Lazy T Ranch

Manhattan, Kansas

By Traci Brimhall

Gravel crunches beneath my tires as I approach Lazy T Ranch, home of the Kansas Poet Lariat Ron Wilson. It’s an unseasonably warm February day, and birds punctuate the silence with their twitters and trills. The deep cerulean sky is cloudless and seems even brighter against the beige of the Flint Hills in winter. Quilt square designs decorate the outbuildings of Lazy T Ranch. The house is tucked in a horseshoe curve of hills.

Ron pulls up and greets me with a white cowboy hat and a kindness as bright as the day. We survey the land and buildings in front of us and make a plan for our afternoon. The winter mud had been nearly constant for weeks, but today is warm and dry, so we get in Ron’s work truck and head out to take in the best views.

As we drive past each pasture and hill, Ron names the peaks and points out where weddings have taken place. We talk about our favorite seasons in the Flint Hills, from the great sledding of his childhood to the gorgeous greens of new grass after a controlled burn takes out last year’s big bluestem. It’s astonishing that they can storm back so quickly after a fire. Nature performs such a hopeful metaphor for us if we choose to see it that way. A hawk wheels above and wind rustles last year’s grasses, and we agree spring’s renewal is one of our favorite times to love this place.

Although the ranch is not far from the stoplights and strip malls of Manhattan, KS, it feels a world away. The Flint Hills are often a retreat for me. I love to walk the trails and admire the gentle light of the prairie and insects lounging on the latest blossoms. But I always feel like a transplant to this ecology. I am still learning the names of wildflowers and how to identify bird calls, still tucking the meadowlark and prairie chicken into poems to feel myself more tied to place.

Ron Wilson’s family has been rooted here since 1968. The limestone barn is even older. But the front meadow is the oldest of all. It is still the original prairie sod, never plowed. Even as a boy, Ron’s mother spoke to him about commitment to the land.

As we leave one lookout point for the next, we begin talking about our love of poetry. Ron heard his first cowboy poet when he was in Colorado and got a kick out of it. That sparked something in him and when Kansas cowboy poet, Dr. Jim Hoy, put out a call for cowboy poems, Ron tried penning his first poem. He’s been crafting verses from his life ever since.

Cowboy poetry certainly sings on a page, but it’s originally an oral art form. The performance of the poem is part of its power. As we make our backroad turns and I wait for him to open gates for us to drive through, we talk about the beauty of this immediate connection — to speak your poem and immediately see and hear your listeners respond. For me, poetry has had more of a private sense of audience. I read other people’s poems and feel a connection, but I may never tell them. People often encounter mine on a page or computer screen, and I may never hear from them either, though I still believe an asynchronous intimacy happens.

Ron and I nod as we listen to each other describe our writing process. We find we are opposites in many ways. He was born here, and I still feel like an unrooted stranger after a decade in the same spot. He’s a night owl, and I’m the blackbird, singing even before the dawn gets too purple. I whisper my poems to myself as I revise, and he performs for audiences at bonfires.

Although we find so many differences, our inspirations for our poems almost sound the same. “Sometimes it comes from a moment,” Ron says, “A night thought.”

“Yes!” I agree. “Sometimes there’s a thing in my brain, like itching the grit inside an oyster and that becomes a pearl.”

“Sometimes it’s a twist,” Ron says.

I nod, understanding the strangeness of the world at times. The unexpected ways that what is right next to you is also hidden. I love poetry because a day can hide its details, and poetry helps us pay attention to them.

“When something goes badly on the ranch, we say, ‘Well, if nothing else, at least I can get a poem out of this.’”

I understand this truth, too — how it’s the storms, the accidents, the smoke from a prairie fire, the night’s quiet astonishments that bring us our poems.

We get out of the truck again once we are in the high pasture. Ron points out another popular wedding spot next to a lone tree. Below we can see a small bend in the river reflecting the stunning topaz of the afternoon sky, moving like something alive. It makes me ache with gratitude to be a guest on this land.

As we get into the truck to circle back to where I parked my car, we talk about what keeps us both coming back to poetry, decade after decade, loss after loss, and for me, home after home.

“The best compliment I could ever hear is that something I wrote made someone feel less alone,” I tell Ron.

“Yes,” he agrees. “The best part are those rewarding moments when you connect at the heart level.”

We turn on the gravel road headed back to the barn where we started. The afternoon shadows lengthen and dapple the Lazy T Ranch sign that reads “Happy Trails.” We complete our circle having learned each other a little better, knowing our different relationships with poetry still rhyme.

Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of four other poetry collections, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Parks Service. Brimhall lives in Manhattan, KS, and serves as the current Poet Laureate of Kansas.

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27240 N. Longwood Dr.

Forest Haven, Illinois

By Jenny Mueller

“Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After mistaking the aspens, which spread along the southern edge of the property where Lisel and Paul Mueller had lived nearly 20 years, their visitors romanticize the couple “as characters / in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin / living contentedly in the country.” My parents surely matched Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin in the strength and longevity of their marriage.

But not all happy families feel happy. Nor, by the end of the 70s, did we live in “country” anymore, even though the guests still think so, gazing out with pleasure on the scene.

Our friends from the city watch the birds

and rabbits feeding together

on top of the deep, white snow.

