Along the Spoon: an Illinois poet considers his place in the Midwestern landscape, (Morgantown: Monongahela Books, 2026).  Illustrated, 220 pp, $15.

Excerpt:  

(Chapter 10): The Great Depression

What I often heard from family and friends who knew my Grandfather Appenheimer was that “he got a lot of men through the Depression”— not by charity but by reliable paid labor.  By “a lot of men” I mean perhaps a couple dozen, and by “paid labor” I mean hard, sweaty work in the fields from sun-up to sun-down during the hottest, muggiest days in August—the worst season of the year to be out in the fields under the sun.  It may not seem like much, money-wise, by our standards, but for most of the men employed at his sorghum mill for a few weeks every August, it was the only cash they might earn all year, and it was enough to make a critical difference.

       More about my grandfather’s sorghum operation in the next chapter.  But what I’d like to consider here are one or two aspects of the Great Depression as they were experienced on the Appenheimer farm, and as they subsequently appeared in a few of my Stark County poems.

       One story told to me by my Uncle Clay (my grandfather’s only son), and repeated several times over the years, hardly qualifies as a story at all.  It is more along the lines of what I would call a “particular.”  Which is to say, an interesting fact without much story-line.  It has to do with a general truth about the Great Depression in America, namely, that thousands of desperate, destitute men hit the road or the rails throughout the 1930s, seeking work— any work at all— and, when they had to, begging for food.  These days, knocking on somebody’s kitchen door in dirty, thread-bare clothes will likely as not get you shot, but back then America was a very different country, worse in some ways, perhaps, but often remarkably generous. 

       The “particular” told to me by my uncle was that every year— and always at the very same time of year— a man would come through and ask to spend a night or two in my grandfather’s barn, and my grandfather always allowed it.  Where he was coming from and where he was going, my uncle didn’t remember, and perhaps the man never said, and perhaps my grandfather, with the reserve common among men who are only somewhat acquainted, never asked.  But for several years this man’s appearance was a regular seasonal occurrence.  Certainly he would have been fed.  My grandmother would have brought a sandwich or two to the barn, and perhaps packed him a little something for the road.  Had he needed a few dollars my grandfather would have found some work around the place that needed doing.  And that’s about it for that story.

       There wasn’t enough there to make a poem,  had I wished to stick to the facts.  I could have embellished it, certainly, but that would have ruined it.  So I left it alone.  What I did write  dealt with the same general situation about wandering “tramps,” as they were called, and was based on several newspaper articles from the early 1930s in the Stark County News, which provided all the necessary facts.  The poem is told in the voice of one of those wandering tramps and, as I had spent quite a lot of time hitch-hiking around the country in my younger years with little or no money, it was easy to put myself in my narrator’s shoes.

 

Hotel Calaboose

    Toulon, Illinois, late October, 1932

I would go through Toulon two or three times

a year, and generally book well ahead

for a night at the Hotel Calaboose.

As free lodgings went, it wasn’t so bad— 

always warm and dry and cleaner than most,

a naked steel slab attached to the bars

for a bed.  You had to furnish your own

newspapers for a mattress and roll

your coat for a pillow.  (I’d started out

with a red woolen blanket two years before,

but it was soon stolen).  When you arrived,

you were handed a saw and shown around back

to a big woodpile to do some work.

There was a stove inside that you could use

to warm up your beans, if you had a can.

The worst part is that they bolted and locked 

the door every night at seven, which did

somewhat inhibit a night on the town, 

but we “knights of the road” were accustomed to

the ascetic life.  As it was explained, 

they locked us up for our own protection, 

but what they meant was for their protection.  

They let us out in the morning at seven.

As I took a moment to kneel in the grass

and check through my stuff for a final time,

the sheriff stepped out on the porch and asked

which way I was headed.  I shrugged, and said

I might catch a ride to the switchyard over

at Galesburg and hop the first open car

that I came to, rolling anywhere west.  

He nodded, and thoughtfully gazed down the road.

He said this past October had been

the busiest yet at the calaboose,

with two or three transients every night,

sometimes as many as half a dozen,

except for three nights the previous week

with none at all, as it was so warm

that whoever was passing through most likely

availed himself of a haystack or barn.

More than seventy men so far this month,

he said,  from every part of the country,

and even some foreign accents as well—

and every one of them down on his luck.

There was nothing much to say after that.

He took a half-empty pack of Luckys

from out of his pocket and shook one loose.

I nodded my thanks and tucked it unlit

beneath my hat to enjoy after lunch,

and started off down the road.  Take care, 

I heard him say.  A raw cutting wind 

picked up as I got to the edge of town. 

I lifted my collar and lowered my hat

and huddled against the cold as I walked.

After a while I heard an old pickup

clashing its gears with a clatter as it 

came up behind me.  I stepped off the road

and stuck out my thumb.  The truck rattled past

and rolled to a stop.  Through the rear window

I could see the driver reaching across

the narrow cab, and the door swung out. 

 

       My Aunt Betty, the Appenheimer’s second eldest daughter, kept a diary during the early 1930s, when she was 13 through 15 years of age, and on November 25th, 1934, her entry reads:

"About 5 a tramp came and asked for something to eat. We didn’t have much but gave him all he wanted.  He sure was hungry."

       Perhaps my grandfather recalled returning to Illinois by covered wagon as a very small child, after going bust in Kansas, and begging a few ears of field corn from a farm along the way to boil for supper, and my grandmother could have recalled numerous times as a child when there was not enough food to go around.

       There are two other Stark County poems situated in the Great Depression, about transient men searching for work.  Both are fiction, though the first contains autobiographical elements, and the second parallels an event in my grandfather’s life.  Both he and I, as young men in our early 20s, spent a year wandering alone through the West with almost no money, working our way as we went.  Alpheus stopped off to work on farms and ranches, and I worked in cedar mills and on logging crews in the Pacific Northwest.

