"From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War" ~~ a cycle of unrhymed sonnets ~~ (work in progress)

 

Excerpt:

~ ~ ~

Stark County News / Toulon, Illinois / October 10, 1917

Miss America Swango and Alpheus

Appenheimer, both of Toulon, were joined

in marriage early Thursday morning

at the home of Mrs. Ida Egbert

by Reverand Colby of the Baptist Church.

Miss Lucy Hull played the wedding march

and during the ceremony performed

“The Flower Girl.”  The bride is a daughter

of Mr. and Mrs. B.F. Swango

who recently removed to Montana.

Miss Swango has lived here for some years now,

making her home with Mrs Fred Dexter

and Mrs Egbert, and has made many friends.

She is a young lady of pleasing address

and sterling qualities.  ~~  The groom is a son

of Mrs A.W. Appenheimer

of Toulon.  He was born in Leoti,

Kansas but has resided here from

the age of three.  He is one of Toulon’s

finest young men.  He enlisted in the

U.S. Marines in the last week of June

and had only been home on furlough with

time enough for a brief ceremony

before being told to report for duty

back in Virginia.  He left by train

on Thursday, accompanied by his wife

who intends to visit for several weeks

among relatives in eastern Kentucky.

  

~ ~ ~

Al to his mother / Quantico, Virginia / October 7, 1917

We had a delay in Peoria

till the evening train and missed our connection

in Louisville where we had to wait

over nine hours.  At first we had planned 

that I would go straight from Peoria

to Quantico, being the most direct,

while America would continue on

alone to Kentucky, but I decided 

to stay with her all the way and to face

the Sergeant Major if I should be late.

I didn’t like her to travel alone.

We got to Mt. Sterling about 9 o’clock

and I helped her off and kissed her good-bye.

and hopped back onto the train as it left.

The last thing I saw of her in the dusk

was the sight of her going up the street

in the company of a red-caped man

who carried her suitcase.  She was hoping 

to hire a man with a rig to take her

ten miles or so to her Aunt Nora’s.

I am anxious to hear if she made it.

I found some rice in my pockets today.

America had a quart of the stuff

in the top of her hat and spilled a good bit

on the car floor.  The conductor took

our tickets and stuck a slip in my hat

and looked us over and chuckled and said

I guess one will do for both of you now.  

~ ~ ~

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 lived in an actual 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 the sadness was more than I could bear. 

 

 

~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 9, 1917

 

I don’t know if you will get this or not.

You thought you would maybe leave on Monday--

you didn’t say where, but I suppose France.

I got some sugar and nuts yesterday

to make you some candy but now I don’t

know whether or not to make it at all.

If you do go to France, you shouldn’t worry

about finding some way to send me your pay.

I can get along all right, as you know—

but how are you?  I expect you’re completely

worn out for you looked as if you could hardly

sit up when I saw you last on the train.

They work you so hard it’s a wonder you ever

manage to get any bedrest at all.

~ ~ ~

America to Al / Jeffersonville, Kentucky / October 11, 1917

 

How I wish you’d been with me yesterday

when we went for apples and had to climb

a hill so steep that our wagon and mules

nearly spilled over backwards.  The little road

was so narrow there wasn’t any room

to walk alongside to drive and the banks

so high the mules couldn’t possibly

turn out on either side — so we simply

let go of the reins and followed behind.

Never seen such a road in all my life

but, Al, the apples were just wonderful

and I’m going to send you some.  I got

a bushel for 50 cents and fourteen

more for a dime, so I did pretty well.

 

"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—
it was later that year, after summer’s heat
had driven Old Locksley into the hushed
recesses and curtained-off rooms of his house—
a house that was more a cavern than house,
with ivy-encumbered and blackened stone
and deeply-set doorways encased in vine—
or more like a mausoleum, perhaps,
with its bordering arbor vitae and yew—
with crumbling foundation and groaning pipes
and crickets in corners, its redolent rooms
provisioned with humidors of tobacco
and crystal decanters of peaty scotch,
its snug little hideaways fitted out
with old leather sofas and mica lamps
enveloped in amber light—  it was later,
much later that year that Locksley, at last,
emerged amid whirlings of leaves released
from willow and maple to clutter the air
all about his head and skitter across
the garden to lodge in the lower boughs
of the conifers—  it was later that year
that Locksley returned to his garden seat,
returned to consider and contemplate
the melancholy decline of the year,
the shedding of gold and of crimson leaves,
the dropping of berries and migrating flocks
of sparrows in spruces, and all the subtle
foreshadowings of the coming cold . . .

