"Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade" now available!

 Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade

Volume 1: 

From Before the War to the Eve of Belleau Wood.

 264 photographs, 26 maps, 15 drawings, 379 pages.  8.5 x 11. 

$40.

 

Here is the Introduction:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

      The decision to write a history of my grandfather’s service with the Marine Brigade in World War I occurred shortly after my grandfather’s death in late 1974, half a century ago.  After Alpheus Appenheimer was buried, his effects were divided among his seven children and these included relics from his service in the war some sixty years earlier: a diary, letters, photographs, documents, medals, bits of equipment and battlefield souvenirs.  Taken altogether, they were compelling and evocative, but as I studied the diary (which was meager, consisting mainly of place-names and dates), and the letters (short on description and relatively few in number, as many were lost in a house-fire), it became clear that they constituted no more than the bare tip of a very large iceberg.

       I had grown up listening to my grandfather’s stories of the war.  Even as a young boy the First World War had been a source of fascination for me and I read a great many books about it, but my reading was indiscriminate and casual.  I sought tales of adventure and heroics and was more drawn to the art, literature and mythology of the war, than to the military history as such.  As a result I was slow to develop the technical understanding of the war that might have enabled me to ask my grandfather intelligent questions about his experiences.  By the time I eventually acquired such knowledge and understanding, he had been gone for many years.

       But even though that golden opportunity of talking with my grandfather in depth about his experiences was lost to me, I refused to let it go.  I began to assemble everything I could dig up about his service—interviewing everyone who had known him to collect any war stories they might have heard, gathering copies of all his letters—both those he had written and those written to him, and from that small beginning I worked gradually outward.  I acquired every book and article I could find on the Marine Brigade and the Second Division—especially first-hand accounts of soldiers who had served in those units—as well as a great many books about the war generally.  I also sought out whatever I could find about his family members during the war. I left nothing out. If it was related in any way to my grandfather’s life in those years, I added it to my growing archive.

       Especially noteworthy in this regard were the experiences of my grandmother, America Swango—first the fiancé and then the wife of Alpheus.  She left a considerable body of letters, mostly written to Al, but also written to and from other family members. The letters are filled with details of her life on several farms and in several small towns along the upper Spoon River in central Illinois during the war, as well as descriptions of her people in the hill country of eastern Kentucky, where she spent a number of weeks in the fall of 1917, visiting among them and covering many miles on foot or on horseback to reach their remote, isolated farmsteads.  Her letters constitute a rich resource of impressions and information both for those family members interested in America’s personal life, and for those interested generally in the life of rural and small-town America during the war.

       As a result, this book is as much a social and cultural, as a military history.  There is, for instance, far more about the French villagers among whom the Marines were billeted than you will find in other books about the Marine Brigade.  There is more about the rear areas, and movements from one area to the next, with all the complex preparations such movements entailed, than can easily be found elsewhere.  And there is of course a good deal of information on the care of mules and wagons, and the duties of teamsters, as well as anecdotes about teamsters and mules. 

       This book, in other words, is about those aspects of the Marine Brigade’s history which—because they do not bear directly on the fighting—have been largely passed over. But a soldier’s experience of war involves a great deal besides combat, and such “peripheral” experiences are consequential in their own right. They matter.  They are an integral part of the full story.

       It will never be possible to recover the greater part of my grandfather’s experience of the war—for the most part that experience went with him to the grave.  But there are, nevertheless, many aspects of his experience—and of the wider context of that experience—which can be recovered, and this book is the result of a fifty-year quest to seek them out and organize them into an open-ended but still coherent narrative.

       But before we begin that narrative, something should be said here of the colonial forebears of Alpheus and America, for those deep familial roots, binding them into the land of this continent, had a profound influence on the formation of their character—on the sort of individuals they became—and  instilled in them an understanding of military service as one of the natural obligations of a free people.

       Both Alpheus and America had ancestral lines that extended back to the 1630s in early America, Their ancestors served in numerous local militias and fought in King Phillip’s War, the French & Indian War, Lord Dunmore’s War, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.  Additionally, I have identified over twenty family members (there were doubtless far more) who were killed, taken captive or even adopted by native tribes: Narragansetts, Wyandots, Lenape, Shawnee and Cherokee. A large number of Alpheus’s and America’s forebears (dozens of whom can be identified) settled frontiers in western Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee—nearly all of them homesteaders and several who worked as wilderness scouts or guides.

