Academic Elitist wrote:

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Obviously the State Poem should be penned by a true scholarly poet.

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Jameela Lares wrote:

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If we want a cultural experience, there are other venues than voting for a jingle.

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All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

I too, sing Mississippi

I'm Clyde Kennard locked in Parchman

For going to man the man; still can’t

Understand why Mis’sippi Southern didn’t lend

A hand, or a leg up, just a bum rap

Hard time and a heart attack; somebody ask Aubrey,

bet he’ll have a clue

about how hot chickenfeed

Got in the trunk of my 52’

Chevy

I too, sing Mississippi

I am Richard Wright taking the IC north

Out the southern night, away from all them

lynch mobs and polices what kept the bottom line

right for King Cotton and Theodore Vardamann

Cheap labor, high prices and plenty

Of white man’s work and if your

Black butt don’t  dig it

Six feet of prime Delta Dirt

Is your share

I too, sing Mississippi

Of how Elvis was a racist who told Tricky

Dick he’d spy on the hippies, the yippies

The stoners; the slick SOB learned all he

Knew at Blind Lemon’s knee

And if his lifelong ambition

Was to be an honorary narc

What else would you expect

After he heard Mama Thorton’s

Hound Dog bark

about fifty million times

And never a penny

In royalties?

Mississippi this song is serious

your Edgar Ray Killens and Bryan Beckwiths

Gonna take they secrets way south, where it’s hotter

Than the house where Vernon Dahmer

Burned, deer rifle in his hand

hoping he was bound for the promised land

hoping his wife and kids got out the back door

hoping Grand Dragon Sam

Bowers would raise his head one more

time before the smoke

blinded him

and the fire . . .

Oh Mississippi, what a song

I’ma sing on that day

too, Oh lawd on that day

hmmmm wrote:

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I'll defer to the literati on the board if they render an opinion. 

 I Am Mississippi, by Paul Ott: I Am MississippiI'm the land of the ChoctawThe hills of Vicksburg, and a cross-cut sawDinner on the ground and muscadine vineI'm a longleaf pine, and Mississippi on my mindI'm a banjo pickin' and all night singsAzaleas a'bloomin' in Ocean SpringsI'm a Gospel Singer and the old folks at homeAnd I'm the eagle on the top of the capitol's domeI'm coffee in the morning and an ole smoked hamCathead biscuits and blackberry jamI'm a Mississippi moon, a dusty Delta Dawn,B.B. King,Magnolias in bloomI'm an antebellum home on the Natchez Trace,A rusty plow on the old home placeI'm Walter Payton catchin' a pass, Elvis Presley,Coon hounds and bird dogs and tea ofSassafrasI'm Miss Mississippi and all her gloryI'm William Faulkner as he writes a storyI'm Jimmie Rogers, the Singing BrakemanJohn C. Stennis, a southern statesmanI'm the Mississippi River as it rounds the bendI'm Gone with the Wind, ya'll come back againWell, I'm everything good you have ever dreamed aboutHush yo mouth, I'm Mississippi - I Am the South."

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So now we have two poems with the same title "I am Mississippi" (see today's Hburg American)

The good news is both authors seem to have properly conjugated the verb 2B in their titles.

Kids, Paul Ott may refer to John C. Stennis as "a southern statesman" but even a cursory examination of the record reveals Stennis as a staunch defender of segregation in the 50's and 60's. As with Strom Thurmond, Stennis's defense of institutionalized racism gave way, in his later years, to greater fairness. However, I'm pretty sure that in 1964, Stennis was among the last of a dozen or so Senate holdouts who supported the filibuster preventing the Civil Rights Act from coming to a vote. As such, he can lay claim to a certain infamy that, in the historical record, will, and should, outlast his later change of heart.

Ott's half-truths about Stennis, however, are of a piece with the way that the rest of the poem dishistoricizes the poet's subject in a torrent of cliches, worn out, sentimental imagery and odd, inappropriate references to Georgia (Ray Charles "Georgia on My Mind" and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind", which is set in and around Atlanta). These latter seem to suggest that Ott's grasp of Mississippi history and culture is pretty danged thin, at best.

In other words, "I Am Mississippi" participates in the same distortion and flattening of the historical record that has been a hallmark of American thought since Columbus "discovered" the Caribes and Arawaks into extinction back in the 15th Century. Because of this, "I Am Mississippi" is an exemplary poem about an American state. In its attempt to be "nice", to neither threaten nor anger anyone it exemplifes the cultural and intellectual vacuum of the entire contemporary American scene.

Hey, did anybody see what happened on "American Idol" last night?

LSU Lit. PhD. wrote:

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   Hey, did anybody see what happened on "American Idol" last night?  

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