The Places Modernity Missed

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

 by BJ Omanson, (a work in progress)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

To my way of thinking, for as long as I can remember, land and literature were as inseparable as root and stem. Raised as I was ‘in the middle of nowhere,’ in the vast agricultural flatlands of north-central Illinois, the land was the source of everything—so much so that even after years of exposure to Modernist and post-Modernist ideas, any branch of the arts that was not derived from the land in some essential way tended to strike me as hollow, if not bogus. The land was inescapable. Not just for me, unregenerate rube that I was, but for everyone who walked the earth, academics and artists included, whether they recognized it or not.

Of course, to express such ideas in the second half of the 20th century in a university setting— where the very notion of “regionalism” had become something of a standing joke— was to invite derision, often to the point where I felt like an unrepentant pagan in a fundamentalist church. But my perception of the land was not something I could change. It was ingrained, a part of my blood and brain. It was who I was, due to where I was from. 

The general consensus was that America’s regions no longer existed in any meaningful way, that they were blurred into a bland facade of their former selves by a tide of homogenization in the 1950s--- by television, top-40 radio, interstate highways and all the corrosive charms of mass culture, and that authentically regional literature, as a result, had dried up as well, and disappeared.

In broad terms, this description appears self-evidently true. The march of modernization seemed inexorable. But the loss of America’s regions may not have been quite so swift or decisive as all that. Looking back now, from the distant 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 German grandmother, America Swango Appenheimer, who was born in a one-room log cabin in Wolf County, Kentucky, rode down from Illinois with her son to visit her old home and her relations 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 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 aunts— were nearly all born 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 German 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 Swedish grandparents, 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 to 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.

*Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade* reviewed in "Roads to the Great War"

A review of the book, Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade (Monongahela Books, 2025), about a teamster, Alpheus Appenheimer, with the Fourth Marine Brigade of the Second Division, A.E.F., just appeared in "Roads to the Great War," one of the oldest and most respected WWI blogs on the web. The book is the first in-depth potrayal of an American teamster in that war, and the review was written by the granddaughter of Major Edward Cole, who commanded Appenheimer's battalion. 

Read the review here.

Suitable for woodland walks: eight pocket editions of voices from the Early Republic

The latest from Monongahela Books: eight pocket editions of voices from the Early Republic suitable for woodland walking. At roughly 4x7, they slip snugly into the pocket of a heavy overshirt or over-the-shoulder satchel. Emerson’s essays “Nature” & "Self-Reliance," Thoreau’s “Wild Apples,” “Walking” & "A Winter Walk," the only known biographical sketch of “Johnny Appleseed” by one who knew him, Dana Gioia's seminal essay on Longfellow, and a little-known essay on Whitman by one of his early biographers -- subjects steeped in the climate of an earlier America and suited to outdoor reverie and rumination. 

These are lightweight, bare-bones editions, free of backcover blurbs or scholarly clutter -- (not that commentary and notes are without their uses, but such fatter editions belong on the shelf, available for consultation, and not weighing down a saunterer’s pack).  ~~~ Six are currently available for purchase, while the other two are in the works. Each fits easily in the hand (leaving the other free for an apple or a pipe), while taking one’s repose on a mossy stone beside the trail, or under a spreading oak in a meadow.

   

                       

                         

  

    

"From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War" ~~ a cycle of unrhymed sonnets

 

From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War

A book of unrhymed sonnets based closely on the letters of a young, newly-married woman to her husband in the training camp at Quantico, Virginia in 1917, shortly before he was shipped overseas.  Written mostly among the isolated hills of her childhood home in Wolfe County, Kentucky, the letters are tender and touching with some lyrical passages, but also unsparing in their naturalistic descriptions of hardship and dysfunction.

~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 8, 1917

Apart from Aunt Nora who's just as kind

as she can be, all the old women here

are spiteful and mean and even make fun

of the way I talk, but I don’t much care.

They say I am foolish to promise myself

to a soldier who’s going straight to war,

but I said I would marry no one else

for if a man doesn’t have life enough

to fight for his country he isn’t likely

to fight for me. — Another old lady

said what a disgrace it was that I

should get myself into trouble like that.