. . . . . . 

For Autumn to Locksley was no mere bridge
of transient days linking summer's close
to the snows of winter— in Locksley's mind,
Old Autumn was less a condition of time
than of place—  it was less a recurrent phase
embracing the earth for a day, than a place
of endless ending through which the Earth moved
as a ship through a shifting sea, a region
unalterable in its alteration,
immutable as the mutable moon.

~~~~~

Note: the poem "Old Locksley among the Ruins" was originally issued as a separate book (Old Locksley among the Ruins, Monongahela Books, 2021), which has since gone out of print and can no longer be ordered.  However, "Old Locksley . . ." is currently the final poem in the collection In the Hour before Dusk  (Monongahela Books, 2021), pp. 59-73.

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.").

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

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.

Another of Omanson's narrative poems, "The Discarded Stone," published in Small Farmer's Journal

 

        Though it is nearly impossible to place a longish narrative poem in a literary journal, not only due to considerations of space, but as well to a certain longstanding bias against narrative poems generally and long poems in particular-- that bias seems not to have carried over to the agricultural sector of our culture.  Or so we are led to conclude, given that two such poems by BJ Omanson, in the space of a single week, were accepted by two agricultural magazines.  

         Both poems are from his regionalist collection, Stark County Poems.  The first was "The Itinerant" which appeared in the Amish publication Farming Magazine, out of New Hope, Ohio, while the second,  "The Discarded Stone," appeared in Small Farmer's Journal, out of Sisters, Oregon.  Our thanks to both editors, David Kline & Lynn Miller, for taking in Omanson's two refugee poems, giving them some hot soup and putting a roof over their heads.

Excerpt:

       It shouldn’t have been there, but there it was,

a nineteenth-century gravestone partly

exposed at the edge of a rubbish pile

back in the woods.  He assumed some farmer

had finally had his fill of always

having to skirt an abandoned plot

of graves that no one had tended for years.

Perhaps he had struck a half-buried slab

with his cultivator and broken a tine

and, perhaps, after cursing and counting costs,

he had hauled away every stone on the site

and plowed it all under. And now, some years

or decades later, this exiled stone

had come to light in a wooded ravine

without a clue as to where it belonged.

He spent the afternoon digging it out,

using his big Shire mare and a rope

to dislodge and drag it up to the road.

With a neighbor’s help he stood it on end

and hoisted it up on the wagonbed

       where, once he had hauled it back to the farm,

       he spent a good hour scrubbing it clean,

       or as clean as he could make it, at least,

       which wasn’t very.  After so long

       in the ground, white marble is less than white

       and no amount of hard scrubbing with soap

       and a stiff-bristled brush will bring it back,

       but he did his best.  The head of the stone

       was another matter, with a scrolled edge

       and a single lily carved in relief—

       it was almost translucent where the sun

       had bleached it to whiteness over the years.

       Such graceful feminine lines bespoke

       a woman still in the bloom of her life,

       or perhaps a child.  Whatever her name,

       the autumn rains had erased it long since,

       as well as the dates, except for the year

       of 1811, which, given the stone’s

       Victorian style, he took to be

       the year of her birth.  And as to where

       the marker should go, he knew just the place:

       a fieldstone wall he had built years ago

to enclose the garden of his late wife

and protect it from any wandering sheep

or cattle that might have slipped through a gap

in the pasture fence.  Guiding his mare

by her bridle, he pulled the wagon in close

to the garden gate, then inclined the stone

slowly and carefully down, and leaned it

against the wall, just under the boughs

       of an old apple tree.  . . .  

Omanson's narrative poem, "The Itinerant" featured in Amish magazine

 

