Planetary [] Appalachia: Editor’s Introduction

Years ago, the poet Jim Wayne Miller provided an observation about Appalachia and history that has, for many, become something of a guidepost for thinking about the region.Tucked away in the twelfth stanza his poem "Brier Sermon -You Must Be Born Again," the titular character -of whom Miller claimed was "synecdoche...for a collective experience" 1asserts that You don't have to live the way your foreparents lived.But if you don't know about them if you don't love them if you don't respect them you're not going anywhere.You don't have to think ridge-toridge, the way they did.You can think ocean-to-ocean.