What trouble? I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

I no longer listen to them at all.

But my little cousins all like me fine.

They snuggle up close and sleep with me too

and follow me everywhere that I go,

but the older women just criticize.

They say my dresses are much too short

and more becoming to a girl of twelve

than a woman of twenty.  The young girls here

go around all day on Sunday with

their sun-bonnets on, but I refuse

to wear them at all.  And in one house

where I visited there was one little girl

so drunk she could hardly stand up straight.

She was only three years old.  That hurt me

worse than anything I have seen.

 

And Al, the chickens just strutted around

on the table, scratching and pecking for crumbs

like they owned the place— and then I met

a young husband and pretty wife so poor

they had to make do in a chicken coop.  

— I would have given most anything

if you could have been with me yesterday

and seen the old cabin where I was born.

I couldn’t find it at first, so hidden

in nettles and horseweeds as it was. 

I thought I would step inside for a bit

and say hello to an old ghost or two,

but it was so dark and smelled of old dirt 

and the sadness was more than I could bear.

 

Did the American war poet John Allan Wyeth spy on Nazi activities in the 1930s while posing as a landscape painter?

      

       From 1932 to 1938, the American war poet, John Allan Wyeth travelled an annual circuit around Europe which allowed him to indulge his new-found passion for landscape painting. He spent each winter and spring in Paris at the Académie Moderne studying painting under Jean Marchand, then spent the summer at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria and, finally, the autumn at the Schule Schloss Salem on the grounds of the old Cistercian monastery north of Salem. Also, at some point during each of these yearly circuits, Wyeth found time to visit Cyprus and Greece for more painting.

The classic expatriate idyll

        On the face of it, Wyeth, like numerous other American and British ex-soldiers of a literary or artistic bent, was leading the classic expatriate idyll between the wars which has since passed into legend, following the well-worn circuit from Paris to the Alps to the Riviera to the Greek islands.  The wrinkle in this picture is his time each year in Bavaria, at the Schloss Salem and in the Bavarian resort town of Berchtesgaden.  What may not be evident to every reader will  be immediately apparent to historians of interwar Germany. Schloss Salem Schule was the principal training ground of the Nazi Youth movement, and Berchtesgaden was the summer home of Adolf Hitler, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering, and several other top Nazi officials. In addition, both locations had associations with the Windsors, the English Royal family.  Wyeth’s six-year stint at these locations coincided both with Hitler’s assumption of the German Chancellorship, and with Prince Philip’s enrollment at Salem.

One artist among so many Nazis

        So why was Wyeth there? The Nazi presence in Berchtesgaden, especially, would have been impossible to ignore. It is conceivable that Wyeth was there for the same reason that so many German and foreign tourists were flocking in, in increasing numbers, to stare at, and pay homage to, Hitler. But nothing in what we know of Wyeth through his few letters and through his family, suggests that he was in any way sympathetic to fascist ideology.

The other possibility, that Wyeth was an observer for British intelligence, using the personae of a plein air artist as a cover for spying on Nazi activities, is a more plausible explanation. On the face of it, the idea of Wyeth as an undercover agent may seem unlikely. He was more an aesthete than an adventurer. According to Edmund Wilson, Wyeth attended literary gatherings at the Charter Club in Princeton, but spent all his time playing Debussy on the piano. He was never a natural mixer, and cultivated few friendships. He was also a homosexual, which may have increased his natural reticence. There was little of the dashing James Bond about him.

A tale of two year-long western trips on no money, sixty years apart

 

As young men, both my grandfather and I took off on short notice to head out West, with no more than we could easily carry, seeking adventure, supporting ourselves with the manual labor we knew best: ranch & farmwork for my grandfather; millwork & logging for me —  and not returning for a full year.  My grandfather's trip is described in a blank verse narrative poem, "Al Appenheimer's Sight-seeing Tour of the Vanishing West," from my Stark County Poems, and opens thus:

In 1912, when he turned twenty-one,

because he had always wanted to see

the Old West of legend before it was gone,

Al Appenheimer packed a canvas bag

with a change of clothes, wished the folks so long,

and walked off into the sunset.  Apart

from his bag and hat, all he had was a pair

of five dollar bills in his shirt pocket. 