       Of particular relevance to this book is the fact that Al Appenheimer’s great-great-grandfather, Anthony Remington, during the Revolutionary War, served aboard the 36-gun frigate Providence under Capt Abraham Whipple as a Continental Marine.

       [More about America’s forebears and their role in the settlement of frontier Kentucky can be found on p. 103].

 

                                                                                                            BJ Omanson

                                                                                                                 Morgantown, West Virginia

                                                                                                                        Armistice Day, 2024

 

Now available as an illustrated book: Dana Gioia's "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism"

Dana Gioia's seminal essay, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism" has just been published as a pocket-size book liberally illustrated with period engravings.

Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism

Omanson's memoir of a winter alone in the wilderness serialized online at The Milk House

Selections from the first volume of BJ Omanson's memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road is currently being serialized online at The Milk House, a collective of rural writing based in Ireland.

Part 1 is introduced by the following paragraph: 

 What follows is a selection from the opening chapters of BJ Omanson’s memoir Three Years on the Nowhere Road in which he recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry— a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and— as he was a high-school dropout— nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia. 

 In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle’s WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw. We pick up his story several days later, on a deserted two-lane road in an Oregon forest, sometime after midnight:

 Continue reading at The Milk House:

A new book of Appalachian poetry by West Virginia poet laureate Marc Harshman

 Every poem in the "Dark Hills of Home" had its birth among the foothills and hollows of the western Alleghenies, between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers in the heart of Appalachia--- where the sun rises late and sets early, and the night is never entirely absent. ~~~~~ Illustrated with period engravings and printed on heavy glossy paper. Approx. 4.5" x 7". Paperback, perfect-bound. 48 pages.

Visit Marc's new PERSONAL BLOG for a continually updated list of future appearances, a wide range of articles about Marc and reviews of his books, a comprehensive list of Marc's publications (both poetry & children's books), a page about previous West Virginia poets laureate, and links to scholarly articles about Appalachian poetry.

 

Volume II of Dan Clendaniel’s magisterial history of the 85th Pennsylvania, Such Hard and Severe Service, is now available.

Volume I ended with the regiment recovering from their exhaustive duties on Morris Island, South Carolina during the siege of Charleston and Fort Sumter in 1863. They had organized in 1861, fought at Seven Pines during the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia and during the Goldsboro Expedition in North Carolina in 1862, and in 1863 had been sent to the South Carolina front. By September of 1863, 177 soldiers had died from battlefield wounds or diseases. An additional 337 men had been dismissed from the regiment, mostly due to medical discharges while a handful transferred to other units.

Also, by late 1863, their commanding officer, Colonel Joshua B. Howell, was convalescing from a severe concussion from a shell explosion. Their lieutenant colonel, Henry A. Purviance, had been killed by friendly fire in the trenches around Battery Wagner on Morris Island. Of the original ten reimental captains, none remained in their position by late 1863, mostly due to medical discharges. Just one, Isaac M. Abraham, who had been promoted to major, remained with the regiment. New leadership was emerging from the lower ranks in each company.

Volume II begins with the regiment enjoying a break from the battlefield beginning in late 1863 and follows the regiment through to the end of the war. Chapters include “Whitemash Island,” “Bermuda Hundred Campaign,” “Diary of Captain Richard Dawson,” “The Exchange Fleet,” “Fort Gregg” and “The Appomattox Campaign.” A final chapter covers post-war reunions. In addition there are thirty pages of appendices.

*Three Years on the Nowhere Road:* discovering Hanshan in the Olympic Peninsula wilderness

 BJ Omanson's road to becoming a poet began about as far from the classroom as can be imagined. He had dropped out of high school five years earlier and had no intention of returning. He was 22, living alone in a primitive shelter above the Calawah River in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula and working in a little shake mill outside of Forks, Washington. 

His journey began one winter morning in a stand of old-growth Sitka spruce when a fellow mill-worker and ex-Sgt of Marines named Mitch handed him a sheaf of folded pages, worn at the corners and tearing at the creases.  They were poems that Mitch had copied out by hand and carried in his jacket pocket for months until finally deciding to pass them along. They were Gary Snyder's translations of the Cold Mountain Poems, written by a half-mad old hermit named Hanshan who lived in a cave overlooking the Yellow River in 8th-century China. 