       As I say, both poems are fiction and are intended to portray situations common during the Depression.  But both are also informed by the personal histories of myself and my grandfather.  Anyone who knew me when I was in my teens will recognize many basic similarities to the naïve teenager in “Travelin’ Man.”  And the situation described in “The Itinerant” may bear some resemblance to an interlude in my grandfather’s wanderings through Mexico in 1912 when he signed on as a hand at a large ranch and became romantically involved with the owner’s daughter, to the point where he was seriously considering marriage, but finally opted to move on.

Travelin’ Man

After he turned seventeen, they stopped

talking of how much promise he showed,

and by the time he had reached twenty-two 

it was painfully clear to everyone

that he’d never amount to much at all.  

In another era he might have galloped 

off to war, which is what a young man 

did in his father’s and grandfather’s time 

when prospects were poor, but he was born 

too late for that.  What he had instead 

was something they called the damned Depression, 

which, if nothing else, provided him with

the perfect excuse to get out of town.  

After half a dozen half-hearted stabs 

at finding work, he rolled up a change 

of clothes in a blanket, waved to the folks

and hitched a ride to the switchyard over 

at Galesburg, where he hopped a midnight 

freight to Topeka and all points west.  

With nothing on hand and nothing in store, 

he could travel light, which suited him fine.  

He thought of himself as a travelin’ man, 

and he liked to keep his options open.  

He rolled through the night on a boxcar roof 

underneath the stars, facing westward to see 

just where he was headed, then switched around 

at dawn to look back at the rising sun.  

It was so resplendent, spilling its crimson 

across the fields, that he almost forgot

how cold and hungry he was.  He turned

back around again, preferring to feel 

the wind in his face and wanting to see

what was up ahead.  The day was full

of promise, by God, and something good 

was coming his way, he knew for a fact.  

He fixed his eye on the distance, intending

to shout aloud the moment it appeared.

           (originally published in the Naugatuck River Review)

 

The Itinerant

He had stayed on a week, this taciturn man,

this man who, despite having taken meals

each day at her table, had never once 

found reason to speak of his purpose or past— 

never, that is, until the last evening 

when, as she was reaching to pass a bowl

of boiled potatoes, he told her that he

would leave with the morning.

                   And, later, as they 

stood framed in the doorway, their talking done

and he on his way to the barn, she told him,

"Wait here a little," and disappeared back 

through the parlor, returning almost at once

to place a few bills in his hand. She wished

to ask him where he would go, to ask him 

where he was going the morning he passed

the farm and had stopped to inquire for work,

but she felt a reluctance to ask what he

had not volunteered himself, and she said,

"I am grateful to you for all you have done."

He nodded and thought once again of how

he had seen her that day alone in the field,

doggedly heaving bales on a wagon,

and he asked of her, "How long can it be,

with your husband dead and two hundred acres

of corn coming on— how long can you last,

a woman alone on so large a farm?"

"For as long as Heaven intends," she replied,

and he nodded once more and, squarely placing

his hat on his head, made ready to leave.

"Must you go just yet?" she asked him softly,

"I have put on a pot of coffee."  He turned

and seemed for a moment to study her,

then once again took his hat in his hand.

"You can sit on the swing," she motioned, stepping

back through the door. "I won't be a minute,"

but when she returned with two steaming cups,

she found him sitting instead on the rail

with his back to the post.  She smiled and said,

"Do you dislike comfort, Mr McCann?"

He seemed to be gazing at something out

in the dark of the night.  "I am fine," he said.

She held out a brimming cup.  "It is strong

and scalding," she warned, "and probably bitter."

He took it with what she thought was a smile,

the merest trace of a smile, and eased 

a savoring sip.  She moved to the swing

and sat on it lightly, holding her cup,

and he saw how the simple hem of her skirt 

swirled once at her ankles and then was still.

From somewhere out of the darkness there came,

from a distant pasture, the melancholy 

lowing of a bull— and she knew, however

long before daylight she might walk out

to offer him coffee or food for the road,

she would find him gone and, struck by the thought,

she asked of him quickly, "Where will you go?"

"West, I suppose," was all that he said.

"Have you no family?"  There, it was out.

"None that would have me around," he replied,

and she knew by the way that he turned to look

at nothing at all, at the empty night,

she had asked too much, and she feared that he

would rise to his feet and bid her good night,

but he kept his place and, to her surprise,

looked back at her gently.  And what she said next,

what she found herself saying, was nothing that she

had so much as thought: "I would like you to stay,"

and she almost gasped to hear herself say it.

She thought that she heard him sigh as he said,

"It wouldn't work out."  "I could pay you more,"

she countered at once, with a sinking sense,

but he shook his head firmly.  "It's not the pay." 

"Well, what is it then?" and she heard in her voice

a tremor of pleading and hated the sound.

"I am sorry," she said.  "I have no right to ask."

He sought for some word to reassure her,

this woman with whom he had felt more at peace

than with any woman that he had known,

but the distance between what he felt somewhere

in the depth of himself and the words he would need

to tell of it here in this woman's presence,

was a distance that he could not hope to bridge,

and so he said nothing.  Beneath the porch,

a cricket began to chirr and they both

gave all their attention to it, keeping

their thoughts at bay.

              It wasn't that she,

now that the haying was done, couldn't find

and hire some capable hand— it wasn't

a matter of labor or need— it was more,

more than she knew how to say, and more

than the circumstance that had led him here

and just as surely would lead him away,

would ever permit.

With his coffee gone,

he started to rise, so she left the swing

and stepped up before him, taking the empty

cup from his hand.  He put on his hat

and regarded her for a long moment.