It was all he needed.  Whenever he

was down to a dollar, he just stopped off

at the nearest ranch and got taken on

as a seasoned hand for however long

       it took to replace the pair of fives,

       and then hit the road.  In this way he tramped

       all the way from Illinois to Texas

       and down into Mexico and then up

       the coast to Washington State just in time

       for the start of the harvest season where he

       was hired to drive a 30-mule-hitch

       combine across an ocean of wheat.  . . . 

An in-depth interview with Jared Carter in New Verse Review

(Carter at work in his home in the late 1970s.  --

                                Photo by Chris Minnick.)

A wide-ranging interview with poet Jared Carter has just appeared in New Verse Review, covering Carter's early years in a small Indiana town, his education at Yale, his years in Fontainebleau, France with the Army, his many years in the publishing business and his long circuitous road to becoming one of the most respected of living American poets. 

Part One of the interview can be read here.  Part Two can be read here.  

And here is a brief excerpt:

New Verse Review:  [C]an you talk about how form corresponds with meaning in your narrative poems? Does form help you find what you want to say, or is it more that you go in with a clear vision or outline of what you want to accomplish with each poem—topically and structurally?

Jared Carter:   "With all due respect, none of that. I may sense notions, or clues, or whisperings, but I don’t begin with ideas. The truth is that I make poems the same way my father built houses and bridges, and the same way my mother made a few dollars by standing near the casket, or next to the bride and groom, and singing her heart out.

I just find a way to fit different words together, and when starting out, almost anything will do. I build poems out of bits and pieces, recollections, country tales, ghost stories, paving bricks, and old zinc canning-jar lids used for ashtrays.

On many occasions, as a youth, I watched my father and his workmen walk out into an empty field, and three months later, in that same field, there would be a small factory or a pumping station. I try to do something similar with each new poem. Not from the top down, but from the ground up."

John Allan Wyeth and the British War Poets

The most memorable poems of the First World War were, among other things, testaments to the catastrophic effects of war on the individual psyche. For all the shocking explicitness of their naturalism, they remained deeply subjective. In that sense, they were the literary correlatives of German Expressionist paintings: expressions of personal horror with a public purpose: to serve up slices of rank Flanders mud on the dinnerplates of the complacent bourgeoisie at home, between the carrots and choice cuts of beef. Such paintings and poems, nurtured by a suppressed festering rage, shook the homefront to the core.

       So all-consuming was the day-to-day scrabble to survive in the bestial setting of the trenches that a broader, more objective perspective was out of the question. Unlike the greatest novels of the war, which did not appear until a decade after the fighting, the greatest war poems—by Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg and Gurney, to name the most obvious—were written during the war itself. That they were written at all under such conditions, let alone with such originality and artistry by poets still in their youth, is little short of a miracle.

       The Great War has been described as the burial ground of whatever vestiges remained of Romanticism, and the major poets of that war have been rightly credited with purging the language of its last romantic trappings. Yet, from the long vantage of a century, the poets themselves increasingly appear as Romantic figures in their own right: as individuals of obdurate defiance, refusing obliteration, emerging against all probability from the vast, inchoate backdrop of modern warfare. Whatever their services to the language of Modernism, the more permanent value of such poets lies in their irreducible individuality in the face of impersonal, all-consuming war—in their embodiment of the inextinguishable human spirit.

"Closing Inventory" from Stark County Poems appears in Small Farmer's Journal

The poem "Closing Inventory," about the death of an aging farmer living alone along the Spoon River in the mid-1930s, and which first appeared in the online journal The Milk House, has been reprinted in Small Farmer's Journal.  The poem is from the collection Stark County Poems (Monongahela Books, 2019), by BJ Omanson. 

Mr. Omanson informs us that he is always pleased when his work appears in a traditional agrarian magazine as it means he is reaching a wider general audience beyond the small specialized audience of academic literary journals.