(We have Russian winters in Illinois,

but no sleigh bells, possums instead of wolves . . .

The city friends came from Chicago and its neighbor-city, Evanston. My parents had moved from Evanston in the late 1950s, buying one acre in Lake County, to Chicago’s north. There they built one of the first houses in “Forest Haven,” a tiny subdivision near the interstate. The house stood at the dead end of one of the subdivision’s five streets, in a northwest corner lot separated by barbed wire from a farm that bordered all of Forest Haven’s north end, as well as our portion of its west. In my childhood, in the 1960s, I gazed west through the wire at the edge of the backyard, looking past the small cattle herd that grazed in the sunset, toward the dark line of woods where the pasture ended and my sight ran out. Past that lay the railroad, another small new subdivision, and the Des Plaines River. Contrails burned their courses over me, arrowing back and forth from O’Hare — newly opened to passenger traffic, half an hour down the interstate.

In those early days, it was almost country around the house where Lisel Mueller’s poems were born. She came to this writing late in life — already 41 when her first book was published in 1965. By 1997, when her selected poems won the Pulitzer, she had nearly stopped writing. Glaucoma diminished her ability to read, and she could no longer drive. One day she found my father at the kitchen table, trying and failing to write his own name. He was losing his language to Lewy-Body Disease. She sold the house and moved them to a complex in Chicago, five minutes’ walk from both groceries and my father’s nursing unit. She never wrote another book of poetry.

In “Another Version,” we seem to be at the comfortable end of the 70s American lyric, with its quiet voice, personal sorrows, nature ready-to-hand for muted unities. While the city-slickers admire the peaceable kingdom outside a contented country home, an old man is dying inside. “He is my father,” Mueller writes,

he lets go of life in such slow motion,

year after year, that the grief

is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple

that won’t go up or down.

But “like the three sisters” in Chekhov’s play, “we rarely speak / of what keeps us awake at night.”

like them, we complain about things

that don’t really matter and talk

of our pleasures and of the future:

we tell each other the willows

are early this year, hazy with green.

“Another Version” begins with the visitors’ error and ends with their hosts’ secrecy. The misunderstandings pile up like northern Illinois snow. Russian allusions mask a German story. The old man was Fritz Neumann, who first arrived in Illinois as a political refugee. As a child in Nazi Germany, Lisel was forced to keep quiet about her father, whose known leftism had marked him as an enemy, someone against whom her schoolmates and neighbors should inform. Neumann, too, kept quiet when at home, but often he was far away. For much of the 1930s he took ill-paying temporary teaching work in France and Italy, while his wife raised two daughters alone in Hamburg. In 1937, luck landed him a scholarship to study at a teacher’s college near Evanston. His wife and children joined him in the US in 1939, ending the years in which Lisel clamped her lips tight to suppress her fears — the child’s terror that her parents might disappear, made very real by her father’s two arrests. Now Lisel became a Midwesterner. She lived all her adult life in Indiana and Illinois. She wrote often of her own luck. But she never lost her night fears, and when an interviewer asked if she considered the Midwest home, she dodged the question, answering, “Let me say what countless other displaced persons must have said: I am more at home here than anywhere.”

Her father remained on the move: from teaching job to teaching job in America, then returning to his native Hamburg after the death of his wife in the 1950s. Remarried unhappily, he kept traveling, steamshipping across the Atlantic for long US visits. One night in the 1970s, he touched down at O’Hare and never left. A stroke had stricken him with aphasia. He retained, however, a teacher’s memory for history: treaties, battles, empires, republics.

But how many people understood that there were non-Jewish German political refugees? In my experience, the old man who came to die with us represented little-known history that always puzzles Americans, even now. My mother sometimes invoked a more famous poet, Brecht, as a short-hand. In poems about her parents, she borrowed Brecht’s description of European exiles “changing countries more often than shoes,” and she quoted Brecht’s sorrow at talk of small pleasures in terrible times, his despair that a casual “talk about trees is almost a crime / since it means being silent about so much evil.”

Undoubtedly, Lisel Mueller talked about trees: aspens and willows, the great maple that still stands at an edge of the front yard — if I can trust the internet. But I can’t, of course, since the house is currently listed on Zillow as “uninhabitable.” On my laptop, I can see that the windows are boarded in the upstairs room that became my mother’s study, from which we saw the long views north and west. In that study, she wrote the books for which she won awards, poems that were popularized on the radio by the era’s voice of the Midwest, Garrison Keillor. The Poetry Foundation praises her work “for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Happy families in suburban nature, quietly sad, the great luck of a long, loving marriage. But she also wrote, almost always, of displaced persons, and in a journal she commented, “My preoccupation with history marks me as outside the mainstream of American poetry. No matter how long I’ve lived and written here, that has not changed and will not change.”

In “Another Version,” when the daughter can’t speak of her father, whose life was determined by history, she talks about trees instead. Her poem makes the pain of such evasion its point.

Suburbia is full of oscillations, migrations. My father, who worked in the city, drove back and forth for years on ever more crowded roads. As the subdivisions multiplied along them, our yard filled up with deer, displaced from the cleared woods. My mother likened them to “refugees,” “risking death on the road / to reach us, their dispossessors.” My sister and I moved to Chicago — which made us the city visitors gazing out on the aspens, itching to return to urban streets. There, we were sure, our authentic lives waited.

