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Brier Sermon—“ You Must Be Born Again” Brier Sermon—“ You Must Be Born Again”
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Cite
Extract
Reared in western North Carolina on a farm in Buncombe County near his maternal and paternal grandparents, Jim Wayne Miller completed his undergraduate work at Berea College in 1958 and earned his doctorate in German literature at Vanderbilt University in 1965. Throughout his professional life, he taught German at Western Kentucky University.
In The Mountains Have Come Closer (1980), Miller first presents the persona for whom he would become best known—the Brier, whose name Miller co-opted from a midwestern epithet for outmigrant Appalachians. The Brier—who is simultaneously a spokesperson for Miller; a representative Appalachian person living in the post–World War II era; and anyone dislocated by rapid cultural change—is aware that he and other southern mountain people live in two worlds: no longer isolated subsistence farmers, they have modern lives like other Americans, yet they are rooted in older traditions as well.
In the “Brier Sermon,” the shape-shifting Brier assumes the persona of a street preacher. Although religion suffuses the poem, Miller uses it metaphorically rather than doctrinally. Not affiliated with a denomination, Miller said that the poem’s numerous diverse sources include Zen Buddhism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
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