He also appreciates the unapologetically old-school  layout of farming magazines with their generous use of space and illustrations and mingling of literary pieces with practical articles on agricultural subjects.

Omanson's work has appeared several times in Small Farmer's Journal and has also appeared in Farming Magazine, an Amish publication, which has published such poets as Wendell Berry and Ted Kooser. 

"He made himself the first authentic voice of America..."

 Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy by Cleveland Rodgers.  Illustrated. (Monongahela Books, 2025).  $8.50. 

The latest 'small booklet' from Monongahela Books is an obscure, little-known essay-- originally published in 1920-- on Whitman as a poet of democracy by one of his earlier biographers, Cleveland Rodgers, who also served as editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Eagle, a post held for a time by Whitman himself.

        "Whitman was a great pivot and force in our national evolution. He came upon the scene in time to gather up the torch that had been kindled in Revolutionary days, and he made a heroic effort to pass it on to the new generations of Americans.  He stands with Lincoln as the exponent and prophet of the greater democracy. 

       Whitman, looking back, saw how far the Republic had come.  He looked around and ahead and saw where the nation could go if it went along.  He wove his dreams into a moving and magnificent pageant of words.  He made himself the first authentic voice of America and democracy's great prophet. "

Carter's "The Land Itself" reviewed in New Verse Review

The Land Itself, by Jared Carter.  Introductory essay by BJ Omanson.  Photographs by the author.  72 pp.  (Monongahela Books, 2019). 

Jared Carter's The Land Itself was recently reviewed by David Lee Garrison in New Verse Review. 

Here is an excerpt:

"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 streetlamps 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. In the words of essayist R. P. Burnham, Carter 'knows that a lived human life is made up of moments, that in the lives of even the most commonplace farmer or druggist or carpenter some of those moments are magical and the very stuff the human spirit is made of.' "

The entire review can read in New Verse Review here.

"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.

 

From the Introduction:

       ". . . 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. "

  

 

" . . . the melancholy decline of the year . . . "

In the Hour before Dusk, by BJ Omanson.  (Monongahela Books, 2024).  Illustrated.  75 pp.  

After half a century of work in the naturalistic narrative mode of Hardy, Robinson and Frost, Omanson returns to his aesthetic origins-- to that long period in English poetry from late-18th century Gothic to the late Victorians-- to contemplate once more the mesmerizing vistas of his youth from the more philosophical vantage of old age.

from "Old Locksley among the Ruins":

.                             It was later that year,
after weeks when the heat of midsummer
had driven Old Locksley to seek the shade,
had driven him, like a disgruntled bear,
to take sanctuary deep in his house,
deep in the cavernous gloom of his house,
with bats in the attic and dripping eaves
and high steepled windows where mystics, monks
and martyrs shone softly in sunlit glass—

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-sized book liberally illustrated with period engravings.

Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism.  By Dana Gioia. (Monongahela Books, 2023).  Illustrated, 107 pp.  $15.

Excerpt: 

"Modern literary criticism on Longfellow hardly exists in the sense that it does for more overtly difficult poets like Dickinson, Stevens, or Pound. There is no substantial body of commentary on specific poems, no vital tradition of critical discourse that collectively sharpens our reading and challenges our preconceptions. The unspoken assumption, even among his advocates, has been that Longfellow's poetry requires no gloss. Consequently, many central aspects of his work have never been examined in any detail (the linguistic stylization and rhetoric of Hiawatha, for example) and misconceptions about his work abound. The best Longfellow scholarship often has a decidedly old-fashioned feel; it traces historical sources, clarifies textual problems, and connects biographical data to the poems. Such criticism addresses a small group of nineteenth-century specialists rather than the general readership for American poetry; it implicitly ducks the issue of Longfellow's relevance to contemporary letters. On the rare occasions Longfellow criticism has spoken eloquently to a broader audiences as in essays by Horace Gregory, Howard Nemerov, and Leslie Fiedler, his champions have usually been more concerned with the general mission of keeping him, however marginally, in the canon than with examining specific features of his work. Since Longfellow's work now largely exists in a critical vacuum, one must begin any serious examination of his work with a few basic observations about the unusual nature of his poetic development and the strange combination of circumstances that brought this multi-talented literary man into poetry."  

