The Arrival of the Ozark Howler

Poet Rufus Grey slams Anglocentric Ozark Howler lore

The best poems read best a second time, after there’s been time for their underlying meaning to soak in. So it is with Rufus Grey’s Ozark Howler Verse, published the better part of a decade ago.

Now, the first poem in the book is the subject of spoken word performance, captured in the video below.

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Some would weave the Ozark Howler into the ancient tapestry of indigenous lore, but the thread simply does not hold. To force the connection, one must stretch a line all the way to the cold depths of the western Great Lakes, grasping at stories of a horned beast asleep beneath the waves. It’s not coherent, and it’s downright disrespectful to rewrite the spirits already onthe land to fit the folkore of invasive settlers.

In his poetry, Rufus Grey unmasks the colonialist beast behind the mask of the Ozark Howler. He writes the Howler not as a monster native to these ancient hills, but as a representative of empire, an immigrant phantom that crossed the sea in the shadow of European sails. It did not rise from the soil of the Ozarks; it walked ashore alongside those who brought blood and iron and blankets tainted with plague, trailing behind the conquerors who claimed the wilderness by erasing its true guardians.

The poem:

The Arrival

Through the grime the grimacing Grim grabs gravely

looping longingly at last, late to the launch

over the Atlantic altitudes acidly aloft

old Shuck shifts southward slurring

colonial courtesy clambering climbing cutting free

haggard hoarse hair heightens to a howl through its horns

sharpened shields shuddering

forward for forest furriers

mangling mountain mines

exceeding England’s empire with eerie egress

an immigrant of immense immersion immolating

native knowledge now nodding

cheaply the churchyard chases Cherokee children

ancestry assessed Aux Arks and

generic genetics genocidal

tragic trails of tears transgressed

my miserable moon of

solitary striding sojourn

Ozark ours over others

bones borne beastly blood

human hunted hordes

in a world of plagues under the pretense of becoming new.

It is a tale of death at our hands

and under no claw at all.