Poems of the Ozark Howler
What makes the Ozark Howler such a good muse for the work of poets?
Those who follow the trail of the Ozark Howler know of K.W. Peery’s verses in books that are branded with an Ozark Howler theme — Howler Holler and the Ozark Howler. These books contain poems that focus on human struggles, mostly, featuring a voice that seems constantly on the verge of completely falling apart or exploding into violence. It’s a human howl that Peery channels.
A new book by Missouri poet Rufus Grey focuses more on the title creature. Ozark Howler Verse: Poems of the Dark Beast. Yet, the book’s metaphors strike at our human struggles, too. The poems describe the lonesome life of a predator always in the shadows, but even in depicting a wild animal in the remote woodlands, they reflect the sense of alienation we all feel in a world where physical reality seems like a neglected ghetto abandoned in the pursuit of a life on our little glittering screens.
Grey’s poem Sightings suggests that the existence of a creature such as the Ozark Howler would not be nearly as odd as the choice by a human being to take a walk in the woods without an iPhone.
The more remarkable sighting is of two feet
that care to step away
from the land of doors and wheels,
holding aloft a seer that looks into things beyond its reach
and not to the glamour it holds in its hands.
In the epilogue to his book, Grey writes, “There are stories still being told, but not being heard. They aren’t in the earbuds that have become embedded in our heads. Searching engines haven’t scanned these moments. They haven’t felt the coarse reassurance we experience as we run our hands over the bark of fallen trees, sensing the texture of all the hidden years that have thickened us.” The poet is talking about the digital deprivation of a life sucked dry by Silicon Valley at the same time as he’s longing for a monster waiting outside of the huge parking lots in Branson.
The poems in Ozark Howler Verse reflect the fear we have of what might be left for us if we were to abandon our instincts to peck and click our lives away, becoming less mobile and more aware of where we are. When Grey writes,
It is not from prowling that I howl
but from the longing to be anything
other than a hunter
he could be talking about any of us, desperately swiping away at an Instagram, looking for connection.
Peery and Grey have very different voices — Peery’s is harsh whiskey and Grey’s is a good warm cup of coffee. Yet, what their poetry has in common speaks to the power of the Ozark Howler to draw our human attention. It’s a wild creature, willingly remote and strange to us, and yet it howls, desperate for the same attention that it shuns.
This is the conflicted mood of our age: Shunning human contact, and yet calling out in hunger for some affirmation that runs deeper than an emoji or a “like”.
The Dark Beast, Rufus Grey knows, is inside us, contained in a glowing algorithmic cage.