"I'll leave at daybreak."  She nodded, but found

there was nothing to say.  "I have liked it here,"

he said, and started to say something more,

but then merely tipped the brim of his hat

and turned away toward the barn.

        The next morning,

expecting to find him gone, she only

entered the barn to see if, by chance,

he had left anything behind.  As she swung

the great door aside she was wholly engulfed

in the redolence of the few hundred bales

they had stacked together.  She stood for a time

in the twilit bay till the wagon and bales

and dust-laden rafters resolved from the dusk.

She could tell by the broken twine and scattered

timothy stalks where it was he had slept

and, standing there lost in his absence, she felt

more tired than she had felt since the day

her husband was buried— and for the first time

in her thirty-eight years she was overcome

with the sense that more of her life had passed

than remained to her.

                    She emerged from the barn

to the sight of treeless fields stretching out

to a level horizon far to the west

where, just for a moment, a thought carried her,

and she stood there poised on the moment, as though

in expectation of something— and then,

entrusting the thought to that hidden place

she had long ago made for herself, she turned

once more to the work that awaited her.

                        (originally published in the Amish

             periodical, Farming Magazine)

The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry, by Robert Bray, is now available

The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry, by Robert Bray (Morgantown: Monongahela Books, 2026), illustrated, annotated, 71 pages. $12.

Here is a short excerpt:

"The one midwestern difference everyone notices, and more often than not negatively remarks, is the landscape itself. On the long interstate haul across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, the cars often seem to drive themselves, the passengers staring like zombies at the nothingness of the agricultural plains. Yet to an inhabitant this very openness is place, and openness is, paradoxically, an aesthetic refuge for many midwestern poets who still feel (in James McGowan's memorable phrase) the 'metaphysical prickle' of the prairie landscape. Midwestern poetry of place treats the landscape as a standpoint. As William Stafford puts it, 'Everything we own / has brought us here: from here we speak.' Stafford's advice is to 'have a place, be what that place requires,' and I would not underestimate the midwestern poet's abilty to blazon this as a motto with which to answer, in perennial words and images, the vagaries of fashion and taste and the generally bland homogeneity of American national culture."

Robert Bray was the editor (with Paul Bushnell) of Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution, 1775-1783: An Annotated Edition of the Military Journal of Jeremiah Greenman (Northern Illinois University Press, 1978), and was editor-in-chief and a contributor to A Reader's Guide to Illinois Literature (Illinois State Library, 1985). He is the author of Rediscoveries: Literature and Place in Illinois (University of Illinois Press, 1991), Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher (University of Illinois Press, 2005), and Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press, 2022). He also wrote the introduction for the re-issue of Francis Grierson's 1909 novel The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches (University of Illinois Press, 1990).

The Back Pasture

I originally envisioned this blog as a haven of quiet reflection, a shady back pasture well out of the hurly-burley of modern life, where cattle and sheep could lie unmolested in the shade chewing their cuds, and a farmer's son could steal off behind an outcropping of rock or fallen log, well out of sight of his father, to light his illicit pipe and read a few smudged pages of Huckleberry Finn.

Or Hamlin Garland, or Willa Cather, or Louis Bromfield?  For what can be more peaceful, after all, than a book of poems or novel from the rural Midwest?  To open its pages is to release the scent of sun-drenched alfalfa mingled with the sound of lowing heifers from a far-off pasture-- it is to invoke a world where life proceeds by an older, more established set of verities, set apart from the frenetic vicissitudes of contemporary culture.  Or so the story goes.

The idea of the Midwest as a literary region, like the idea of regionalism itself, begs a slew of questions, and in many quarters (and classrooms) has become a subject of considerable wrangling.  To some critics, calling a work of literature regionalist is to dismiss it as minor, as though a work steeped in local realities cannot also possess universal significance.  To other critics, conversely, regionalism is an honorable designation with a long pedigree, but to which no contemporary writer can lay legitimate claim, since regions in the traditional sense no longer exist.

Is regionalist literature predominantly rural, or is it urban and suburban as well?   Are Theodore Dreiser, Saul Bellow, or Gwendolyn Brooks Midwestern regionalists as much as Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters or Wright Morris?  Is regionalism simply a matter of geographical location, or does it require some deep and intimate connection to the land?

Given that the character of America's regions have grown ever more homogeneous since the Second World War, has American literature since the war increasingly lost its regional distinctions?  In other words, did literary regionalism attain its high tide in the 1930s  (as was the case in painting)-- never to rise again-- or does it in some sense remain as vital today it has ever been?

To what extent was the regionalist movement in American literature, as has often been argued, a reaction against the rise of industrialism?  Was it the unquiet ghost of Jeffersonian America refusing to remain moldering in its grave?  And if regionalism was indeed a revolt against industrialism, what is its relationship to the later environmentalist movement?  To what extent can John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold or Edward Abbey be viewed as literary regionalists? At what point does autobiography or personal reminiscence enter the realm of literature?  And what of Henry Thoreau? No one disputes the status of Walden as a work of literature.  And, if that is so, might not Thoreau be considered a true progenitor of literary regionalism in America?

Or, to return to the Midwest, is not an even older, truer antecedent of regionalist literature to be found (as John Hallwas first suggested in 1981), in the Autobiography of Black Hawk? --with its stubborn refusal, in the face of overwhelming military and cultural forces, to relinquish ties to that particular corner of earth on the Rock River where his ancestors were buried.  His Autobiography-- as the archetypal expression of physical place as spiritual home, and the inevitable tragic loss of that place-- might well be viewed as prototype of nearly all American regionalist literature. And its occurrence near the physical center of the continent, during the formative years of the American Republic (as noted by numerous writers)-- affords the Autobiography even greater symbolic weight.

