"The Great Plains" and "The Good Earth"

Ian Frazier's The Great Plains is one of those wonderful books that surprised me at every turn. As I read, I never knew quite where we were heading, never expected that I would encounter Crazy Horse and hardy Russian wheat varieties and America's underground nuclear arsenal. I was also surprised at how much the book managed to teach me without feeling like a history text. Frazier really likes archival research and long lists of details and relating his encyclopedic knowledge of, say, Sitting Bull, to an extent that should be boring, but somehow Frazier manages to whip each grain of data into an emotional dust storm by the end of the book, linking ideas and characters and themes so that they all become unified and meaningful, the whole of the Midwest suddenly tied together and transformed within the dark and moving cloud of Frazier's words.

Not only did I love The Great Plains, but it also inspired me to read more Midwestern poets, something I've wanted to do since I began writing my thesis (a book-length manuscript of poetry about growing up in Kansas) at Penn State. Though being a Midwestern writer is nearly trendy these days (we had four panels of our very own at AWP's 2009 conference in Chicago!), there are very few terribly famous Midwestern poets, and those who are terribly famous (like Robert Bly and Albert Goldbarth) don't really like to talk too much about it. After all, real literature in America is about the mad and dirty streets of New York, the umbral woods of New England, the moss and humid corruption of the Deep South, and the zen mountains and forests of the West Coast, not about corn fields and highways. As if seeing horizon to horizon inhibits the writing of good poetry.

To get started, I checked out The Good Earth: Three Poets of the Prairie (2002). Ice Cube Press put out the slim volume as part of the Harvest Lecture Series, which is dedicated to the connections between "the natural environment and the spiritual realm" (according to the purpose statement at the beginning of the book). The eponymous three poets are Paul Engle, William Stafford, and James Hearst, none of whom I had read before this book.

I had heard of Paul Engle, however, as the influential director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the teacher of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell (I'd recommend Mark McGurl's The Program Era for a detailed look at Engle's influence on Iowa's prestigious program). I had never heard of James Hearst at all, and I think, unfortunately, that my ignorance of both Hearst's and Engle's work is largely deserved, at least based on the selection found here. Engle's poems in this collection are sing-songy (and not in a fun T.S. Eliot sort of way). They present pretty images that do nothing more than sit on the page and stare back at you. Hearst, on the other hand, comes right out and says what he means but skips that whole showing business (as in "Birthplace" when he tells us there's a decrepit barn before him that makes him "tremble to think how things / Outlive the hands that used them").

Stafford, on the other hand, I mostly liked, and not just because he was born in Hutchinson, Kansas and went to KU. Another Kansas poet, Denise Low, introduces his section, calling his poems "Likeable, yes, but [. . .] not naive, primitive paintings. The poems are subtle, dark, Godly and paradoxical at once. [. . . But] they are not stereotyped rural landscapes of barns and windvanes." Low later describes how Stafford wrote to recapture a "dream vision" he experienced while camping near the Cimarron River, a vision that impressed upon him "the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky."

Though only eight of Stafford's poems appear in The Good Earth, I liked them enough to check out The Way It Is, a selection of his work published in 1998. I'll surely say more about it once I'm deeper in, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with my current favorite William Stafford poem. It's a poem about choice and compassion and, I think, human convenience and cruelty. I can never help blaming the speaker, even though I don't know what else he could have done.

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Travelling Through the Dark
By William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.