T. R. Hummer has a childhood story straight out of a Faulkner novel. In fact, it’s remarkably similar to the Faulkner short stories The Bear and The Old People—though T.R., short for Terry Randolph, clarifies that there weren’t any bears around —both featuring a character whose sole job on the farm is to teach the children to hunt.

“There was a man on our farm,” begins Hummer, award-winning poet and editor of The Georgia Review, referring to his childhood farm in rural Macon, Miss., “who had the job of teaching the boys to hunt. I don’t know what his real name was, but we called him Stump.”
Stump had taught Hummer’s father to hunt, but by the time Hummer was a child, Stump was an old man. He was still around on the farm though, and had the odd predilection for spending his days walking around in a five-mile circle, accompanied by a mule.

“He’d come across the house three to four times with the mule,” Hummer recalls. “You could time your clock to it.” Sometimes Hummer and the other children would bum a mule ride for part of the way. “It was real remote. We lived 15 miles from the nearest town. We went there once a week for groceries, and that was about it.”

Upon entering the first grade, “I was astounded,” he says. “I had no idea there were so many people in the world, people my size.”

At first glance, such a childhood does not particularly suggest that Hummer would one day have poems published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and in his own books; that he’d receive the Hanes Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship; that he’d teach at multiple universities and work as an editor “at the top, A-list journals of the nation,” as his colleague Judith Ortiz Cofer deems them; or that in 2001, he’d come to the University of Georgia as a professor of English and to edit the highly regarded Georgia Review.

Yet, however isolated, his youth clearly offered a bounty of inspiration even before Hummer would escape his small hometown: There was his immediate pastoral surroundings, his tentative exposure to and then full-blown love affair with blues, jazz, and rock and roll, and the struggle of the civil rights movement unfolding before him on the television set.

The Louisiana State University Press has just published Hummer’s The Infinity Sessions, a new collection of poems. In August, U.K. publishing house Arc Publications will release Bluegrass Wasteland: Selected Poems 1978-2003. And this November, Rager Media, a new press in Ohio, will re-issue Hummer’s esteemed poetry collection Walt Whitman in Hell.

“I believe that Walt Whitman in Hell is the most important book anyone of our generation has written,” says Garrett Hongo, a poetry professor at the University of Oregon. He met Hummer at an Modern Language Association Annual Convention in the mid-1980s and became a good friend. “It is prophetic, cautionary, bereaved, and angry about what’s become of Whitman’s version of America in our time. It has the geographic sweep of Whitman, the feeling of having walked cold and tough streets, the Whitmanic consideration of the abandoned and the forlorn.”

“As a writer, he is one of the most important midcareer poets in America,” seconds David Baker, an English professor at Denison University in Ohio and poetry editor at The Kenyon Review. Another long-time friend, Baker has written extensively on Hummer’s poetry. “He is a personal writer with a public sense of responsibility. Part of that responsibility is political, and part is artistic.”

What would the child Hummer thought of that? Poetry simply was not around Hummer as a child. He did love to read, though, favoring comic book versions of classics such as The Three Musketeers and Moby Dick and The Jungle Book, and the contents of his grandmother’s “curious little library,” which mostly consisted of lurid adventure tales and “a bunch of Masonic books” that had been his grandfather’s, Hummer says.

He spent the first ten years of his life on a 2,400-acre farm that belonged to his grandmother, living in a farmhouse that was “a weird old house my great-grandfather built. It was an interesting house to live in—full of dark places, nooks, and crannies.”

His father, C.V. Hummer, under the moniker of Hummer Brothers Bees, had raised queen bees to sell to other beekeepers. His mother Marion Slocum’s parents rented a bee yard to his father’s family, and that’s how Hummer’s parents met—C.V. was 16 years old; Marion was 14.

By the time Hummer was born in 1950, various extended family members lived on the farm, which would soon abandon the bee business for ventures in cotton and wheat, dairy and beef. Cousins were everywhere. It was easy for him to feel out of place as a child, and he liked to fantasize about being from another planet. Books offered an escape, and so did television, which would truly become a messenger of the outside world. “They were an escape hatch, a separate universe,” he says.

He soon tried his hand at writing, conjuring The Wizard of Oz knockoffs on green-edged notebook paper. In high school, he’d attempt some poetry for the first time, but it was always an imitation, he says­—in this case, Edgar Allan Poe.

