An Interview with Sterling Plumpp

John Zheng: Professor Plumpp, you are a native son of Clinton, Mississippi. How has your coming of age in Mississippi influenced your poetry?Sterling Plumpp: Several things: The rural agricultural black peasant lifestyle and experience nourished my body and soul. The families adjacent to the farm my grandfather sharecropped left me with an abundance of humanity to observe and participate in. But most importantly, my maternal grandfather, Victor Emmanuel, 18801955, exemplified a manhood I idolized. He had a fourth grade education, seven children and a firm commitment to rule his house. He was sixty when I was bom and a deacon in his church and a mason. His prayers on bended knee before he retired for the night and when he arose in the morning are, perhaps, the impetus for my love of blues and my interest in black vernacular. I was never weaned from my appreciation of how the peasant voice could celebrate and affirm life.I never lived in Clinton proper; I lived in the country on a farm where people planted, chopped, cultivated and picked cotton. They had gardens and killed game, raised chickens and hogs. They were a community of neighbors. They would sometimes send a child over to borrow a little baking powder, sugar, or lard. They attended the motley array of churches within a five mile radius: Wells Grove, Mound Hood, St. Thomas, Pilgrim Rest, Holy Ghost, and Pleasant Green.Here I heard tales from their lives and they resonated in me. When I read Uncle Tom 's Children (Richard Wright), I learned a meaning of blackness and self in Clinton. My books-Clinton, Steps to Break the Circle, Blues Narratives, Home/Bass and Black Rituals-arise from my memory and appreciation of my emergence in Clinton.JZ: I remember when we first met around ten years ago at the blues symposium in Jonesboro, Arkansas, you mentioned Richard Wright, saying he was your man. How did he influence you in writing?SP: When I initially read Black Boy and Uncle Tom's Children in 1962,1 had no idea how to incorporate personal experiences into the literary genres. Most importantly, I learned the value of reading a variety of genres and seeing the world through the eyes of authors I read. Finally I learned how the great capitalist nation with a constitution as a work-in-progress had harmed, dehumanized and exploited many under ideology of both race and class. Wright taught me a method of patterning my experiences so that I could make aesthetic sense out of them.JZ: I feel that your journey out of Mississippi was not at all a way to escape the hardships, but to travel for good education. What was your goal in each stop of your travel?SP: When I graduated from high school at the age of twenty, education or the opportunity to acquire skills needed to fashion a life was utmost in my mind. I discovered Greek literature and the power of literacy before I discovered education. After I read The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex, my Roman Catholic and southern upbringing world was in shambles. I knew intuitively that those who mastered the word in great literary texts were the true saviors of bodies and souls.True, Mississippi had been hardships, which eclipsed any possibility of my achieving selfhood there. But it was also a place within the small margins of school and church where I had compiled enough hope to propel me to dream. Therefore, my two years at St. Benedict's College in Atchison, Kansas had exposed me to Western civilization and a greater sense of literacy so that my eventual move to Chicago was tolerable.JZ: Any writing about your experience, insight, or discovery from your travel?SP: Yes, Johannesburg and Other Poems reflects my insights gained from meeting people engaged in revolutionary struggle. I learned you find yourself involved in combat for state power; you do whatever is necessary to persevere or you perish. I heard gunshots and fleeting footsteps all night from my room in a Johannesburg hotel, therefore, I came away with the belief that the chronicle of revolution is what poet Mongane Serote calls "a tough tale. …