Harshman reads from "Dark Hills of Home" on Mountain Stage

 

(this Mountain Stage concert aired on April 4, 2023).

KATHY MATEA:  Hello again and welcome to the second hour of Mountain Stage.  I'm Kathy Mattea and I'm so glad you joined us.  We're back here in Charleston, West Virginia and we're celebrating our 39th Anniversary today. .. . . .  Still to come, a very special extended set from Bela Fleck, 'My Bluegrass Home.'    But we're going to open this second hour with a writer and poet .  In fact, he's celebrating his 10th Anniversary as West Virginia's Poet Laureate.  He's written 14 nationally acclaimed children's books and 7 books of poetry .  .  .  (long list of titles and prizes), and his newest book for this, his anniversary year, called Dark Hills of Home, published by Monongahela Books.  He says, "It's hard to explain, but I'm the kind of writer who needs to know where the woods are, and that there are good friends and neighbors nearby."  Please welcome back to the Mountain Stage, Marc Harshman.

MARC HARSHMAN:  Thank you Kathy . . .  I'm so happy to return to be part of another anniversary celebration.  This first poem is from my new book, Dark Hills of Home, and is one that plants us squarely in West Virginia, particularly the southeastern mountains, "Not All that Much."  (reads it, followed by "Cleaning the Cistern.").

A winter alone in the wilderness: Omanson's memoir serialized 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:

Forthcoming ~ Relics: Philosophical and Political Writings, 1966-86, by Virginia DeCourcey.

Relics: Philosophical and Political Writings, 1966-86  by Virginia DeCourcey.

Excerpt: from her essay "Justice as a Metaethical Absolute" 

       Justice is a word, like Freedom, or the Good, that functions on so many different levels of meaning that it is difficult to know with any certainty what the term connotes. In everyday language, the “just” is apprehended on an intuitive level and usually in the context of fairness: people may say, “That was an unjust thing to do,” “War is never just,” etc.  We intuitively grasp the moral response to real life situations that these statements express.  That intuitive grasp, however, may not come from some innate faculty in man to perceive the moral.

       Perhaps we intuitively grasp the idea of Justice, without analyzing it, because we share in the same language community.  Through many associations and long use we have come to express automatically certain normative judgments that seem sound.  In this regard Justice as an abstraction is most often viewed as a collection of certain ethical statements.

       It is the purpose of this essay, however, to inquire into the function of Justice as an ethical category in language.  While such an approach does not contribute any new normative speculation concerning the ethical correctness of solutions to certain current moral problems, it is hoped that such a linguistic analysis might help to clarify the nature of Justice as an ethical concept, its role as an ideal or absolute in a system of knowledge – as well as shedding light on why we accept as a matter of course certain normative propositions that we intuitively relate to the idea of Justice.

Straight out of law school in the early 1970s, a young man seeks a position among the law firms of small-town western Kentucky

After Law School: All the Doors I Knocked On, by James R. Elkins. (Monongahela Books, March 2024). Illustrated, 24 pages. $10. 

 Excerpt:

           During my final semester at the University of Kentucky College of Law in the fall of 1971, I began sending out letters of inquiry regarding employment to various Louisville law firms, but they elicited little interest. One Louisville lawyer, in a small firm, returned my resume with a scrawled question: How much do you want? I almost answered: More than you are willing to pay!

          I have a faint recollection of visiting one Louisville firm. The walk down the hallway of their office provided a chilling glimpse of how lawyers work: each door open, every man dressed in the same dark suit, each head bowed. Not one looked up to acknowledge my presence. I now suspect I only imagined that interview; I’m no longer certain it actually happened. I never had any notion I would end up as a Louisville lawyer. I never imagined myself going off to the big city to practice law, becoming a big-city lawyer. That inconsequential visit to a Louisville law firm may be nothing more than a muddling of old memories.

