written. Does its content reflect a coming to terms with one’s imminent demise?
FB: Yes, I address that issue in several of the poems.
EP: Due to the pandemic, this interview is being conducted in cyberspace. But, if we could have conducted it anywhere in the world, what place would you choose and why?
FB: Here in Greenwood. This move has been very good for me in many ways. I would show you the Benjamin May’s Historic Site and share the very small role I’ve played in the development of it. I would take you to the Greenwood Genetic Center, where my daughter-in-law Lori serves as Director of Communications, and let her take us on a tour with informed notes on all the things they are doing. It’s absolutely amazing. Then I’d like to take you to a meeting of our diversity group as well as a literary meeting that Suzy Holloway and I co-host at her Puppet House.
Of course, a meeting in Roanoke, Alabama, would also be good. I would take you to Broughton, the rural community where my roots strike deep. I would show you my great-grandfather’s farm that Dad bought and moved us to when I was fifteen.
There, he taught me how to raise corn and hay for our livestock. I would take you down the back-roads (all dirt back then), where I once rode Dynamite, my racking wonder, often late into the night. (There were no idle hours for me back then.) I would take you by Granny Bassett’s place – she the matriarch of our large family – the big house built out of heart pine, her father sawed from virgin, long-leaf pines. It’s more than a hundred-years old and not sagging at all. Finally, I would take you to the Tallapoosa, the river of my youth.
Thanks, Eugene, for journeying with me by way of this interview. And to you, Sue Walker, and staff for posting it. Peace, joy, and love to you all.
EP: Thank you, Fred. This has been fun, hasn’t it? As for the drinks we weren’t able to enjoy with this interview, here’s a raincheck for when you come to Charleston. We could meet at Tommy Condon’s Irish pub on Church Street.