In 1935, at a literary conference in Baton Rouge, folklorist and scholar Benjamin Botkin looked out at an audience that included Robert Penn Warren and Randall Jarrell and declared that Southern poetry, as a distinct category, didn’t exist. “One of the things that strikes the outsider about Southern writing,” said Botkin, a native Bostonian living in Oklahoma, “is that as soon as one stops writing prose and becomes a poet, one ceases to be a Southerner and even poetic.” Rebuttals, if they came, were muted: grumbles