  One of BJ Omanson's narrative poems from his 2019 collection Stark County Poems, has been featured in a two-page spread in the Amish agrarian publication, Farming Magazine.  Although not a literary journal as such, the editor, author David Kline, considers poetry an important part of a fully-lived life and includes poems in every issue.  Among the poets appearing periodically in Farming Magazine are Wendell Berry and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

Excerpt: 

.                                                    And, later, as they
stood framed in the doorway, their talking done
and he on his way to the barn, she told him,
"Wait here a little," and disappeared back
through the parlor, returning almost at once
to place a few bills in his hand. She wished
to ask him where he would go, to ask him
where he was going the morning he passed
the farm and had stopped to inquire for work,
but she felt a reluctance to ask what he
had not volunteered himself, and she said,
"I am grateful to you for all you have done."
He nodded and thought once again of how
he had seen her that day alone in the field,
doggedly heaving bales on a wagon,
and he asked of her, "How long can it be,
with your husband dead and two hundred acres
of corn coming on— how long can you last,
a woman alone on so large a farm?"
"For as long as Heaven intends," she replied,
and he nodded once more and, squarely placing
his hat on his head, made ready to leave.
"Must you go just yet?" she asked him softly,
"I have put on a pot of coffee."  He turned
and seemed for a moment to study her,
then once again took his hat in his hand.
"You can sit on the swing," she motioned, stepping
back through the door. "I won't be a minute,"
but when she returned with two steaming cups,
she found him sitting instead on the rail
with his back to the post.  She smiled and said,
"Do you dislike comfort, Mr McCann?"
He seemed to be gazing at something out
in the dark of the night.  "I am fine," he said.
She held out a brimming cup.  "It is strong
and scalding," she warned, "and probably bitter."
He took it with what she thought was a smile,
the merest trace of a smile, and eased
a savoring sip.  She moved to the swing
and sat on it lightly, holding her cup,
and he saw how the simple hem of her skirt
swirled once at her ankles and then was still.
From somewhere out of the darkness there came,
from a distant pasture, the melancholy
lowing of a bull— and she knew, however
long before daylight she might walk out
to offer him coffee or food for the road,
she would find him gone and, struck by the thought,
she asked of him quickly, "Where will you go?"
"West, I suppose," was all that he said.
"Have you no family?"  There, it was out.
"None that would have me around," he replied,
and she knew by the way that he turned to look
at nothing at all, at the empty night,
she had asked too much, and she feared that he
would rise to his feet and bid her good night,
but he kept his place and, to her surprise,
looked back at her gently.  And what she said next,
what she found herself saying, was nothing that she
had so much as thought: "I would like you to stay,"
and she almost gasped to hear herself say it.

She thought that she heard him sigh as he said,
"It wouldn't work out."  "I could pay you more,"
she countered at once, with a sinking sense,
but he shook his head firmly.  "It's not the pay."
"Well, what is it then?" and she heard in her voice
a tremor of pleading and hated the sound.
"I am sorry," she said.  "I have no right to ask."
He sought for some word to reassure her,
this woman with whom he had felt more at peace
than with any woman that he had known,
but the distance between what he felt somewhere
in the depth of himself and the words he would need
to tell of it here in this woman's presence,
was a distance that he could not hope to bridge,
and so he said nothing.  Beneath the porch,
a cricket began to chirr and they both
gave all their attention to it, keeping
their thoughts at bay.

                                        It wasn't that she,
now that the haying was done, couldn't find
and hire some capable hand— it wasn't
a matter of labor or need— it was more,
more than she knew how to say, and more
than the circumstance that had led him here
and just as surely would lead him away,
would ever permit.

                                   With his coffee gone,
he started to rise, so she left the swing
and stepped up before him, taking the empty
cup from his hand.  He put on his hat
and regarded her for a long moment.
"I'll leave at daybreak."  She nodded, but found
there was nothing to say.  "I have liked it here,"
he said, and started to say something more,
but then merely tipped the brim of his hat
and turned away toward the barn.