          Then there was the drive to Hodgenville in central Kentucky to talk with a lawyer in a three-man firm. The size of the firm sounded better suited for what I was after, or thought I might be after. As I had grown up on a twenty-acre farm, attended a small rural high school, and elected to go on to law school in my home state, the idea of practicing law in a small firm had its appeal. I knew nothing about the work of Louisville law firms, and not much about the work of small town lawyers like the one I was visiting in Hodgenville. All I knew for certain was that I didn’t want to do title searches! I had the vague notion that I might become a criminal defense lawyer. How that might pan out, I had no idea. The lawyer, in our brief correspondence, hadn’t mentioned criminal work at all.

          As for the town of Hodgenville, I knew no more about it than I did about the law firm. All I knew was that Hodgenville was reputedly the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. The pleasurable prospect of practicing law in Lincoln’s birthplace was a welcome distraction from worrying whether or not my gray-green herringbone sports jacket and subdued tie were appropriate attire for the interview.

          Hodgenville felt familiar for a town I had never stepped a foot in. But then, this was what every small town in Kentucky looked like. The lawyer’s office was down-town, a short walk from the courthouse and was not difficult to find. The lawyer was friendly in a folksy sort of way—adept at banter and at holding in abeyance what we both knew we were there to discuss. We talked on about one thing and then another until, in a suddenly sober tone, he advised me that he was involved in local politics. There were no details provided. I knew enough about small-town lawyers of that era to appreciate that there was nothing unusual or out-of-the-way about such a lawyer involving himself in politics. I had dabbled in politics myself in high school (campaigning for Ned Breathitt, governor of Kenucky from ‘63 to ‘67), and during my first year in college. I was neither oblivious nor adverse to the law-politics connection.

          Eventually the lawyer came round to the point: Do you mind if I ask you what party you belong to? I told him I was a Democrat. His smile disappeared. Well, you can always change parties. In this little firm we are Republicans. The look on my face told him all he needed to know and the interview came to an abrupt halt. I had made the hour-and-a-half drive from Lexington solely to learn that I would not be practicing law in Hodgenville. I can’t say I was disappointed. The lawyer would continue his search for a new associate. I had intended to visit the Lincoln homeplace on my way out of town, but found I had suddenly lost interest. Maybe, another day.

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

Dark Hills of Home, by Marc Harshman.  (Monongahela Books, 2022).  Illustrated with period engravings. 48 pages.  $10.

Every poem in 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. 

Between Low Gap and Ramon

                                             In Memoriam: Jean Haley 

Over a road shoaled with fog and last light,
           she rode quietly
           in the first of the plastic seats,
           a mask of cigarette smoke among the others,
           the gray-silvered bus bending its way
           around the many turnings that swerve
           between Low Gap and Ramon,
           the roadside locusts a shivered blue of shadow
           wreathed in grape rope and poison. 

“Somewhere here,” she said, “somewhere
           between the culvert bridge and
           the Cox for Sheriff tree . . . he said
           a red box, must be a mailbox would be it,
           be a lane, and he would get me there.” 

But in that settling mist
           swept with light we saw nothing.
And so James, he backed in at the
           Rod & Gun Bar and worked over
           the way he’d come, the rest of us
           quiet for her
           who was quiet for something
           other than we might know. 

Her black hair an old nest of wind
           and her stiff, stern hands singly
           on each knee were a testimony
           to what? 

A small house, small money,
           small children? 

Coming past the Butcher turn
           around which the headlights would next catch
           the steel shine of the culvert
           that let Big Run dribble its way to the river,
           she leaned forward and mumbled—
           loud it came in the strained prayerfulness
           of strangers now a part of it:
“Here’ll be fine.”
“But ma’am, there’s nothing . . .”
“No, now this’ll be it here,
           somewhere’s close.”
And above the quiet of the engine
           as James pulled onto the berm
           I heard the crickets and peepers
           gathering for their nightly rehearsals.           

Out the window I could see her;
           shoulders straight, head turned,
           the diesel-heavy stench of the bus
           spilling over her.                                                                       

She would wait and trust,
           her will to believe insistent
           and a part of what she leaves
           behind for me
           wishing to believe like her
           that someone will be there
           to take us home.