Among a newer generation of literary critics and historians, the term "regional" has become a catch-all for a host of evil traits (substitute narrow-minded, provincial, backward, reactionary, misogynist, racist, fascist or what have you).  There are some stereotypes that not only never die, but grow ever more reductive and vicious over time.

In any case, these are just a few of the questions and issues about regionalism inviting discussion at the present time.  To start the ball rolling, I will post the provocative opening paragraphs of Robert Bray's "The Road Down from Spoon River," followed by three essays of my own: two from a work in progress (Along the Spoon: An Illinois Poet Considers his Place in the Illinois Landscape): "The Places Modernity Missed" and "Oak on a Knoll," as well as an earlier essay, "The Persistence of Regionalism," which introduced Jared Carter's book, The Land Itself. 

Readers are invited to submit their own essays on Midwestern literary regionalism to further the discussion.  Send me an excerpt at bjomanson@monongahelabooks.com.  Previously published essays are welcome.


 

The Road Down from Spoon River

Read the evocative opening section of "The Road Down from Spoon River" (from The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry-- due out in early June), by the renowned scholar of Illinois history and literature Robert Bray --- describing a pilgrimage to a certain country graveyard and a meditative stroll through the 'necropolis on a hill' of Spoon River Anthology.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Route 9 west from Bloomington, looking for something like Spoon River: a necessary pilgrimage into the country where a lasting part of the Illinois mythology was conceived. Nowadays the highway is always busy, but the secondary roads are quiet and I follow them without design until the pastoral landscape of the river valley begins to take hold. Over the years, including recent years living in central Illinois, the name "Spoon River" has meant to me the spectral realm of Edgar Lee Masters's poems, not lines on a road map or state parks or folklife festivals. My Spoon River is dark. Yet this place I have come to now is spacious and sunny, lovely in a way very different from the necropolis of the book. Soon I abandon the car for a short climb to a little township cemetery, complete with its oak-grove, at the crest of a rounded hill. There is something melancholy---expected and appropriate---in the early springtime air. The rank grass and bright pink phlox stand in startling contradistinction to the graves and their weathered stones. Am I standing at the source of Spoon River? The reasonable answer is no, it is a romantic notion to suppose that Masters got his inspiration from walking around in this or any other cemetery. Thus far reason. But, unreasonably, I continue to think, walking from grave to grave, that these sleepers may be the very ones Masters put into the ground above Spoon River, and here they remain, well pleased with this land and this landscape, immeasurably preferring its elemental quality of refuge to painful consciousness in the town below. For in the end it was the town they hated, the narrow institutions that confined, the meager civilization that starved them. Down in the town the discontents (who epitomize Spoon River for the contemporary reader, though they are not its whole story) could find nothing to affirm in their lives, and if to live is to have a voice, they lived most fully in the brief moment when death allowed them to speak to the world.  

The timeless poetic convention of the epitaph proved a neat device. The late citizens of Spoon River were at last free to size up the town, without reserve and beyond the censure of the ladies' aid or the chamber of commerce. In this sense, no doubt, every cemetery has the makings of a Spoon River. At my feet is the once-high Victorian obelisk of a leading family's plot tumbled into ruin. Close by is the residuum of an early settler's stone, far too worn by now to give up its modicum of information---what was surely a pious verse above, names and dates below.  "All, all, are sleeping on the hill."  Actual and fictive folk commingle in an imagination that can no longer distinguish the book of Spoon River from Spoon River itself.

           
As Illinois goes, this place is old. A few of the graves antedate the Civil War. A few reflect its ravages. And many more recall the waving of the bloody shirt in yearly celebrations to the turn of the century and beyond.  Going further back, somewhere on this hilltop acre is reputedly the final western home of a Revolutionary sergeant who wandered out of Rhode Island in 1805, eventually found himself in Illinois, and became for years a fixture in the town's Independence Day parade, marching down Main Street to the tattoo of his own different drummer, marching long after he had ceased to know exactly what he was doing and the town had other wars to fight and remember. But I search in vain for the plain old soldier in the midst of the high-rise Gilded Age monuments and Grand Army of the Republic memorials. It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that the nineteenth century is a strange, vast distance away, with no bridge of ages for convenient crossing back and forth. Here, though our generations have their occasional markers, and a number of the old stones have been replaced by new monoliths of polished granite, "history" appears to have begun with Lincoln's progenitors and to have ended sometime around 1900. We talk easily about continuity with the past and try to possess it through the simplifications of genealogy and hereditary clubs devoted to American ancestor-worship. And in so doing we get a version of the past that tells us precisely what we want to know; it looks and tastes familiar because it is from our own recipe. But what of the other past, the one with so many ingredients that aren't handy and some few that we shall never find? The myth of continuity, if it is to serve us in health, must be taken entire. The myth must help us make not only those self-aggrandizing connections between past and present, which beguile us into thinking that Lincoln was only yesterday and hence is with us yet, but also an approach to this perplexing otherness---a palpable difference that suggests an ancient Illinois, a vanished aboriginal race, with as yet no key for deciphering its traces in such high places of symbolism as graveyards. 

