Grounded in the musical traditions of Blues narratives, Carbuncle Resurrectrix: Antar, Miss Liberty, and the Prince of Pigs is the second volume in a series featuring the fictive poet/songwriter, Artz Carbuncle. Stylistically, the poem's three movements range beyond the personal lyrics of the previous volume, The Ballad of Artz Carbuncle, to engage traditions of narrative and dramatic poetry, while extending the story of Artz's development initiated in the Ballad. Antar's Children, the first of the three narratives in Resurrectrix, presents Artz's travels down the East Coast with aging Blues artist Antar Jones. Miss Liberty's Dreams, the second section, recounts his interactions with an elderly patient in a North Carolina mental facility. The third section, Songs for the Prince of Pigs, consists of a short series of poems centering on the death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet. These three movements examine issues of race, gender, and elite cultural dominance in American experience. Their sequence echoes Carl Jung's archetypal psychology of individuation and the construction of an authentic self.
The author began this book in about 1976 when he first encountered the ancient Arab warrior poet, Antar, in 3000 Years of Black Poetry, selected and arranged by Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul Lomax (1970). Bouldin was then teaching at West Virginia State College, which until its integration in 1954 had been a prominent institution of higher education for Black students. His own mentors at the time included Dr. Sophia Nelson, a noted scholar of African American literature, and another faculty member and family friend, Dr. Cubert Smith, a visual artist, teacher and activist to whose memory the book is dedicated.
The three movements address current cultural and social issues by examining themes of personal development, especially relationships between father and son, and between men and women within a framework of patriarchal domination.. The three sections involve independent story lines, but these share recurring elements: central characters who are poets (i.e., Antar Jones, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, and Shakespeare), father and son relationships (Jones and Carbuncle, Whitman and Dylan, Shakespeare and Hamnet), and various empowered feminine figures who serve as the source of dreams, wisdom, and moral direction. Each section also includes some song poems that echo the Blues lyrics that are central to the Antar narrative.
The author, Ty Bouldin, a native West Virginian, began writing seriously in the late 1960's as a college junior at Concord College in Athens, WV where he graduated with a degree in English and minors in History and Philosophy. He returned to school for a Masters Degree at Miami University of Ohio in 1970. In 1972 he began teaching English composition and introductory literature courses at West Virginia State College, where he designed classes in the traditional sources of contemporary American song-poetry, the work of Bob Dylan, and other relevant aspects of contemporary American literature. Following work on a PhD in Communication and Rhetoric, Bouldin and his wife moved to Tucson, AZ to work at The University of Arizona until their retirement in 2003, when they returned to their home in West Virginia.
