Effort on to restore poet's farm

His simple ballads and lyric poems struck a chord with a certain post-World War II audience who saw his fresh ideas as an antidote to the dissipated modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Awarded fellowships and prizes, lauded by well-connected critics in New York and Boston, Reece enjoyed a brief walk in the literary limelight.

But sickness, hardship and melancholy took their toll. His poetry never proved profitable. He was often treated as a kind of idiot savant, a taciturn mountain farmer with a miraculous gift of verse. Both his parents suffered from tuberculosis, and in caring for them he also contracted the illness.

Finally, on June 3, 1958, he took his own life with a bullet through his disease-riddled chest. He was 40.

Fifty years later, his champions would like to see "Hub" Reece take his rightful place in the Union County landscape and the literary firmament. A nonprofit group has acquired his house, barn and 9 acres of his family farm near Blairsville, which it is transforming into a living museum dedicated to his life and work.

This week the society plans to acknowledge the passing of Reece's death anniversary with a gathering of Georgia writers who are in many ways the poet's godchildren, including Reece biographer Raymond Cook, novelist Terry Kay and poet Bettie Sellers.

Their goal: Give one of Georgia's best poets his due. But they've got a long row to hoe.

Tough undertaking

Circumstances seem to discriminate against the Reece legacy.

A visitor to the Reece farm sees the spruced-up barn standing ready for the installation of exhibits. A natural slope behind the corn crib will, according to plans, be transformed into an outdoor amphitheater.

But the project is mired in red tape, and no workers are in evidence. All is quiet, save for the dark burble of Wolf Creek. The half-renovated farmhouse stands empty, its new concrete-block basement open to the weather.

There are other indignities: A historical drama called "The Reach of Song," based on Reece's life and work, hasn't been in production for several years. The state named a hiking trail in the Blood Mountain Wilderness the Byron Herbert Reece Access Trail, but vandals made off with the bronze plaque that stood at the trailhead.

And there is the challenge of indifference.

"He's the most unknown Georgia author," said Fleming Weaver, chairman of the farm development committee.

Sellers, 82, a retired professor of English at Young Harris College, hopes to change that. She came to know the mountain poet as a teacher at his alma mater, and she recently penned a biography to accompany a DVD of interviews with Reece's colleagues. Reece was a throwback, a writer who used common language, short meter and rhymed couplets in an era when poetry was going in the other direction.

"The avant-garde that was making a splash was a different kind of poetry," said Sellers, nibbling a salad at the dining hall at Young Harris, in nearby Towns County.

The contemporary poet is a performer, but Reece was ill-suited for that role. He disliked giving readings, shunned crowds and preferred time spent in his writing shack to most forms of society.

"There wasn't a brash bone in his body," Sellers said.

When he attended Young Harris College, he lived in the "workhouse" with other students who did chores on the college farm —- milking cows, plowing fields —- in exchange for financial aid.

"At night the boys would sit around the wood stove and yammer," Sellers said. "[Reece] would never do that. He was upstairs writing."

An eye-opening talent

Reece never graduated from Young Harris, unwilling to study either mathematics or French. He alternated between farming and teaching elementary school to make a living, but as his parents' illness progressed, he adopted more responsibilities on their farm, where he lived. He never married.

In the meantime, he continued to write poems and submit them to magazines across the country.

In 1943, Kentucky writer Jesse Stuart came across one of Reece's poems and marveled at its "simple language of understandable genius." He became a booster, and he helped persuade his publisher, E.P. Dutton, to put out a book of Reece's verse. The collection, called "Ballad of the Bones," appeared in the fall of 1945, and it propelled the farmer into the national conversation.

"It is as if our eyes were opened to something as big as the Appalachians," John Gould Fletcher wrote in a review in The New York Times.

Among Reece's fans was legendary Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill, who wrote: "In Reece, Georgia has, I think, one of the really great poets of our time, and one to stand with those of any other time."

Today, some county leaders wish to hitch their wagon to that star.

Tourism is big business here, as the billboards for kayak and cabin rentals indicate. Union County's sole commissioner, Lamar Paris, says that a Reece interpretive farm would cater to that traffic, drawing busloads of Elderhostel visitors and others traveling from Helen to Dahlonega to Blairsville.

"They are interested in history and Appalachian culture," Paris said. "If we build it, they will come."

After "Ballad of the Bones," Reece would publish three other collections of poetry and two novels. Within the next decade he'd be considered for a Pulitzer Prize and win two Guggenheim fellowships. He took the state's highest poetry prize five times, and he earned residencies at Young Harris, Emory University and UCLA.

Young Harris, where he was teaching when he took his own life, remains a headquarters for Reece followers, and its Duckworth Library manages an archive of Reece letters and personal items. Two larger-than-life paintings of the poet on his farm decorate the library's reading room.

Living well, dying young

Debra March, who minds the Reece collection, leafed through his letters one recent afternoon, pointing out that in his correspondence he broke free of the ascetic-genius facade and demonstrated wry humor.

"Of late years have developed the habit of at times getting systematically and solitarily drunk," he confided to one friend.

Far from being a self-denying hermit, Reece "enjoyed the finest clothes he could afford, the finest whiskey he could afford, and the fastest car he could afford," March said.

That would have been a 1957 two-door Chevy, said Blairsville resident and Union County Historical Society President Sam Ensley, who was living in the same dormitory as Reece in June 1958. "You could hear his typewriter going late into the night," Ensley said.

Reece wrote no suicide note, but he had finished correcting his students' final papers, and left them in a neat stack in a drawer of his desk before firing a rifle into his chest. When two students burst into his room, they found his body on the floor. A recording of Mozart's Piano Sonata in D was playing on the phonograph.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Slices of wry from Georgia poet Byron Herbert Reece:

"I believe that poetry should be intelligible and vigorous." —- Part of a self-description he submitted to E.P. Dutton for his book of collected poems, "Ballad of the Bones."

"No. It was a butcher and an insurance salesman." —- His response to a woman who wanted to know whether he was named after the famous English poets Lord Byron and George Herbert.

"The farm seems good after a sojourn among the intellectuals who scorn anything simply stated." —- To a friend, after returning from a teaching fellowship at UCLA.

"I was totally unaware of my apparently stupendous powers of mimicry." —- Part of an angry letter Reece wrote to The Saturday Review after a critic typified his poems as "derivative."

MORE ON REECE

> "Mountain Singer: Poetry and Biography of a Hill Country Genius" by Raymond A. Cook (Cherokee Publishing)

> "Faithfully Yours: The Letters of Byron Herbert Reece" edited by Raymond A. Cook and Alan Jackson (Mercer University Press)

> "The Bitter Berry: The Life of Byron Herbert Reece" by Bettie M. Sellers (University of Georgia Press)

MULBERRY HALL

At night when his chores were done, Reece often walked out of the house he shared with his parents to a shed in the yard, where he kept a desk, a lamp, a typewriter and a cot. There he'd write, sometimes all night long, catching catnaps and enjoying the solitude.

This writer's shack he gave the tongue-in-cheek name Mulberry Hall, not because he felt it was a grand lodging, but because he'd painted it a purplish-red with paint donated by a friend. The Union County Historical Society rescued the shack recently, and it is keeping it on county property, to be returned to the Reece Farm when the farm project is complete.