Along the Spoon: An Illinois poet considers his place in the Midwestern landscape

 

Excerpt:

(Chapter 10): The Great Depression

What I often heard from family and friends who knew my Grandfather Appenheimer was that “he got a lot of men through the Depression”— not by charity but by reliable paid labor.  By “a lot of men” I mean perhaps a couple dozen, and by “paid labor” I mean hard, sweaty work in the fields from sun-up to sun-down during the hottest, muggiest days in August—the worst season of the year to be out in the fields under the sun.  It may not seem like much, money-wise, by our standards, but for most of the men employed at his sorghum mill for a few weeks every August, it was the only cash they might earn all year, and it was enough to make a critical difference.

       More about my grandfather’s sorghum operation in the next chapter.  But what I’d like to consider here are one or two aspects of the Great Depression as they were experienced on the Appenheimer farm, and as they subsequently appeared in a few of my Stark County poems.

       One story told to me by my Uncle Clay (my grandfather’s only son), and repeated several times over the years, hardly qualifies as a story at all.  It is more along the lines of what I would call a “particular.”  Which is to say, an interesting fact without much story-line.  It has to do with a general truth about the Great Depression in America, namely, that thousands of desperate, destitute men hit the road or the rails throughout the 1930s, seeking work— any work at all— and, when they had to, begging for food.  These days, knocking on somebody’s kitchen door in dirty, thread-bare clothes will likely as not get you shot, but back then America was a very different country, worse in some ways, perhaps, but often remarkably generous. 

       The “particular” told to me by my uncle was that every year— and always at the very same time of year— a man would come through and ask to spend a night or two in my grandfather’s barn, and my grandfather always allowed it.  Where he was coming from and where he was going, my uncle didn’t remember, and perhaps the man never said, and perhaps my grandfather, with the reserve common among men who are only somewhat acquainted, never asked.  But for several years this man’s appearance was a regular seasonal occurrence.  Certainly he would have been fed.  My grandmother would have brought a sandwich or two to the barn, and perhaps packed him a little something for the road.  Had he needed a few dollars my grandfather would have found some work around the place that needed doing.  And that’s about it for that story.

       There wasn’t enough there to make a poem,  had I wished to stick to the facts.  I could have embellished it, certainly, but that would have ruined it.  So I left it alone.  What I did write  dealt with the same general situation about wandering “tramps,” as they were called, and was based on several newspaper articles from the early 1930s in the Stark County News, which provided all the necessary facts.  The poem is told in the voice of one of those wandering tramps and, as I had spent quite a lot of time hitch-hiking around the country in my younger years with little or no money, it was easy to put myself in my narrator’s shoes.

 

 

Hotel Calaboose

    Toulon, Illinois, late October, 1932

I would go through Toulon two or three times

a year, and generally book well ahead

for a night at the Hotel Calaboose.

As free lodgings went, it wasn’t so bad— 

always warm and dry and cleaner than most,

a naked steel slab attached to the bars

for a bed.  You had to furnish your own

newspapers for a mattress and roll

your coat for a pillow.  (I’d started out

with a red woolen blanket two years before,

but it was soon stolen).  When you arrived,

you were handed a saw and shown around back

to a big woodpile to do some work.

There was a stove inside that you could use

to warm up your beans, if you had a can.

The worst part is that they bolted and locked 

the door every night at seven, which did

somewhat inhibit a night on the town, 

but we “knights of the road” were accustomed to

the ascetic life.  As it was explained, 

they locked us up for our own protection, 

but what they meant was for their protection.  

They let us out in the morning at seven.

As I took a moment to kneel in the grass

and check through my stuff for a final time,

the sheriff stepped out on the porch and asked

which way I was headed.  I shrugged, and said

I might catch a ride to the switchyard over

at Galesburg and hop the first open car

that I came to, rolling anywhere west.  

He nodded, and thoughtfully gazed down the road.

He said this past October had been

the busiest yet at the calaboose,

with two or three transients every night,

sometimes as many as half a dozen,

except for three nights the previous week

with none at all, as it was so warm

that whoever was passing through most likely

availed himself of a haystack or barn.

More than seventy men so far this month,

he said,  from every part of the country,

and even some foreign accents as well—

and every one of them down on his luck.

There was nothing much to say after that.

He took a half-empty pack of Luckys

from out of his pocket and shook one loose.

I nodded my thanks and tucked it unlit

beneath my hat to enjoy after lunch,

and started off down the road.  Take care, 

I heard him say.  A raw cutting wind 

picked up as I got to the edge of town. 