For the rest of the winter, ensconced in his shelter with a small fire for warmth, seven miles from the nearest neighbor, Omanson read and re-read the ancient poems, along with other books of literature, ethnology and mysticism, and wrote his first cycle of poems. ---- 

Volume I of Three Years on the Nowhere Road chronicles that first winter on the Calawah, his hazardous work in the mills and on the steep, logged-over slopes, his encounters with a Sasquatch and other backwoods eccentrics, and his first steps on the arduous, solitary road to becoming a poet.

*The Old Hotel at the End of Night*, a new narrative poem & chapbook by BJ Omanson

 The latest poem by BJ Omanson, "The Old Hotel at the End of Night," has been issued as a palm-sized booklet by Monongahela Books.  A synopsis of the poem is given on the back cover:

"A man is driving through the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, in what used to be the Old Republic, the old America, and he breaks down and begins walking--- through a night that never ends, in a nation that is not quite gone."     

" . . . a true American artifact, and a rare example of allegorical vision."        -- Dave Mason, former Poet Laureate of Colorado.

 

A poem from Omanson’s *Stark County Poems* featured in Ted Kooser’s *American Life in Poetry* column

For the second time this year, a poem from a book published by Monongahela Books has been chosen by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser to appear in his weekly column, American Life in Poetry, which appears in newspapers across the United States and in 72 countries around the globe. The poem is "Nowhere to Nowhere" by BJ Omanson, from his book Stark County Poems. The poem will also be archived in the Library of Congress.

The poem, along with Ted Kooser's comments, can be seen on the American Life in Poetry website.

Carter's *The Land Itself* receives second review

 "The Laureate of Loss," a review of Jared Carter's The Land Itself, by poet & reviewer David Lee Garrison, has just appeared in the online journal Mock Turtle Zine.

Of Carter's book, Garrison writes:   "The black and white photographs within the book and on its cover, taken by the poet himself, have no human figures in them. They have the lonely look of Andrew Wyeth paintings—abandoned houses, a closed-up church, cemetery figurines, an old mill, spirea flowing over a wall and casting shadows. And yet, the poems are about people and their struggles, people and their wanderings across Midwestern landscapes. Jared Carter tells us their stories. 

The poems are as stark, uncluttered, and unassuming as the photographs. The poet does not moralize or generalize or draw abstract conclusions. He lets the people and the land and the structures that remain on it speak for themselves. He draws back a curtain on the past and shows us birds in the rafters of a covered bridge, gas street lamps it was thought would never go out, and a coffin filled with rock salt. Then he offers us a glimpse of the human context of such things. 

What we hear in these poems are primordial echoes of the land and reverberations from little Midwestern towns. What we see and experience are defining moments in lives now mostly forgotten."

The entirety of this review can be read in the current issue of Mock Turtle Zine. Scroll down to the end of the issue.

Two more titles from Omanson's *Stark County Poems* appear in *Illinois Heritage*

Two more poems from BJ Omanson's Stark County Poems-- "The Aging Widow in the Third Pew" and "Populism"  (both situated in the late 19th century in Stark County, Illinois)-- appear in the current issue of Illinois Heritage: a Publication of the Illinois State Historical Society.

New review of Carter's *The Land Itself*

 A review of Jared Carter's The Land Itself by Michael R. Burch has appeared recently on the online poetry journal The HyperTexts.

Burch refers to Carter as " . . . the poet of the uncanniness of the commonplace . . ."  He writes,

"The Land Itself begins on a Quixotic note, with a dog barking in the distance and “somewhere a windmill turning in the wind.” The first small town we encounter is ironically named Summit. But Summit is long gone, vanished without a trace from its hill. What remains? “Only the land itself and the way it still rose up.” Here we find the book’s title. What is left when we ourselves are gone, or have become mere shades of ourselves? The land itself, a haunting thought."

The entire review may be read here.

Two poems from the new edition of BJ Omanson’s *Stark County Poems* published in *Illinois Heritage*

Two of the new poems from the new enlarged edition of BJ Omanson's Stark County Poems-- "Proverb of the Three Hotels" and "The Boy Who Climbed a Tree"  (both about Abraham Lincoln's 1858 visit to Toulon, in Stark County, Illinois)-- appear in the current issue of Illinois Heritage: a Publication of the Illinois State Historical Society.