But some things never change. In 2020, reviewing an anthology of poems responding to the pandemic, the New York Times took furious aim against its “tepid” contents’ resort to natural imagery. There were too many poems “about flowers. Or birds. Or trees.” The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, had been “wise to rage against tree poems,” the critic complained. And perhaps the book really was tepid. But what an astonishing charge! As if we could still see no urgency in trees. As if we still believed that trees crowded out our witness of history, not the other way around. As if we hadn’t all learned to pronounce a new urbane word, Anthropocene, to slip inside our poems. As if grief, the poisoned apple in my throat, were only for childhood and not for aspens, “country,” snow.

Jenny Mueller lives in St. Louis. She is the author of two books of poetry, State Park and Bonneville, both published by Denver’s Elixir Press. She is also the editor of Moonie, a posthumous e-book of poetry by Brian Young, published by Fence Digital. She is the younger daughter and literary executor of Lisel Mueller. Unlike her mother, Jenny has been able to do years of coursework in creative writing, a privilege she tries to pass on to her students at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois.

Photo by Marianne Connell.

To read “Another Version” in its entirety, please visit the website of the Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, where Lisel Mueller is a featured poet.

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Marmaton River
Fort Scott, Kansas

By Jeromiah Taylor

The grass is fuchsia, the sky bluntly cold, and the horizon swathed in haze. It is late November on the Osage Plains. In southeast Kansas, the distinction between grassland and woodland, or plain and hill, is blurred by the mile. Technically speaking, it is a tree savanna. As for creeks and rivers, we’ve got a few. On my little stretch of highway between Wichita and Fort Scott I encountered the Osage, the Cedar Hollow, the Bachelor, and the Owl creeks. For the rivers, there were the Little Walnut, The Fall, and The Neosho. And then, roping through the 155-acre Gunn Park in Fort Scott, the river I’d come to see: the Marmaton. 

It took some time to find the river on foot. Like most Kansas rivers right now, the Marmaton is low. In fact, one offshoot was completely dry, allowing me to walk the cracked bottom of the gulch. While I stood in the Marmaton’s dusty vein, the ground as I knew it rested ten feet above my head, with only the ombre sediment at eye level. In my silent memories, the idle river moves slowly, its wooded sentinels bending in the sharp gust. 

At 11 years of age, the photographer, director, composer, and writer, Gordon Parks, was thrown into this river by some white boys under the impression that he couldn’t swim. These events and his circuitous path to fame and fortune are documented in his 2005 memoir A Hungry Heart, a Kansas Notable Book. The river itself is part of a driving tour commemorating the filming locations of the 1969 film The Learning Tree, Park’s landmark film debut, which he wrote, directed, and scored. The film is based on his auto-biographical novel of the same name.

In A Hungry Heart, Parks describes Fort Scott as “touched by all the hands of nature”, and also as “the mecca of bigotry.” A place he refuses to flatten: “bathed in lovely twilights,” yet where “bigotry spewed its venom,” and where he “ate hatred, a lot of it,” as well as “cabbage, cornbread, [and] strawberries.” It was in Fort Scott that Park’s parents and siblings “sowed love’s harvest,” which he learned to share with those “who asked for no more than also to be loved.” 

And it is in Fort Scott that he is buried. After traipsing in the rain through Evergreen Cemetery on 215th Street, the sun-bleached lot markers having been no help, I found Parks’ grave, which bears his poem “Homecoming.” Parks reflects on Fort Scott therein, while also venturing, with a heap of triumphalism, that “hatred is suddenly remaining quiet, / keeping its mouth shut!” The unhappy irony of reading that rain-splattered inscription in 2022 will not soon leave my memory.

In 1950 Parks shot an unpublished photo-story for LIFE magazine called “Back to Fort Scott” amidst the Jim Crow-era turmoil culminating in the 1954 decision of Brown vs. Board of Education.  The Gordon Parks Foundation later published the story in a book. Isabel Wilkerson, in her introduction, describes Fort Scott as “neither North nor South, neither East nor West, right smack in the middle…and at the intersection of what it meant to be American on the eve of The Depression and as-of-yet-unseen social upheaval.”  

As for Parks, Wilkerson deems him the “documentarian of a watershed century.” That sentence caught me in its undertow, as figurative watersheds are a recent fascination of mine. Maybe because I live surrounded by literal ones. Wichita sits on the mouth of the Little Arkansas River watershed and Fort Scott is in the Little Osage River watershed. The Marmoton flows into the Little Osage which flows into the Osage which flows into the Missouri which flows into the Mississippi which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. “Right smack in the middle” starts to feel relative when discussing rivers.

Watersheds, idiomatically speaking, are dividing or turning points. Parks’ writing is filled with recollections of watersheds. For example, as he lay dying, Park’s older brother Leroy, told a 10-year-old Parks, who’d been caught fighting, “Your brain is more powerful than your fists, try using it. You’re to remember that — ok?”  One year later, after being thrown in the Marmaton and left to drown, Parks stayed below the surface, swimming to the opposite bank, so that his white attackers wouldn’t see him escape. A brain more powerful than fists indeed. 