         

Join our discussion group on Facebook: REGIONALISM RECONSIDERED: Ideas of Region & Place in Literature & the Arts

Jared Carter as a Regionalist Poet

That Jared Carter, among living writers, is one of America’s premier regionalist poets is a claim few who know his work well would dispute. Yet describing any writer as regionalist in the second decade of the 21st century is in some ways problematic. The last high-water mark of American regionalism, the 1930s, was already on the wane by the time Jared Carter was born, and regionalism’s death knell was already being sounded by such critics as Lowry Charles Wimberly – who saw in the spread of national brands and national standards the inexorable homogenization of America’s regions. At the same time, John Crowe Ransom and the Agrarians were analyzing the slow death of Southern regionalism due to the spread of industrialism, the migration from rural areas into the cities, and a host of inter-related cultural trends.
          After the end of World War II, the homogenization of America’s hinterlands, due to the spread of the interstate highway system and television, received a quantum boost, with its effects becoming more far-reaching and virulent with each passing decade until, by the digital revolution of 1990s, it had come to seem as though regionalism could only legitimately be spoken of in the past tense. And yet it was through these same decades, when so much of what was most distinctive about America’s heartland was vanishing, that Carter was turning out poem after poem, portraying characters, situations and locations as singular and sharply defined as any in literature, and he was doing so with a honed plainness of style that left no doubt as to their veracity and authenticity.
          Beginning with Carter’s first book, Work, For the Night is Coming (1981), readers were introduced to a region which was at once literal and mythical: “Mississinewa County,” somewhere “east of Spoon River, west of Winesburg, and slightly north of Raintree County,” as Carter himself has explained. It is a fictional county named for an actual river (the Mississinewa, a tributary of the Wabash) which, like the fictional town “Spoon River” (also named for an actual river), Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha County,” Frost’s rural New England, Robinson’s “Tilbury Town” and a long list of other literary regions, is rooted equally in the American continent and the American psyche. Mississinewa County is a multifaceted, multidimensional “place” of such symbolic and allegorical richness that its hinterlands and far boundaries – despite several decades of appreciative commentary – remain largely unexplored. Altogether, Carter’s books contain much of what one has come to expect in a regionalist body of literature from the American Midwest: pool halls and funeral parlors, dilapidated barns and covered bridges, barbershops and taverns, and miles of highways, telephone poles and open country inhabited by farmers, druggists, drifters, drunkards, undertakers and real estate appraisers. Turning to any of the early and late poems in the current collection, one is struck once again by the assurance and authority in the poet’s voice. Carter’s descriptions are rendered with a pitch-perfect precision that can only come from long familiarity with his subject. He is a plein-air poet, portraying his region with a sharpness of focus and an eye for inconspicuous but telling detail that cannot be achieved at second-hand.
          The answer, then, to the question of whether a genuinely regional literature is still possible in the 21st century, when America’s regions have been all but homogenized, suburbanized, industrialized and digitized out of existence, is to be found in the pages of any of Carter’s books, where the poems, like palpable artifacts plucked from field or creekbed, constitute clear evidence of a region still very much alive. Precisely how America’s regions have survived a century of destructive “progress” – at what cost, and in what fashion – are complex questions beyond the scope of this essay. But one index and proof of their survival is to be found in the literature they produce, and Carter’s books are as strong a piece of evidence as one might hope for.
           A region, after all, is infinitely more ancient than its human culture, and its current human culture is but the surface film on a deep sea of earlier cultures. As Carter observes in “After the Rain.”

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field
again, near where the river bends. Each year
I come to look for what this place will yield –
lost things still rising here.

The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail,
a crop of arrowheads, but where or why
they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail,
dropped from an empty sky,

yet for an hour or two, after the rain
has washed away the dusty afterbirth
of their return, a few will show up plain
on the reopened earth.

The changes wrought on America’s regions in the past century, however profound they may appear from our shortened perspective, are, in the extended view of things, ephemeral. Long after the present culture has passed away without a trace, the region – which is part of a primordial continent and defined by topography and watersheds rather than arbitrary lines on a map – will persist. The archaic character of a geographical region, its impalpable but enduring spirit, is not something that the passage of time can erase. It is intrinsic to the land itself, and exists in present time as an underlying influence. Indigenous peoples everywhere have always been aware of this influence, and have responded to it in a multitude of ways. In simplest terms, the earth and everything upon it are in possession of consciousness; every object – animate and inanimate – is alive; every location has its resident deity, its numen; and the earth as a whole is numinous. Some version of this simplified cosmology was intrinsic to the Mississinewa region, to its native tribes, just as another version of it was intrinsic to the ancient ancestors of Europeans. To the archaic mind, the earthly and spiritual realms were interpenetrated; the separation between them inconstant and porous, and at certain times, in certain places, under certain circumstances, a person could slip unwittingly from one realm into the next, or even occupy both simultaneously, as in Carter’s early poem “Mississinewa County Road,” where the speaker, even as he drives off into the dusk, is left standing by the roadside, gazing upon a landscape more nebulous than solid.

When you drive at dusk, alone,
after the corn is harvested, the wind
scatters bits of dry husk along the road.
A farmer has draped a groundhog’s carcass
across the corner of a wire fence
and the crows have pecked out its eyes.
Your headlights show these things
to a part of your mind that cannot hurry,
that has never learned to decide.
While the car goes on, you get out
and stand, with the chaff blowing
and crickets in the grass at the road’s edge.
In the distance there is a dog barking
and somewhere a windmill turning in the wind.

Such otherworldly moments as this – and there are a number of them in Carter’s poems – are never imposed forcefully on the experience or situation being described: they arise subtly and unobtrusively – organically, one might say – from the material at hand. The impression created on the reader is that such moments are nothing exceptional – they are woven into the fabric of the poem as simply one occurrence among others. At a certain point the poem has become uncanny, and the reader is not even sure how or when it happened.
           This numinous aspect of Carter’s poems doubtless serves multiple purposes, but our interest here is in how it functions as a manifestation of the land’s archaic character. Throughout his poems there are references to, and remnants of, the region’s remote past: arrowheads, geodes, ancient myths and folklore, the incalculably ancient behavior-patterns of cicadas and crows, and human activities that date to the dawn of agriculture and earlier, picking stones from a field, turning flax to linen. But the most compelling of such survivals are the instances in which archaic modes of perception emerge within the psyches of individual characters in the poems.
           Such instances are to be found throughout Carter's extensive corpus, but I will confine myself to a single represen-tative example: the crazed, homeless woman in “Spirea,” whose role as an erratic wandering seeress (“the sybil . . . who knows already / what lies ahead”) is made clear in the opening section of the poem, where she is presented in all her pathetic, demented disarray, a part of the town, but apart from it.

