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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Miner’s Shack

Picher, Oklahoma

By Joe Schiller

The shacks huddled haphazard and crosswise, scattered between the chat piles. Leaky roofs, knotholes, and loose-swinging doors let the dust in on any decent breeze. In Picher, Oklahoma, nobody built for permanence. They leased their plots from the biggest mining companies or from the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of Quapaw people (who were then mostly excluded from mine work). They moved on short notice as the “diggin’s” expanded, evicted by progress. In 1948 Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996) traveled to the Tri-State mining district at its productive end. Where useful ore made up only two percent of the dirt, they were pulling mountains of rock to the surface to parse out any profit. The extra stuff was called “chat.” The shack she stayed in during her visit, like most in Picher, had come to town in pieces on family migrations from area farms and older district camps.

Le Sueur is identified mostly with the Upper Midwest, but this landscape of the Lower Midwest epitomizes her life’s work: proletarian literature and reportage about industrial capitalism’s paired assaults on women and land. Her mother’s home on Minneapolis’s tony Lowry Hill, where Le Sueur taught writing after World War II, will not do as a landscape for Le Sueur. The “wasteland of ruined earth and human refuse” she encountered in extreme northeast Oklahoma will.

“It’s the chat, overn everything,” explained Le Sueur’s interview subject, the titular “Eroded Woman” of this trip’s product, an article for the left-wing Masses and Mainstream. The woman wiped a chair for the writer. “Her eyes seemed dusted” with chat, wrote Le Sueur, “their blueness dimmed and yet wide open and upon me.” The Eroded Woman was the wife and mother of mine workers, and she nursed her husband through the district’s environmental scourge, silicosis — “You drown in your own blood, you do,” lamented their son.

The Eroded Woman and her family were partisans of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). That made them outcasts in a district of proud, American-born laborers who had violently excluded Black Americans, immigrants, and labor organizers from their camps, certain that they were future bosses themselves and didn’t need a radical union. Just Le Sueur’s kind of person, the Eroded Woman repaired the son’s wounds from “the Klan, the bosses, pickhandlers,” who beat every man with a union button during mid-1930s labor strife. “I’m mighty proud of him not to lick the boots of the company,” she declared. She and her men resisted their town’s xenophobia. They exemplified the ideal of what the historian Julia Mickenberg has called Le Sueur’s “alternative Americanism.”

The shack is most certainly gone. Nothing in Picher met a dignified end when the mines closed across the 1950s and ’60s, except proud citizens, who willed theirs, usually by moving away. Even the landmark Connell Hotel was razed, its rubble filling an abandoned mine shaft in 1972.

In the 1980s, a new generation of feminists rediscovered Le Sueur. More recently have come the regionalists. Late in life she said she was “a passionate, partisan Midwest lover,” but that didn’t tell it all. More accurately, she loved the Midwest at its margins, and no place was more marginal than the Tri-State mines in the late 1940s.

“Eroded Woman” and its landscape embodied what Le Sueur’s editor Elaine Hedges called her “central formulation of female experience.” It focused on one woman haunted by the deaths of children and “the plunge into the darkness of the underground, the woman (or the earth) as wounded, invaded, and raped.” “Eroded Woman” was suffused with agrarian longing for what was lost on the land when capitalists extracted progress from beneath it. Amid shifting political winds in the late 1940s, perhaps Le Sueur felt her McCarthy-era persecution coming. She closed:

All over mid-America now lamplight reveals the old earth, reveals the story of water, and the sound of water in the darkness repeats the myth and legends of old struggles. The fields lie there, the plow handles wet, standing useless in the mud, the countless seeds, the little houses, the big houses, the vast spider network of us all in the womb of history, looking fearful, not knowing at this moment the strength, doubting the strength, often fearful of giant menace, fearful of peculiar strains and wild boar power and small eyes of the fox.

The lower continent underlying all, speaks below us, the gulf, the black old land.

Meridel Le Sueur’s life and work remind us of the hopeful and radical potential of regionalism and place — that tradition and history, rather than being reactionary, can gird people for progressive struggle. Picher, down from 10,000 people to about 2,000, unincorporated in 2009 after a contentious buyout process and the coup de grâce of a tornado that killed seven people and destroyed more than 100 homes. The Quapaws remain, remediating mine waste with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The chat piles, once the symbol of a proud community’s work, stand now like monuments to folly, leaching their payload of heavy metals into Tar Creek and rendering a large area uninhabitable. Without the shacks and the people who built them, the piles memorialize only the bankruptcy of past racial and ethnic exclusion. The “white man’s camp” of the early twentieth century proved to be no bulwark against economic and environmental collapse. As Meridel Le Sueur could surely have told us, it’s a good lesson for our time of climate crisis, economic precarity, hardening borders, and rising xenophobia.

Joe Schiller is an acquisitions editor at the University of Oklahoma Press. He is also a PhD candidate in history at the University of Oklahoma, writing an environmental history of deindustrialization in the rural Tri-State mining district. He lives in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and tweets @Joe_Schiller.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress: “Zinc miner’s home. Picher, Oklahoma,” by Arthur Rothstein, May 1936. LC-DIG-fsa-8b38342.

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