Jeromiah Taylor is a writer based in Wichita, Kansas, who is passionate about the cultural life of his region. He is a staff writer for Fauxmoir Literary Magazine, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Kansas Reflector, The Sunflower, The Penn-Capital Star and others. Get in touch at jeromiahtaylor.com.

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River Cabin
Blackhawk Island, WI

By Shanley Wells-Rau

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

______for a wing-bone

What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The cabin was a writing sanctuary for Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), said to be America’s greatest unknown poet, who will forever be linked to Blackhawk Island in southeast Wisconsin.

Look at Blackhawk Island on a map and you’ll see it’s actually more of a peninsula that points into what is called Lake Koshkonong, an open water area that is really just the Rock River being messy all over its flood plain. The river likes to outstretch itself and in its flood-prone ways created a recreational haven for boaters and fishers.

Placed less than 100 feet from the Rock River, Niedecker’s cabin was bought as a kit from a catalog and assembled by her father in 1946. He sited it closer to the road than the river in hopes of preventing displacement during the regular floods of spring. Elevated on concrete feet, the 20×20 one-room house hovers over four cement steps. The front and only door faces east, away from the river, as if to shrug off the idea of annual flooding. This one room contained her life: bed, books, table, typewriter, sink, pencils, hand-held magnifying glass. With no running water, she hauled buckets as needed from her parents’ house across the road. That was the house she grew up in. The house she needed to escape.

Her father, a congenial carp seiner and fisherman’s guide who was inept with finances, was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor close in age to his daughter. This neighbor and her husband were milking Henry Niedecker of property and money. Her mother, Daisy, had lost her hearing after her only child’s birth and turned her head away from her husband. Her “big blind ears” couldn’t hear what her eyes couldn’t see. A lifetime of fighting flood mud, “buckled floors,” and increasing poverty seem to have settled around her like a mourning shawl.

Niedecker left the area a few times—for college until the family’s finances made her quit (early 1920s), for artistic and romantic companionship with a fellow poet in NYC (early 1930s), for work as a writer and research editor for the WPA in Madison (1938-1942), and finally for Milwaukee in 1963 when she married a man who lived and worked there. But that spit of land brought her back after each exodus. Once married, Niedecker and her husband, Al Millen, returned to the river every weekend, eventually building a cottage riverside just steps from her cabin. They moved into the cottage for good in 1968 when Millen retired. Niedecker lived there until her death on Dec. 31, 1970.

In the opening lines of her autobiographical poem “Paean to Place,” Niedecker submerges herself deep inside a location she said she “never seemed to really get away from.”

Fish

____fowl

________flood

____Water lily mud

My life

____

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

_________________born

____

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Painted green when built, the cabin today is chocolate brown. Sturdy wood, unfinished inside. A brass plaque by the door shines with the lines: “New-sawed / clean-smelling house / sweet cedar pink / flesh tint / I love you.” Her signature is embossed below. When I visited, it was hot and dry. The riverside window was open, allowing a breeze to push stifling July heat into the plywood corners. A lovely space. I could see myself writing there. I told myself I could even manage life with “becky,” as she called her outhouse.

It’s not hard to imagine the constant cleanup from the river’s yearly ice melt and flooding. Tall maples and willows accustomed to watery life block the sun over a dirt yard that would easily mud with rain. The only access to sunshine seemed to be on the riverbank or in a boat on the river itself. The tree canopy jittered with life, a “noise-storm” as Niedecker once wrote to a friend. I looked to see what birds were holding conference, hoping to meet one of the famous plovers so linked to her work. I saw none. Just movement, shadows, and chittering, and I thought of her technique to overcome her own failing eyesight by memorizing bird song. She could see birds as they took flight. Sitting still, they were invisible to her except through their calls and conversations with one another.

I grew in green

slide and slant

_____of shore and shade

Neighbors saw her walking, always walking, stopping to peer in close at some flowering plant. She bent in—nose distance—to see past her own bad eyesight. Before her marriage to Millen, she worked as a hospital janitor in Ft. Atkinson. Her failing eyes required that she work with her body, no longer able to serve as a librarian’s assistant as she did in in the late 1920s or a magazine proofreader as in the late 1940s. Her eyesight wouldn’t allow her to drive. If a ride wasn’t available, she walked the four miles to work. Four miles home again.

Out-of-place electric guitar riffs float past underbrush the afternoon of my visit. Someone is listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” seemingly not at peace with bird song or tree breeze. The blaring music makes me think of Lorine’s struggle with disrespectful vacationers and rude neighbors. She persisted in centering poetry inside her hardworking life in a community slowly turning blue-collar loud. Her neighbors didn’t know she was writing her way into the poetry canon.

The current owners are descendants of the couple who bought the property in 1986 from Millen’s estate. They kindly allow poets on pilgrimage, and they seem to care lovingly for the property. As I walked to the river to meet it up close, the owner appeared with a genial greeting. He asked if I’d noticed the 1959 flood marks on the wall inside the cabin. I hadn’t. Eagerly, he guided me back to Niedecker’s “sweet cedar pink” to show me that and other details. After friendly conversation, I decided to head back to town. I didn’t need to meet the river up close. I’ve already met it many times in her poetry.