I lifted my collar and lowered my hat

and huddled against the cold as I walked.

After a while I heard an old pickup

clashing its gears with a clatter as it 

came up behind me.  I stepped off the road

and stuck out my thumb.  The truck rattled past

and rolled to a stop.  Through the rear window

I could see the driver reaching across

the narrow cab, and the door swung out. 

 

       My Aunt Betty, the Appenheimer’s second eldest daughter, kept a diary during the early 1930s, when she was 13 through 15 years of age, and on November 25th, 1934, her entry reads:

"About 5 a tramp came and asked for something to eat. We didn’t have much but gave him all he wanted.  He sure was hungry."

       Perhaps my grandfather recalled returning to Illinois by covered wagon as a very small child, after going bust in Kansas, and begging a few ears of field corn from a farm along the way to boil for supper, and my grandmother could have recalled numerous times as a child when there was not enough food to go around.

       There are two other Stark County poems situated in the Great Depression, about transient men searching for work.  Both are fiction, though the first contains autobiographical elements, and the second parallels an event in my grandfather’s life.  Both he and I, as young men in our early 20s, spent a year wandering alone through the West with almost no money, working our way as we went.  Alpheus stopped off to work on farms and ranches, and I worked in cedar mills and on logging crews in the Pacific Northwest.

       As I say, both poems are fiction and are intended to portray situations common during the Depression.  But both are also informed by the personal histories of myself and my grandfather.  Anyone who knew me when I was in my teens will recognize many basic similarities to the naïve teenager in “Travelin’ Man.”  And the situation described in “The Itinerant” may bear some resemblance to an interlude in my grandfather’s wanderings through Mexico in 1912 when he signed on as a hand at a large ranch and became romantically involved with the owner’s daughter, to the point where he was seriously considering marriage, but finally opted to move on.

Travelin’ Man

After he turned seventeen, they stopped

talking of how much promise he showed,

and by the time he had reached twenty-two 

it was painfully clear to everyone

that he’d never amount to much at all.  

In another era he might have galloped 

off to war, which is what a young man 

did in his father’s and grandfather’s time 

when prospects were poor, but he was born 

too late for that.  What he had instead 

was something they called the damned Depression, 

which, if nothing else, provided him with

the perfect excuse to get out of town.  

After half a dozen half-hearted stabs 

at finding work, he rolled up a change 

of clothes in a blanket, waved to the folks

and hitched a ride to the switchyard over 

at Galesburg, where he hopped a midnight 

freight to Topeka and all points west.  

With nothing on hand and nothing in store, 

he could travel light, which suited him fine.  

He thought of himself as a travelin’ man, 

and he liked to keep his options open.  

He rolled through the night on a boxcar roof 

underneath the stars, facing westward to see 

just where he was headed, then switched around 

at dawn to look back at the rising sun.  

It was so resplendent, spilling its crimson 

across the fields, that he almost forgot

how cold and hungry he was.  He turned

back around again, preferring to feel 

the wind in his face and wanting to see

what was up ahead.  The day was full

of promise, by God, and something good 

was coming his way, he knew for a fact.  

He fixed his eye on the distance, intending

to shout aloud the moment it appeared.

           (originally published in the Naugatuck River Review)

 

The Itinerant

He had stayed on a week, this taciturn man,

this man who, despite having taken meals

each day at her table, had never once 

found reason to speak of his purpose or past— 

never, that is, until the last evening 

when, as she was reaching to pass a bowl

of boiled potatoes, he told her that he

would leave with the morning.

                   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.

        The next morning,

expecting to find him gone, she only

entered the barn to see if, by chance,

he had left anything behind.  As she swung

the great door aside she was wholly engulfed

in the redolence of the few hundred bales

they had stacked together.  She stood for a time

in the twilit bay till the wagon and bales

and dust-laden rafters resolved from the dusk.

She could tell by the broken twine and scattered

timothy stalks where it was he had slept

and, standing there lost in his absence, she felt

more tired than she had felt since the day

her husband was buried— and for the first time

in her thirty-eight years she was overcome

with the sense that more of her life had passed

than remained to her.

      She emerged from the barn

to the sight of treeless fields stretching out

to a level horizon far to the west

where, just for a moment, a thought carried her,

and she stood there poised on the moment, as though

in expectation of something— and then,

entrusting the thought to that hidden place

she had long ago made for herself, she turned

once more to the work that awaited her.

