Jo Garot McDougall
(WorldNews Entertainment)

Everybody understands the path to literary notoriety runs through the occupants of a literary salon holding court in a dark and seedy big city bar. Or it runs through the hothouse incubators of Ivy League graduate programs. The golden path for a writer isn`t usually laid out before the eldest daughter of an Arkansas Delta rice farmer. Writers don`t generally emerge out of a domestic life on a farm dominated by the daily tasks of raising children and keeping house. The rise of Jo McDougall, the current poet laureate of Arkansas, doesn`t follow the typical trajectory from obscurity to recognition. The six collections of poems published under McDougall`s name -- beginning in 1987 with The Woman...