After a career in the oil industry, Shanley Wells-Rau earned her MFA in poetry at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming in The Maine Review, Bluestem Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Plants & Poetry, among others. She teaches literature and writing for OLLI and OSU and lives with her husband and a clingy dog outside town on a windy hill, where she wanders the prairie to visit with native flora and fauna.

_____

For further reading, digital archives, and more, please visit the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Special thanks to Amy Lutzke, who spent a very hot day driving me around and showing me Niedecker’s personal library.

Photograph by Jim Furley, April 1979. Permission granted by Dwight Foster Public Library.

The post Lorine Niedecker – Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Belle Isle
Waawiiyaatanong

By Daniel A. Lockhart

I’ve come to the river, as one does frequently in Waawiiyaatanong, in the closing weeks of winter. The land has begun to wake up from the snow and the river itself contains patchworks of ice, a south sliding quilt of the lakes above us. The air is thick with fog, giving the world an evenness of white and grey. Punctuated by the restless patterns of geese and swans rejoicing over the return of open water. Across from where I stand, separated by the Fleming Channel of the Detroit River, is the jewel of an urban park, Belle Isle. I reminded of the island and the city across the water from us nearly hourly, as the clarion tower sings out its song across the water and the city streets between. What is before me in this moment is that spirit made real. A near translucent moment of a city in the clouds, an island at its heart.   

To think, this is the same restless river in which, in his poem “Belle Isle, 1949,” Levine and his Polish high school girl were baptized “in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, / melted snow.” The river of industrial stove making, the river before the monumental decline of the great Horatio Algerian city, the river that is hardly visible past the row of phantom trees that make up the horizon that used to be, and still is, the island anchor of Levine’s poem.  Today, even the vision of the opposite bank is gone and the river is a nexus of dull light. Sharp edges of fluorescent modern Detroit, and Windsor for that matter, are absent. I have loved the constellation of skyscraper lights that dominate us here. Even in daylight they are gone. But here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.

Is this the perfect calm of the water between city and island? “Turning at last to see no island at all / but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight.”  Before me, that darkness chased away and the river sheened as if it had never known of the Griffon, a burning Rouge River, the gore of Bloody Run. This river is a different river than Levine’s. More ancient, freed from ore haulers, the shadow of stoves, the traffic of Jefferson. At least, temporarily, between shipping seasons. Across the river there are certainly drums. A passing car on the island’s ring road, hidden in the dense fog bank hovering above shore. There is no possibility of touching the river beyond. Signs warn of its threat on the metal fence that separates us. Alone. There is no woman, there is no warmth of another in all of this.          The river is changed. And it is light now. And I find myself lost in thoughts of the warmth of a lover’s breath upon my skin. Taken by the heavy cold in the air around me, I understand that each time is of itself. The spirit lives on. But the impermanence of the world allows at best for anchors in our memories. We no longer build stoves. Few of us swim in the river. The water is undisturbed as it passes before me, its surface defiant and purposeful like sturgeon skin. And the world is the white of an elder’s hair; wèlathakèt returned. And the quiet, while the river slides by in her earliest stages of waking in this the earliest hours of spring. Moving us, in silence, “back where we came from.”

D.A. Lockhart is the author of Breaking Right (Porcupine’s Quill), Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House), and Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce). His work has been shortlisted for Raymond Souster Award, and longlisted for ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and First Nations Community READS Award. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor at the Windsor Review.

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Cow Creek Crossing
Pittsburg, Kansas

By Leslie VonHolten

Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The Government Lake,” a trip to the toy store ends with a discomfiting acceptance of violence. Or the reader of “Awkward Silence,” on her porch, annoyed by helicopters mating overhead. Or how about those late-in-life lovers, mugged by musicians in “The Hostile Philharmonic Orchestra”?

If you think these are strange set-ups, how about this: Tate, a surrealist, absurdist Midwestern poet won the Pulitzer Prize (1992) and the National Book Award (1994) for his odd dreamscapes. What a world.

Tate lived many places that rightfully claim him, but it was as a student in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he learned that he was a poet. This landscape of disturbed prairie, coyote howls, and broad days opened the deep attention he needed to see the absurd in everyday life.

I’m all for the magic carpet ride Tate gives us, but it is “Manna” from his first collection that grounds me. A little sentimental, yes, but its alignment of solitude and connection under the night sky hits me square in the sternum. It is my all-time favorite poem set in Kansas.

Train tracks in Pittsburg have changed since Tate wrote those lines in 1967. Many spurs have been pulled out or paved over, and the depot is now an event center. But you can still find slow, flat and open crossings on the quieter edges of town. Tate’s miraculous provision of the poem likely happened as he walked home along West Hudson Street. Poets and other bohemians were known to drink on the trestle bridge spanning nearby Cow Creek, the setting of another poem in the collection.

Rural Kansas is rarely seen as a gateway to surrealist thought, but look closer and consider. Pittsburg is surrounded by the land-scars of mining, small pits and hills that undulate throughout the county. In the early 20th century, immigrants from all over the world came to southeast Kansas to work in the “gopher hole,” strip, and shaft mines. Many were from Eastern Europe, and the area became known as the Little Balkans. It’s a heritage that echoes still: until the pandemic, you could polka dance at Barto’s Idle Hour in neighboring Frontenac on Saturday nights. Artist-painted fiberglass replicas of coal buckets honor the town’s mining past.