Then she came, the sybil, out through the doors
of The Bell, the single drinking establishment
permitted in that narrow little country town –
she came out neither staggering nor collapsing
but gliding – not carefully, one step at a time,
like a tight-rope walker, but recklessly, wantonly,
as someone oblivious to danger, who knows already
what lies ahead, and has nothing to fear

. . . . .

… and the fact that she was barefooted, that
she wore only a blue shirtwaist, that her hair
hung the length of her back, and was never combed
or pinned up, that she seldom stopped talking
to herself, that all her relatives were dead,
that she had no place to stay, owned nothing,
needed nothing, harmed no one –

After relating the town’s well-intentioned but ineffectual attempts to contain her and keep her from harm, Carter continues his description with the same precise detail and neutral voice, only now, without leaving the familiar, we find ourselves in the realm of the uncanny.

. . . some of them encountered her –
the husbands out watering their lawns, the wives
with their children, the young people pausing,
at the corner, with their bicycles, watching her,
seeing her go by. Many avoided her passing;
many were afraid, unable to return her bright gaze.
A light shone from her eyes. Something glimmered
when she moved. There was about her a presence,
an immanence, that announced a way, a direction
most of them could not imagine, would never know.
She walked on, heedless, muttering to herself,
leaving them far behind.

Had such a person been encountered by the original native inhabitants of the Mississinewa region, she would have been thought “touched by the gods,” her madness a mark of divinity, just as in an earlier European tradition she might have been thought a “holy fool.”
           Throughout the night she wanders through the town, as all around her doors are closing, lamps are dimmed, and the world is preparing for sleep.

Always she moved in a straight line, pausing
for no obstacle, respecting no property line –
through backyards, over fences, across gardens,
managing to steer, nightly, by a different star –
by Venus smoldering low above the line of trees,
by Mars or Saturn in stark opposition to the moon –
by whatever brightness seemed most beckoning,
however faint or furious its glow.

She has shed her layers of civilized socialization like a superficial skin, and emerged a child-like creature in direct communion with the cosmos. She is oriented only toward what is ancient, and is oblivious to civilization’s arbitrary boundaries. The earth she inhabits is the archaic numinous planet, without man-made barriers or boundaries, where every natural object is alive and responsive.

                                             In this way
she traversed all points of the town, stopping
sometimes to speak to whomever or whatever
she encountered – whether house, tree, horse
or child –

She continues with what must be the most characteristic and ancient of human activities: walking, putting one foot in front of the other, traversing the landscape.

… but invariably moving on, walking
on through the streets and into the countryside,
walking out among the fields, the gravel roads,
walking until she collapsed against a stone wall,
under a hedge, or in a barn, with rain falling,
walking until she lost her way among dark dreams.

Thus far the poem has described the woman’s actions in a general way, but at this point it relates a particular incident, one night in early May, when the spirea is at the height of its blossoming, and she has just forced her way through a dense spirea hedge, emerging by chance into the presence of an elderly professor of physics who is alone in his back yard, gazing through a telescope at an unimaginably distant star nebulae. The canes of the spirea have caught on her flimsy clothes, pulling them from her body.

                                Her shirtwaist
is torn, she is hardened by incessant walking
and wandering, by being out in all weathers,
her breasts and her gaunt body have emerged
androgynous and gleaming, she is aglow now,
dusted with shattered blossom as though prepared
for some elusive ritual . . .

Arrested by the sight of the telescope and oblivious to her own nakedness, she walks straight across the yard toward the professor.

. . . she approaches, strides toward him unhesitant
and unafraid, reaches to touch the viewing aperture,
already in perfect focus, smiles, and leans down –
fragments of white blossom, living particles
of sundered veil cling to her long hair, drip
from her forearms, her rough hands – she sees,
she looks for a long time. There is no sound
except her slight breathing.

Here, once more, in its description of their encounter – of the cosmos within and the unnamed presence throughout – the poem becomes numinous.

                                        Finally she begins,
she raises her head, the light is in her eyes,
the shining, and she speaks what comes. He bows
as though in prayer, knowing there is no difference –
it is the far galaxy, great orb and afterimage
in his brain, it is the milk-white hedge cresting
all around them, it is the unsummoned presence
come at last, and always, up through the waves,
it is the voice speaking through all, to all,
here, now, in the darkness, in the starlight.

Two individuals – who in terms of their respective cultures could scarcely be more distant from one another – find themselves, simultaneously, by some fated triangulation of man, woman and galaxy, transfixed and transformed.
           Even as Carter demonstrates an uncommon gift for describing the indescribable – the incorporeal, spectral dimension of the world – his descriptions of how the material world actually functions, how it is formed and what is required to survive in it – reveals a detail and depth of practical knowledge that few writers today are able to match. Consider this description of artisanal technique from “Cutting Glass.”

It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.

You do not really cut glass, you score its length
with a sharp, revolving wheel at the end of a tool

not much bigger than a pen-knife. Glass is liquid,
sleeping. The line you make goes through the sheet

like a wave through water, or a voice calling in a dream,
but calling only once. If the glazier knows how to work

without hesitation, glass begins to remember. Watch now
how he draws the line and taps the edge: the pieces

break apart like a book opened to a favorite passage.
Each time, what he finds is something already there.