During his junior year in high school, a teacher—the most subversive one at the school, which didn’t mean much, Hummer contends—slipped him a book of poems by e.e. cummings.

Around him, it was a changing world. Even the family farm that had been “kind of like a patchwork quilt,” with flat farmland sharing space with cherished woods, was not spared. The 1960s had ushered in both new physical and political landscapes: Trees were mowed down and made way for vast swaths of soybeans. Civil rights workers were killed in nearby Philadelphia, Miss.

“I never had the experience of having black playmates,” says Hummer. His father did, sharing a hardscrabble farm upbringing with the children of black farmworkers, and yet Hummer’s family was plainly racist, he says. Again, the television set was a gift, and Hummer slowly realized that his views were changing, becoming different from his family’s. At the time, he kept it to himself. Meanwhile, he found salvation from his suffocating, small world in music.

“I fell in love with music when I was nine or ten,” he says. He took up the saxophone—which remains a beloved instrument—and realized that, as a fan of jazz, blues, and rock and roll, all of his musical heroes were black.

He received that e.e. cummings book as a student in a segregated high school. “I was turning into a musician,” he recalls. “That was my way of dealing with it . . . the only thing I was truly, deeply interested in was music.”

He coasted academically, formed a rock and roll band with friends, and would often skip school to make weekend gigs on extremely short tours of neighboring towns.

If he had been asked what his future held then, “I would have told you I’d be a musician,” Hummer says. All the while, perhaps excepting the gift of the e.e. cummings book, Hummer maintains that he and his classmates were steadfastly encouraged not to think.

“Racism is so patently ridiculous that if you think about it for two minutes, it dissolves,” Hummer says. To breed a new generation of racists, “Parents, in the course of educating you, have to gouge out your eyes and make you blind. I had to grow back my eyes.”

“He thought himself a Southern poet only by accident of birth and environment and wanted out of the South,” recalls David Smith, a professor in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. Smith is also Hummer’s former professor, as well as editor of his books published by Louisiana State University Press.

“This is a common pattern for Southern whites. I would even say that you have to leave the South to make objective what it is you are part of, to see it clearly—hence his movement to Utah, Ohio, Vermont, and Oregon. But I used to say to him I knew it was inevitable that he would return to the South, as I did myself, and he would laugh it off.”

Hummer himself resists the label of Southern writer—“I haven’t written fiction in years, and between Faulkner and Eudora Welty, the material I may have written would have been thoroughly used up”—and doesn’t see much of a tradition to justify the label of Southern poet.

Smith posits that Hummer can’t help it that he’s back in the South, labels or no. “The South and its culture, even the funny way its people turn vowels into diphthongs, let alone its musics, is not something you shake off or unlearn . . . it is something you can, often must, resist and struggle to change; but it is also like the water a fish breathes. Gotta have it. And certain fish need the specific chemical water where they have always thrived.”

Hongo says of Hummer and the South: “When [Hummer], the novelist Chang-rae Lee, and I were on the creative writing faculty at Oregon together,” he says, “I once remarked that we were a faculty of apostates—he of the Old South, me of nationalist Asian America, and Chang-rae of the ruling class. We are each of what and where we come from, but each a critic, lapsed members. I think, like so many intellectuals and artists of the New South, Terry fits very well alongside Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Julian Bond and Anne Richards.”

Hummer stayed in the South for college but did manage to leave his hometown. By the time he attended Mississippi State in 1968, poetry was becoming more popular in college curriculum. Hummer officially fell for poetry then but still made time for his then—true love—music—assisted by the counterculture crowd, which was “where the musicians were.” Under his hippie pals’ wings, Hummer soon learned the writings of Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1969, he went to a B.B. King concert—King’s first in Mississippi in around 15 years, Hummer recalls—and snuck backstage with press passes from a photographer friend. He and his friends spent around 30 minutes with King, rapturously listening to tale after tale. King regaled them with stories of his friendship with Elvis Presley, and how each of them was almost forbidden to attend each other’s shows because of race rules. Hummer and his friends each left with a guitar pick.

“He was extremely gracious,” Hummer says. That interaction was pivotal to Hummer—and yet he found himself consistently being drawn more toward poetry.

Both of his poetry teachers at Mississippi State were also saxophone players, and yet one of them asked Hummer, “Well, which would you really rather be, a truly great saxophonist or a truly great poet?” At the time, Hummer was reading Yeats, Eliot, and Dickinson. His saxophone players were still rock and rollers.