This is also a land of gorillas. They are everywhere. The Pittsburg State University mascot is the proud town identifier — even the trash bins in front of each house are gold and red, and cement silverbacks decorate yards in every neighborhood.

The historical juxtaposition exposes the absurdity: Pitt State students selected the gorilla in 1925, while just three years earlier, the town made international news when 6,000 women and children marched for three days to protest poor labor conditions in the mines. The Kansas National Guard was deployed to establish order; a New York Times reporter dubbed the women the “Amazon Army.” They were lauded as heroes in the mine camps.

It’s a surreal mix, these legacies of college rah-rah comingling with a socialist labor movement. “I sure miss that country; I am really beginning to feel or see the roots I have there,” Tate wrote to his instructor Eugene DeGrusen in 1966. “It takes time and distance I guess to see that kind of thing, but I see it now and I’m proud of it. Not that I write bucolic verse or even use much naturalistic imagery, but I am primitive in a contemporary way, if such a phrase can be allowed.”

… but I am primitive in a contemporary way … Fiberglass coal buckets, Saturday night polka music, and gorillas on the prairie. Seeing a place better after you have left. Hello absurdist poet — we know you well.

Leslie VonHolten writes about the connections between land and culture. A 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency fellow, her art writing has been published in Pitch, Lawrence.com, and Ceramics Art + Perception. Sometimes she also curates a show or makes a zine. She lives in Kansas, where she mostly grew up. Leslie thanks poet Al Ortolani for the Pittsburg map and memory conversations.

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All My Relations Art Gallery

Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Elizabeth Wilkinson

All My Relations Art Gallery is on Franklin Avenue, 1.1 miles from my house, in the Ventura Village neighborhood of Minneapolis. This section of Franklin Ave is called the American Indian Cultural Corridor. The corridor starts just as you cross over Cedar Avenue, is interrupted by Hiawatha Avenue, and extends west toward an end point near Maria’s Café on 11th Avenue. The art gallery shares space with the Pow Wow Grounds Coffee Shop. During the summer months, their joint parking lot becomes the Four Sisters Farmers Market, selling produce from Indigenous farm cooperatives. Much of what goes on, on the corridor is under the umbrella of the Native American Community Development Institute. Heid E. Erdrich, National Poetry Series Award recipient and poet from the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, until just recently served on their board and now works as curatorial mentor for All My Relations.

Heid’s work weaves through the Twin Cities and the cities weave through Heid. When I first came to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, a non-Native moving from North Carolina into Anishinaabe and Dakota territory, Heid Erdrich and her poetry welcomed me in. Only a few weeks into my life in the cities, fall of 2008, a colleague took me to hear Heid read poems from her collection National Monuments, which would come out in November. Now, I weave that book of poems over and over again into the classes I teach and smile at the sharp wit:

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects

that appear or disappear at will

or that appear larger in rear view mirrors,

include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,

well-ness circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

The Pow Wow Grounds is in the same building as All My Relations, and you have to go through the coffee shop to get to the art. Well, to get to the gallery. There is always some community art hanging on the coffee shop walls and some community artists hanging around drinking coffee. At Pow Wow Grounds, you can tuck into a warm corner with a cup of tea and a wild rice blueberry muffin, baked by Bob Rice, the owner. World-class poets write in Pow Wow Grounds. Heid’s newest collection, Little Big Bully, has poems that sprang up inside the bright yellow walls of the Grounds. Heid has been connected with the gallery for over a decade. It makes sense; her work — both poetry and prose — is often intertwined with performance and with visual art.

On her homepage, Heid includes links to her video poems. “Pre-Occupied” takes viewers from the comic cosmos into the churning Mississippi River, turned brown and frothy at the point of the St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam in central Minneapolis, just a scant two miles north of All My Relations. “River, river, river,” she says, “I never, never, never…” Her poem spills out over city scenes and archival photos and clips from a 1950s animated Superman comic, while the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” plays.

She wrote and recorded “Od’e Miikan / Heart Line” for an award-winning art project; her voice autotuned with wolf sounds and then with moose sounds echoed into the Minneapolis night sky while giant animated wolf and moose art installation sculptures, made from chicken wire and scrap plastics, howled and pawed the ground.

A few years ago, Heid taught ekphrastic poetry — poems that describe art, and its impact on the viewer, in vivid detail — to a small group of Indigenous women at All My Relations. Those writers traveled the gallery, pulling imaginative language-meaning out of the artistic visual-meaning pieces all around. Heid sat, as she often describes herself, bear-like, watching and listening with a fierce-gentle-art-love. Inside the warm yellow walls in Minneapolis, a name that combines mni, the Dakota word for water, with polis, the Greek word for city, Heid connected words and images and women across space and time in the heart of the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

Liz Wilkinson is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, MN. She researches, writes about, and teaches women’s literature — more specifically Native women’s literature and the literature of women and sports. She finds that these areas pleasantly collide more often than most people imagine.