In its waking state glass was fire once, and brightness;
all that becomes clear when you hold up the new pane.

Or this description, in “The Gleaning,” of a barber shaving for the final time, at an undertaker’s behest, the face of his friend who has just that day been killed in a threshing accident.

                                             In the parlor
the barber throws back the curtains
and talks to this man, whom he has known
all his life, since they were boys
together. As he works up a lather
and brushes it onto his cheeks,
he tells him the latest joke. He strops
the razor, tests it against his thumb,
and scolds him for not being more careful.
Then with darkness coming over the room
he lights a lamp, and begins to scrape
at the curve of the throat, tilting the head
this way and that, stretching the skin,
flinging the soap into a basin, gradually
leaving the face glistening and smooth.

Or this description, in “Picking Stone,” of a family clearing a recently plowed field of rocks.

                                              They spread out
across the fresh-turned earth, following
a flatbed truck, searching with their hands
through the broken clods, grasping, struggling,
helping each other heave up what they find.

. . . .
                                                             The father
moves back and forth, now down on his knees
with a son, brushing sand from a boulder,
deciding they will come back and get it
with the tractor, now carrying the baby
for a while, suddenly handing it to his wife
and going to help the oldest daughter, who
has lifted a rock and hugs it to her body,
staggering, as though she were burdened
with grief.

In Carter’s poetry the material and immaterial are paired aspects of the same reality. What he demonstrates again and again – by an acuity of attention to the world simply as it presents itself – is that there is no clear division between matter and spirit. Carter’s language never makes the leap into abstraction; it is faithfully fixed on the particular, for it is within the particular, within the ordinary world of phenomena, that the uncanny is to be found, as in the poem “Cicadas in the Rain.”

Only when it began to rain could I hear it,
in late summer, after they had all risen high
in the saucer magnolia tree – a soft, slow rain
at first, while the light still held in the west.

That sound so familiar, so unhesitant, but never
during a storm, and yet with drops plashing
and pelting through the leaves, their voices
coalesced in ways I had never heard before –

some strange harmonic of summer’s ending,
some last reinforcement or challenge – mounting
against the rain’s insistence, trying to outdo it,
seeking a pulse within the immensity,

and succeeding, as though a door had opened,
and I heard pure sound issuing forth, stately
and majestic, even golden, while all around it,
darkness, rain falling, trees bent by the wind.

Carter is the laureate of loss and, beyond loss, absence. He has been witness to the emptying out of the rural Midwest for three quarters of a century. This is what the regionalist writer faces now in America: the swift passing away of what took three or four hundred years to build up slowly. In the following passage, from “Train Station,” Carter describes what is left after a front-end loader has knocked down and hauled away a small town’s only train depot.

                                           There’s
only grass there now, a level stretch
where you can stand and look both ways
straight through the heart of town
where the track used to be – as though
some vast, invisible knife had sliced
it in two, and left it to heal over,
or as though there had been a way out,
once, or at least a way to move on,
but all that was forgotten now, and
out beyond the city limits there were
only trees, and fields, and open sky.

And sometimes, as in the poem “Summit,” it’s an entire town that has vanished.

                             Up ahead was a little town
called Summit, that had been a flag stop once,
on a spur slanting off from the main line
to Terre Haute. That spur’s been gone for years.
Summit was gone, too. But I found it, after
a while, figured out exactly where it had been,
right at the top of a long rise you could see
stretching for miles across the countryside.
Nothing out there now but lots of beans and corn,
blue sky and clouds. Not even fence rows anymore.

You could almost imagine the train heading west,
up that long grade, pouring on the coal, making
for high ground. When it finally pulled in,
and the telegraph man came out for the mail,
there would be a couple of little kids sitting
on the baggage wagon, waving to the engineer.

I walked up to the only place it could have been.
Right there, at the crest of the hill. Somebody
had kept it mowed. There was a strong wind blowing.
I searched around in the grass for a long time,
but I couldn’t find anything. Not a trace.
Only the land itself, and the way it still rose up.

          After such loss, what remains to be said? In the midst of absence, of half-light and fog, a lesser writer might well lose his way and fall into digression or, worse, cliché. But it is precisely here that Carter seems most at home. He has a knack for apprehending what is left after nothing is left. It might be, as in the poem “All Souls’,” a ghostly creature of the night, more spirit than flesh, that few of us might even suspect was there.

                                                     I had stepped
off the trail, to look at a line of prints,
and sensed something near, perhaps ten paces.
There was still enough light. A snowy owl,
moon-faced and pale, waited in shadow, aware
of my presence, having no reason to go.
We both waited; we both watched each other.
When the time was right, it leaned and fell
headlong from its perch, letting gravity
seize and draw it down as though a sack
of sand had been cut loose – and halfway
through the dive began to flatten out
and start to turn, forcing the earth’s pull
forward, shifting all that power into
wings which, unfurled and shaken once,
twice, carried it cleanly across the glade
and out along the trees below the ridge.
Nothing else moved or made a sound.

Or, as in the poem “Prophet Township,” it might be a literal absence that Carter describes, which is somehow both empty and not empty, as when he portrays a solitary visitor who has stopped off at an old abandoned farmstead to have a look around.

                                           Now and then
when I drive past one of these places
set back up the lane – doors unhinged,
windows broken out, lilacs choked up,
willow drooping in the side yard –
  I’m never in much of a hurry to stop,
poke around.
                       Sometimes I sit there
in the driveway for a few minutes,
thinking about it, knowing that if I
step up to the front porch, or find
my way through the weeds to the pump,
there will be a slight breath of wind
just ahead of me, something rustling
through the timothy grass.
                                            It will pause,
stopping each time I do, waiting
until everything gets quiet again.
I can’t catch up with it, or come
face to face with whatever it is.
I can sense only that it’s pleased –
  by the way it turns, every so often,
to make sure I’m still coming.

