Challenging Southern Masculinity in “The Last Saturday in America” https://ift.tt/4XiLwc7
The longstanding trend of defining masculinity as an emblem of stoicism and strength has led to suggestions that maybe men aren’t alright. Ray McManus enters this conversation with his fourth book of poetry, The Last Saturday in America, opening the wounds embedded in the expectations of being a man and examining how those expectations converge with the culture of the rural American South.
A Southerner himself, McManus approaches this collection from the view of someone both steeped in and appreciative of the region’s cultural touchpoints, while at the same time confronting a realization of the rot those norms can seed in the men it produces. McManus is both looking back at the South that shaped him and pushing against it in the hopes of unspooling a different future, and his poems illuminate that complicated emotional vantage point, even for someone without first-hand experience. As noted in the introduction by David Joy, author of Those We Thought We Knew, McManus “has chipped away at the pageantry and performance, the stupidity of the lie, the outright futility of it all.”
McManus opens the collection with a single poem, “wrasslin’,” before entering the three subsequent parts that comprise the rest of the book. The initial poem – entitled with a word in dialect that immediately evokes many associations – compares the position of Southern men to a that of a WWE wrestler trapped in their role, wherein a wrestler is “lock-armed against the only backdrop / they’ve ever known” and “caught in the gaze of the crowd, / indifferent and indignant to the moves / they’re pinned in.”
After this deft positioning, the subsequent three sections loosely track the experience of moving from boyhood into manhood, with bullies and calculus sliding into reflections of a husband and father. We see babies born into a “brutal” world that in some ways has already predetermined their path, then we witness those babies growing into young boys whose shells quickly begin to harden. We understand the corner these boys are increasingly backed into, the world’s throwing up of its hands and their seemingly fixed fate in a place where “it’s easy here to see the best way to go nowhere.”
McManus is particularly poignant when drawing lines from within our culture, dominated by media and materialism, to the men who dwell within it. In “black and white cowboys,” for me a standout in the collection, McManus ponders, “What’s the point of complicating / cruelty when there’s money to be made?” At many points throughout the collection, that sense of hollow futility resounds, as McManus explores a way forward in what can often feel like a self-reinforcing echo chamber.
Publishing the collection in this particular political moment, one sown with increasingly rife division ahead of a presidential election, it seemed surprising that McManus didn’t grapple more directly with those implications for Southern manhood. How does the resurgence of a particular brand of masculinity, which has found a strong foothold in the American South, further complicate the mission to peel back the falsity within which masculinity has for so long been bound? McManus seems to touch on that MAGA mindset somewhat in “man’s greatest hits,” where he alludes to “fathers sad / for the day when a nation / can no longer perform / the way it used to.” Still, it seems an inescapable sticking point, in a time when it seems change could be either within reach or slipping further from our grasp as we’re jammed into the past.
Still, illuminating this tension between what was and what is no longer, working in a way that’s both emotionally resonant and often bravely blunt, McManus takes a great step forward in the collective search for a different path.
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