Photo courtesy of All My Relations Arts.

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South Side Community Art Center
Chicago, Illinois

By Angie Chatman

4724 South Evans Avenue was located a block south of Cottage Grove, one of the main thoroughfares through the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The three-flat building, now demolished, initially housed four generations of my family. The oldest generation — my great-grandfather Ernest Hezekiah Fambro, along with his two sons, Curtis and Timothy, his wife, Nellie, and her mother, Amelia Beasley Ball — had moved to Chicago from DeKalb County, Georgia, in 1916. This was early in the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrial North of the United States, which continued through the 1960s.

My relatives weren’t the only Negroes to settle in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks and her family also migrated to Chicago, in response to lynchings and other forms of racial unrest in Topeka, Kansas, as well as for economic opportunities. Brooks lived in other places after her literary successes brought more lucrative teaching assignments, but those were temporary addresses. Chicago was home. This is obvious from the title of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945, as well as Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956.

Due to national and local laws mandating segregated housing, at its peak 300,000 Negroes lived in Bronzeville, in the area between 39th and 51st from Cottage Grove to Halsted (until the Dan Ryan Expressway was built in 1961 and cut the western boundary line of the neighborhood to State Street). Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery at Provident Hospital, the first African American owned and operated hospital in the country. Loraine Hansberry’s 1959 stage play, A Raisin in the Sun, was based on her family’s experience living in and attempting to move away from Bronzeville.

Once, on a Saturday morning my mother took us to the South Side Community Art Center, a three-story brick building on Michigan Avenue. We were going to hear Mrs. Brooks, who was then the first African American Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, read her poems. My younger siblings and I sat on the linoleum floor on mats of woven fabric, fans moving the air like a barge on the Chicago River. Mrs. Brooks’ voice rose above the hum, like that of the soloist in the choir. I don’t remember what poems she read, only that I recognized the tenor of the words. Her poetry had the same rhythm and cadence of conversations among my relatives during a backyard cookout in the sunshine.

My mother had promised we’d stop for ice cream after the reading. She took a detour on the way and pulled over in front of 4724 South Evans. Stairs led up to the entrance. Every apartment had the same layout: an open living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. There was a small yard in the back. My siblings and I were dismayed that a family of six shared one bathroom.

I never lived in that building on 47th and Evans; it’s now an empty lot. For my mother, though, it was the telescope she used to focus on fond memories of carefree days with her three older sisters: days full of hopscotch, double-dutch jump rope, roller skating to the Hall Branch library — a mile and a half away — and movies at the Regal Theater. Ms. Brooks’ also uses her experiences in Bronzeville as a lens with which she can zoom in and out to comment not only on the quotidian activities of Black folk, but also display how dysfunctional racist practices are for both Black people and white people.

I have not lived in Chicago for over 25 years. Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement grew from Minneapolis, to Chicago, to cover the globe, I turned my telescope towards home. It occurs to me — each time there’s another murder of a Black man/woman/child by police, and as people of color face a disproportionate impact from COVID-19 — that “We die soon.” Too soon.

I turn also to Brooks’ Annie Allen, published in 1949, especially a poem entitled “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” about a drive through Beverly, a then all-white neighborhood on the South Side:

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.

At least nobody driving by in this car.

It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us

How much more fortunate they are than we are.

Angie Chatman is a native of Chicago. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, The Rumpus, Blood Orange Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her essay, “Ode to Poundcake,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won a WEBBY award for her performance in the “Growing Up Black” episode of the World Channel’s Stories from the Stage. Angie can also be heard on The Moth Radio Hour’s podcast in the episode titled “Help Me.” Angie now lives in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood with her family and rescue dog, Lizzie.

Photo courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center.

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JAMES EMANUEL

Alliance Public Library
Alliance, Nebraska

By Sean Stewart

Alliance, Nebraska, does not remember James Emanuel. There is no plaque, no statue. His poetry is not assigned to high school students. Despite the lofty architecture of the public library and museum, there is no display, no exhibit. Just two or three dusty books kept in the staff room of the library alongside genealogy tomes, protected behind glass cases. Protected from being discovered.

I grew up craving art in a town that didn’t have any. I read about other places—any other place I could—and the figures who put those places on the map. I decried the emptiness of the prairie I found myself in. I was scared the small world of my beginning had set the limits for all I could be.

Alliance had no bookstore, no venue for musical or theatrical performances to speak of, no university. In this town of 8,000, I gravitated to the place stories could be found. The public library was a lifeline. Everywhere else my world felt small, but when I stepped inside the library it became limitless. The old library building, built in 1912 with a Carnegie grant, boasts classical columns and resilient stone. The current library is equally grand: skylight windows fifty feet up seem to usher the world in. The place grabbed me. I got a job as a library page, and as I shelved books a new geography imprinted itself on my mind. Even if no section of the library was especially thorough, I could see the hints of everything not present. And I wanted to learn it all.

I’d been working there for years before I discovered James Emanuel. His faded books were kept with the archives in the staff room. When I was tasked with rearranging the archival shelves I was, as far as I could tell, the first to look at them in decades.

What I found left me breathless. James Emanuel was a poet pushing against the very bounds of what it’s possible for one life to contain.