          You don't have to say that the land is haunted. It's not about the ghosts of Potawatomi warriors or buffalo moving spirit-like across the land. It’s not about doors opening and closing by themselves in an abandoned farmhouse, or a figure glimpsed through a darkened window when no one is there. It's not about Romanticism or spiritualism, or skepticism versus belief. It's about something that anyone who has spent enough time alone, outside, away from the city, will recognize – anyone who has stood on a rise in open country, watched a storm forming in the distance, and felt a gust of rain-scented wind in the face, or who has walked to the edge of a small town at three o'clock in the morning when everything was still and gazed out over the emptiness of distant, darkened fields. There is an ancient part of every one of us that takes over at such times, that stirs awake in our depths, and recognizes something that the rest of our preoccupied brain has completely missed. It is as real as any other part of our experience. It just takes a while to notice it.
          Jared Carter’s poetry – in its fidelity both to the letter and the spirit of the land – does something that art should never lose sight of: it adheres so scrupulously to the world as it is, to the “local habitation” in all its distinctiveness, particularity and long extent of its history, that it assumes the very form and character of that region, is shaped and scoured by it, and so becomes a true expression of the land itself.



~~ BJ Omanson, June 2019

The Places Modernity Missed

"The Places Modernity Missed," from Along the Spoon: An Illinois poet considers his place in the Midwestern landscape.

 by BJ Omanson

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

About the time I was born, a tide of homogenization: television, top-40 radio, interstate highways and all the corrosive charms of mass culture, began sweeping across America to such an extent that many in academia and the arts, historians, and many others all along the political spectrum, began raising the alarm that America’s distinctive regions were in danger of disappearing and that authentically regional literature, as a result, was drying up as well. On the face of it, they weren’t wrong. The march of modernization seemed inexorable. Looking back now, from the vantage of the 2020s, one has the impression that modernity was munificently dispensed to every part of the country during the 1950s, bestowing Elvis, Sunbeam mixers and cherry-red Chevies like celestial blessings into every cobwebbed corner of America. But growing up as I did on a small farm in the deep middle of the rural Midwest, I remember those years very differently. Though the nation’s rough-hewn regions were being worn smooth by the cultural uniformity spreading across the land, there were still a great many rural backwaters far from the cities where such changes only faintly registered. ..... 

        When my maternal grandmother, America Appenheimer, rode down from Illinois with her son to visit her old home and relations in Wolfe County, Kentucky in the early 1950s, nearly all the roads across several counties were still gravel or dirt and some of her relatives could only be reached by driving up dry creekbeds. Many still had no electricity or running water apart from what they could rig up for themselves. And in the place where I was born in 1950, in the valley of the upper Spoon River in Stark County, Illinois, where my father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been born, life was proceeding much as it had for decades. The elders who helped to raise me— four grandparents and a host of grand-uncles and grand-aunts— were nearly all born and raised in the 19th century. Many were more at home driving a team than a car, and most had grandfathers who had fought in the Civil War. My own grandfather, Alpheus Appenheimer, who was born in a one-room sod dugout in western Kansas, had two uncles who had fought for the Union. ..... 

        The modern world was encroaching, to be sure: in the farmhouse of my paternal grand-parents, James and Hildur Omanson, there was a small television in the parlor for watching the weather report each evening, and Lawrence Welk on Sundays, but my grandmother still did the laundry by hand with a wringer and two aluminum tubs, and she once told me that she missed cooking on her wood-burning range which was still kept in the basement. Virtually everything that came to our table—meat, dairy, vegetables, fruit—was grown and prepared right there on the farm, or garnered from the woods. I watched my father and uncle butcher a hog for the family larder every fall, and my mother and aunts sitting in the front yard plucking chickens. Shirts and overalls were still patched, socks still darned, and even a few dresses (and some of my own clothes), still cut and sewn from feedsacks that came in lovely patterns. The modern world was making inroads, yes— but in countless small ways, and in most ways that mattered, it kept its distance until I was well into my twenties. .....

        That was my experience, which must seem marginal now, but it was hardly unique at the time. The funeral bells for American regionalism that began tolling in earnest in the 1950s in the universities were premature— the result of a complacent east-coast perspective that had lost sight of the nation’s interior. But America’s indigenous regions were not so easily eclipsed. My experience of growing up in a world that was still distinctly regional, of extended families whose collective memory stretched back into the previous century, and whose way of life was far more traditional than modern, was by no means unusual— never mind how remote we might have seemed from the lofty vantage of academia in those years. If you were born in the 1940s or early ‘50s anywhere among the small towns or farms of rural America or, for that matter, in any of the established ethnic neighborhoods of larger cities, your experience would almost certainly have been similar. A friend of mine, also born at mid-century, the grand-daughter of Greek immigrants, was raised in a multi-lingual Boston neighborhood where the culture was still noticeably Old World and where, for instance, she was not permitted to use the telephone until she was 16. We met in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula in the early 1970s as part of the off-the-grid, back-to-the-land movement and discovered, despite the obvious differences in our backgrounds, that our early experiences had much in common. ..... 

        My point is that many writers who are only recently gone or still alive now, who are in their 70s or 80s and still writing, spent their formative years in regions of America that remained distinctive and deeply rooted in a much older America— born on farms or in small rural towns in the 1940s or ‘50s. We still remember and we still carry that older America in our veins. We have been writing and publishing now for decades and we’re not dead yet— or if we are, our graves are still warm and our voices, attenuated to whispers, can still be heard.

See also . . .

 

"Regionalism Reconsidered," a facebook discussion group.  Open to all.