“I thought, would I rather be Yeats or Ace Cannon?” he says, adding with a laugh that if he then had known about John Coltrane, he might have changed his mind.

The decision he made was a turning point, and Hummer left to go to the University of Southern Mississippi to become more serious about writing. The first poems he published there were sonnets, and he had a certain resistance to newer styles of writing.

“It took me awhile to get used to contemporary poetry,” he says. He didn’t shun it, however, and soon developed an interest in the South American and Eastern European poets whose popularity was rising at the time.

He experimented, first with autobiographical writing, and then the opposite —“writing about nothing to do with anything to do with me.” His background in music helped him enjoy some poems just for the way they sounded, without the pressure of fully attempting to grasp the content.

Hummer’s musicality is still present in his poems today, says Ortiz Cofer, Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing, who has been friends with Hummer since they met in the early 1980s.

“His poems have of course changed over time but are always beautifully crafted and moving and insightful,” she says. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that he’s a trained musician. I think his music has imbued his poetry with something very unique. For one, the themes of music appear in his work, and for another, the structures of music appear . . . it’s a pleasure to the mind and the ear. It’s an intellectual experience to read his poems, but also a sensory one.”

“His poetry is, more than anything else, fun to read,” agrees Baker, “fun for its allusions and rich densities, and fun for its stories and sound.”

After receiving his M.A. in 1974, Hummer spent the next three years living in Jackson, Miss., where his first chapbook, Translation of Light (Cedar Creek Press) arrived in the mail on the day of the birth of his first daughter, Theo.

Smith recruited Hummer as a graduate student in English to the University of Utah in 1977. He remembers his first impression of Hummer vividly: “Terry was slight of build, appeared introspective, had the carriage of a Baptist who led youth ministry, wore short hair and a trim mustache,” he says. “He looked more like a government tax sleuth than a poet.”

(Though Hummer’s hairstyle had changed by the time he met him in the mid-1980s, Hongo recalls a similarly humorous first impression of Hummer: that of a genteel Confederate general, despite Hummer’s by-then well-known criticism of social prejudice.)

“He was, I thought, altogether too willing to test and challenge the important things I had to say,” continues Smith. “In that he convinced me he had more and better things to say than I did. His intellect was immediately fresh and fierce.”

In 1980, Ph.D. in English under his belt, Hummer went to teach at Oklahoma State University and became poetry editor of the Cimarron Review. He also took up the saxophone again, playing with The Skinners Brothers Band, and dropping out right before they briefly became Garth Brooks’ backup band.

After his first two full-length books of poetry were published —The Angelic Orders (LSU Press) and The Passion of the Right-Angled Man (University of Illinois Press)—he took a post at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he edited The Kenyon Review and guest-edited The New England Review at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 1989, he became editor of the latter. The next year, he published The 18,000-Ton Olympic Dream (William Morrow). After having won a Guggenheim Fellowship, he relocated yet again to the University of Oregon in 1993 and worked on Walt Whitman in Hell (LSU Press), which would be published in 1996.

Smith calls Hummer’s writing “a patient refining of poetry in three respects: He writes compelling stories; he pushes language to have explosive energy and layers of meaning; and he tries to keep an engagement alive between the entertainment of poetry and the focus on social issues.”

Hongo says: “He is one of the most thoughtful, ethically deliberate essayists I can think of. His essay “The Mind of the South” is a personal consideration of what’s changed and what still needs to change in the culture and society of his native region.”

In 1997, after 20 years away, Hummer finally returned to his “native region” to become Senior Poet in the MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He played saxophone with the blues band Little Ronnie and the Grand Dukes, until the arrival of his second daughter, Jackson, and his book Useless Virtues (LSU Press). Soon after, he came to Athens.

“He’s wickedly funny,” says Hongo, “ferociously informed about politics, current events, and jazz. And he’s a brilliant gourmet cook!”

Hongo remembers an exchange with Hummer at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont in the late 1980s. In the middle of a lengthy, postlunch conversation that ranged from Pablo Neruda to Robert Penn Warren, “Terry suddenly proposed a vow—that we never lie to each other about poetry, that we would be harsh and critical towards each other’s poems if need be, to always tell one another the truth,” says Hongo. “It’s been a vow we’ve kept for 17 years now.”