He was born in Alliance in 1921 and grew up with the same quiet streets that I did, the same railroad engines droning in the distance, the same treeless sandhills stretching to every horizon. He read his first poem at Alliance Junior High. As a teenager, he worked on a cattle ranch before leaving the area and moving East.

Emanuel attended Howard, Northwestern, and Columbia universities. He was mentored by Langston Hughes, on whom Emanuel went on to write an influential book-length analysis. Emanuel then cemented his own scholarly reputation with Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, a groundbreaking anthology of African American literature.

From the relatively pastoral beginning of early poems, Emanuel’s later began to focalize in his writing around racial injustice. Their topical change is matched by their uptick in rhythm. Poems like “Panther Man,” his scorching condemnation of the murder of Fred Hampton, are marvels of energy and anger. Emanuel later disavowed America entirely. His son was brutalized by police and took his own life in the aftermath. James Emanuel renounced the United States and spent the rest of his life an expatriate in France, pioneering a new form he called the jazz haiku.

I have to think that Emanuel’s artistic and personal evolution in a direction his country was unwilling to follow is at least partly responsible for his anonymity in Alliance. When he died in 2013, the Alliance Times Herald ran one of his early poems called “Poet as Fisherman,” sidestepping his real legacy as a poet of startling rhythm, fierce critiques, and unfettered experimentation. I’m proud, now, to be from the home of the blistering jazz haiku king, James Emanuel—the town whose streets and surrounding oceans of dry tallgrass shaped his early world. When I began looking for traces of him in Alliance, I learned that Emanuel said of the public library—the 1912 iteration—“the Alliance town library was in biblical terms ‘my truth and my refuge.’” I wish I could tell him that it was for me, too. I wish I could tell him that his own books I discovered there are no small part of why.

Sean Theodore Stewart received his MFA from the University of Idaho, where he served as the fiction editor of Fugue. The Arkansas International selected one of his stories as a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Writer’s Prize and his work has appeared in Salt Hill, The New Territory, and Guesthouse. Originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.

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Angelou Memorial
Stamps, Arkansas

By Greer Veon

Despite living in southwest Arkansas most of my life, my first visit to Stamps was with my parents in August 2018. We made the trip on a Sunday afternoon before my flight back north the following morning, my parents joking that Stamps was the kind of place that kept to itself. I sat in the backseat picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across and imagined feeling the breeze she once breathed.

In September 2017, a local newspaper reported that a memorial sign dedicated to Angelou disappeared from the grounds of Lake June days after Stamps elected Brenda Davis, their first Black mayor. “It makes you wonder,” Mayor Davis told reporters. “But I wouldn’t speculate.” All the same, the mayor’s suspicions resonated, coming as they did in the Southern town that served as the backdrop for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s painful 1969 memoir about coming of age during the Jim Crow era. Over time I searched for updates, but the suspects’ names were never printed, and the story went cold.

In a way, Angelou’s memoir prefigures Mayor Davis’s wariness:

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high rise? The answer must be in the experiences shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment.

In the early 20th century, Stamps served as a flag stop for the railroads that stretched across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. I grew up forty-five minutes away on the state line between the twin cities of Texarkana, one of the bigger stops on that same line, the Cotton Belt Route. Many of my childhood memories are set in the backseat of our family car as we took weekend drives on local roads through one-stoplight towns filled with forgotten gas stations and churches. Most of the newer highways bypassed Stamps. So did most people. When my ninth-grade English class read Angelou’s memoir, our teacher spoke less about how close we lived to the town and more about parents’ letters asking that my classmates be excused from the reading.

I didn’t revisit that memory until shortly after I moved away and read a piece on the Celebrate Maya Project, which was holding a 2018 celebration for the author’s 90th birthday. Angelou’s admirers gathered in Stamps to honor her and witness her childhood landscape. Still, I couldn’t shake the missing sign. I wondered what remained, and I longed to visit Maya’s hometown the next time I returned home.

On the way to Stamps that afternoon, we stopped at Burge’s, a retro dairy barn in nearby Lewisville, where we ordered from the front window. Minutes after stuffing ourselves with brisket and chocolate pies, we entered Stamps’ historic downtown, marked by a post office and outdoor storefronts. Paint cans and a ladder leaned against a half-completed mural. As we crossed over the train tracks, I looked for Annie Henderson’s merchandise store, the center of Angelou’s life in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but it’s gone.

We found Lake June on the edge of town, the water drained enough to expose its bottom brush. Despite reports that the state would replace the missing sign, there, almost a year after it was stolen, stood a wooden skeleton of the memorial. There’s something sobering to see that as the same place where a young Angelou spent her alone time. Even Maya Angelou, a voice of her generation, still faces these attempts at erasure, even in the town that played such a vital role in her legacy. Angelou’s memoir addresses a childhood filled with love and pain that stayed with her no matter where she moved. What “heroes and bogeymen” have other children first encountered here and other towns alike?  I feared who decides what parts of our homes will be made forgotten. Will they make space or blot out the experiences, the identities of their neighbors? I inhaled the damp air and left without answers.

Greer Veon is a writer who works for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent work has been featured in ELLE. Find her at greerveon.com.

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