Amanda Crim
Poet Rita Mae Reese discovered O’Connor when she was an undergraduate.
While many contemporary poets are writing issue-oriented poetry about race and politics, Madison poet Rita Mae Reese instead looks inward (or perhaps more precisely, southward) for inspiration. In her newest collection of poems, The Book of Hulga, Reese explores her lifelong fascination with the life and works of writer Flannery O’Connor.
The winner of this year’s Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, awarded by the UW-Madison English Department, The Book of Hulga will be published at the end of March by the University of Wisconsin Press. Reese received her MFA from the UW’s Creative Writing program and now lives in Madison with her family.
The Book of Hulga is what is known in the poetry world as a “project book.” Increasingly popular, project books usually explore a single topic. Writers use them to follow their obsessions or to provide a structure or focus for their creative energies. Poems may all follow a consistent form, or, as in Reese’s case, may use different poetic forms to explore related ideas.
Reese first discovered Flannery O’Connor when she was an undergraduate at Florida State University. As a native of West Virginia, Reese found O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style weirdly familiar. “Her fatalism and her dark humor seemed more Appalachian to me than purely Southern,” says Reese.
Reese wrote her first poem about O’Connor in 2001. That poem, “Flannery O’Connor’s Peacocks Go to Heaven After She Dies,” won a prize, sealing Reese’s fate as a true O’Connor junkie. Over the years she has made pilgrimages to O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Ga. “Once I climbed over a fence to sneak around her farm,” says Reese. “It’s all there, the house, the barn, the hayloft.” These locations appear in O’Connor’s stories, in Reese’s poems and in the drawings by Julie Franki that illustrate The Book of Hulga.
But who is Hulga and why is this her book? Reese says she had a hard time writing about O’Connor directly, as much as she wanted to. Instead, Reese found her entry point in Hulga, a memorable character from one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, “Good Country People.” Hulga was a favorite of O’Connor’s too. O’Connor once wrote to a friend that if she lived long enough, she planned to write a whole comic novel about Hulga. Alas, O’Connor died of complications from lupus in 1964 at the age of 39 and never got around to writing Hulga’s story. “I feel like I’m giving Hulga the story that she deserves,” says Reese.
Reese is currently halfway through the first draft of a novel. She is reluctant to discuss the topic, however, citing “writer’s paranoia.” “It’s hard to move on from Hulga,” she says. But she doesn’t have to, yet. The national magazine Poets & Writers is doing a feature on Reese in March, and its website includes a recording of Reese reading some of the poems.
The book’s official launch party will be held on Flannery O’Connor’s birthday (March 25) at the Arts + Literature Laboratory on Winnebago Street. Birthday cake will be served. On April 8, Café Zoma on Atwood Avenue is hosting a poetry reading and art reception, exhibiting Franki’s artwork from the book.