                        (originally published in the Amish

             periodical, Farming Magazine)

*From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War* reviewed in "New Verse Review"

 

A review (read here) by Brad Skow of BJ Omanson's From the Kentucky Hills in a Time of War has recently appeared in New Verse Review.

Excerpt:  

" But there is real drama in the book. There are harsh moments of violence, drunkenness, and the subordination of women. America witnesses a three year old girl “so drunk she could hardly stand up straight.” A newborn dies after being given “a few drops of / weakened and sweetened whiskey to keep it / from crying.” America mentions her father and one of her uncles, and says that

     . . . by the time I was five I hated 

all men but these. They were all mean to me 

and their wives and I grew to detest them.

When America grew up, the “but these” exception disappeared. Her uncle once said to his wife 

. . .  that he would slap off her face 

 and knock her down with a chair . . . 

simply because she had dared to ask for a new pair of shoes.   America had learned that her uncle

. . . was also like all other men 
and I vowed that I would never marry as long 
as I still had a mind of my own.

Writing about her grandfather, America wonders if he

  . . . recollects how Grandma and I were made 

to stand with backs to the wall at each meal 

and patiently watch as he and his sons 

ate their fill and only when they had left 

the table were we permitted to eat, 

provided that there were any scraps left.

This passage is a good example of the real poetry of the book. No “dazzling technique,” as I said, but there is careful attention to where line breaks fall: harsh enjambment is rare, instead each line tends toward one clear breath. This contributes a quiet dignity and reserved elegance to the verse."

"The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry" now available

The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry, by Robert Bray, is now available from Monongahela Books, illustrated, annotated, 71 pages. $12.

Here is a short excerpt:

"The one midwestern difference everyone notices, and more often than not negatively remarks, is the landscape itself. On the long interstate haul across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, the cars often seem to drive themselves, the passengers staring like zombies at the nothingness of the agricultural plains. Yet to an inhabitant this very openness is place, and openness is, paradoxically, an aesthetic refuge for many midwestern poets who still feel (in James McGowan's memorable phrase) the 'metaphysical prickle' of the prairie landscape. Midwestern poetry of place treats the landscape as a standpoint. As William Stafford puts it, 'Everything we own / has brought us here: from here we speak.' Stafford's advice is to 'have a place, be what that place requires,' and I would not underestimate the midwestern poet's abilty to blazon this as a motto with which to answer, in perennial words and images, the vagaries of fashion and taste and the generally bland homogeneity of American national culture."

Robert Bray was the editor (with Paul Bushnell) of Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution, 1775-1783: An Annotated Edition of the Military Journal of Jeremiah Greenman (Northern Illinois University Press, 1978), and was editor-in-chief and a contributor to A Reader's Guide to Illinois Literature (Illinois State Library, 1985). He is the author of Rediscoveries: Literature and Place in Illinois (University of Illinois Press, 1991), Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher (University of Illinois Press, 2005), and Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press, 2022). He also wrote the introduction for the re-issue of Francis Grierson's 1909 novel The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches (University of Illinois Press, 1990).

Monongahela Books reviewed in New Verse Review

Monongahela Books just received a nice plug from the influential NEW VERSE REVIEW in their column 'The Rusty Paperweight' on Substack. Their Editor Steve Knepper (who teaches literature at the Virginia Military Institute) wrote:

"BJ Omanson’s Monongahela Books publishes an interesting mix of poetry, military history, and regional studies. It has published collections by contemporary poets such as Jared Carter and Marc Harshman. It has also published a volume of poems (introduced by Dana Gioia ) and a critical study of American World War I poet John Allan Wyeth. There are some intriguing forthcoming studies of literary regionalism in the Midwest, including Robert Bray’s The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry and Early Reviews of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Omanson is a gifted poet in his own right. I especially admire his collection Stark County Poems."

https://newversereview.substack.com/p/the-rusty-paperweight-may-26

The Road Down from Spoon River

Read the evocative opening section of "The Road Down from Spoon River" (from The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry-- due out in early June), by the renowned scholar of Illinois history and literature Robert Bray --- describing a pilgrimage to a certain country graveyard and a meditative stroll through the 'necropolis on a hill' of Spoon River Anthology.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Route 9 west from Bloomington, looking for something like Spoon River: a necessary pilgrimage into the country where a lasting part of the Illinois mythology was conceived. Nowadays the highway is always busy, but the secondary roads are quiet and I follow them without design until the pastoral landscape of the river valley begins to take hold. Over the years, including recent years living in central Illinois, the name "Spoon River" has meant to me the spectral realm of Edgar Lee Masters's poems, not lines on a road map or state parks or folklife festivals. My Spoon River is dark. Yet this place I have come to now is spacious and sunny, lovely in a way very different from the necropolis of the book. Soon I abandon the car for a short climb to a little township cemetery, complete with its oak-grove, at the crest of a rounded hill. There is something melancholy---expected and appropriate---in the early springtime air. The rank grass and bright pink phlox stand in startling contradistinction to the graves and their weathered stones. Am I standing at the source of Spoon River? The reasonable answer is no, it is a romantic notion to suppose that Masters got his inspiration from walking around in this or any other cemetery. Thus far reason. But, unreasonably, I continue to think, walking from grave to grave, that these sleepers may be the very ones Masters put into the ground above Spoon River, and here they remain, well pleased with this land and this landscape, immeasurably preferring its elemental quality of refuge to painful consciousness in the town below. For in the end it was the town they hated, the narrow institutions that confined, the meager civilization that starved them. Down in the town the discontents (who epitomize Spoon River for the contemporary reader, though they are not its whole story) could find nothing to affirm in their lives, and if to live is to have a voice, they lived most fully in the brief moment when death allowed them to speak to the world.  

The timeless poetic convention of the epitaph proved a neat device. The late citizens of Spoon River were at last free to size up the town, without reserve and beyond the censure of the ladies' aid or the chamber of commerce. In this sense, no doubt, every cemetery has the makings of a Spoon River. At my feet is the once-high Victorian obelisk of a leading family's plot tumbled into ruin. Close by is the residuum of an early settler's stone, far too worn by now to give up its modicum of information---what was surely a pious verse above, names and dates below.  "All, all, are sleeping on the hill."  Actual and fictive folk commingle in an imagination that can no longer distinguish the book of Spoon River from Spoon River itself.

           
As Illinois goes, this place is old. A few of the graves antedate the Civil War. A few reflect its ravages. And many more recall the waving of the bloody shirt in yearly celebrations to the turn of the century and beyond.  Going further back, somewhere on this hilltop acre is reputedly the final western home of a Revolutionary sergeant who wandered out of Rhode Island in 1805, eventually found himself in Illinois, and became for years a fixture in the town's Independence Day parade, marching down Main Street to the tattoo of his own different drummer, marching long after he had ceased to know exactly what he was doing and the town had other wars to fight and remember. But I search in vain for the plain old soldier in the midst of the high-rise Gilded Age monuments and Grand Army of the Republic memorials. It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that the nineteenth century is a strange, vast distance away, with no bridge of ages for convenient crossing back and forth. Here, though our generations have their occasional markers, and a number of the old stones have been replaced by new monoliths of polished granite, "history" appears to have begun with Lincoln's progenitors and to have ended sometime around 1900. We talk easily about continuity with the past and try to possess it through the simplifications of genealogy and hereditary clubs devoted to American ancestor-worship. And in so doing we get a version of the past that tells us precisely what we want to know; it looks and tastes familiar because it is from our own recipe. But what of the other past, the one with so many ingredients that aren't handy and some few that we shall never find? The myth of continuity, if it is to serve us in health, must be taken entire. The myth must help us make not only those self-aggrandizing connections between past and present, which beguile us into thinking that Lincoln was only yesterday and hence is with us yet, but also an approach to this perplexing otherness---a palpable difference that suggests an ancient Illinois, a vanished aboriginal race, with as yet no key for deciphering its traces in such high places of symbolism as graveyards. 

         

The Places Modernity Missed

"The Places Modernity Missed," from Along the Spoon: An Illinois poet considers his place in the Midwestern landscape,  (to be released later this month-- September).

 by BJ Omanson, 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

About the time I was born, a tide of homogenization: television, top-40 radio, interstate highways and all the corrosive charms of mass culture, began sweeping across America to such an extent that many in academia and the arts, historians, and many others all along the political spectrum, began raising the alarm that America’s distinctive regions were in danger of disappearing and that authentically regional literature, as a result, was drying up as well.On the face of it, they weren’t wrong. The march of modernization seemed inexorable. Looking back now, from the 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 maternal grandmother, America Appenheimer, rode down from Illinois with her son to visit her old home and relations in Wolfe County, Kentucky 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 all 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 grand-aunts— were nearly all born and raised 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 own 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 paternal grand-parents, 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 into 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. "