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.

"The Itinerant," from Stark County Poems, 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?"

Remnants of Bohemia: Dinkytown's literati in the early 1980s

 

Book House Nights ,  by BJ Omanson.  Illustrated, 26 pp.  (Monongahela Books, 2022).  $10.

Excerpt:

          I look back on my time as a used-bookstore clerk with mixed emotions.  The pay (as has always been the case with bookstore jobs), was far from sufficient, and the hours long—yet the afternoons and evenings I spent in that bookstore were one long panoply of offbeat characters with whom I never tired of talking: hoarse-throated street musicians, poor independent scholars and morose writers of every stripe, a surprising number of highly literate janitors and other bookish workmen—even an ex-Hell’s Angel turned bibliophile—though it is the poets who most clearly stand out in my memory. 

John Macoubrie

       One of the most memorable was a small, stooped poet named John Macoubrie who looked to be well into his fifties, though such were the daily hardships of his life that he may well have been younger than he appeared. He was decidedly of the genteel, high-culture school of Wilbur and Hecht, and his knowledge of prosody was so much more extensive than my own that I decided never to mention to him that I was a poet at all. He was known to all the older established poets in Minneapolis and was well-respected. He would come into the bookstore most nights after he got off his shift as a dishwasher. He rode an old-fashioned ‘50s-era bicycle, even in winter, wearing a thread-bare tweed jacket, coughing into his sleeve and perpetually hunched against the cold. Word was that he had been married once or possibly twice, suggesting a prior state of stability—but was now in reduced circumstances, maintaining a bare subsistence in a tiny rented room. On every visit to the bookstore he would purchase a book, but never more than one, and never for more than a quarter or fifty cents. This restricted him mostly to used copies of the old paperback Laurel series of pocketbook poets. Frequently he would conclude his purchase with some lines from that particular poet which he had by heart. On one occasion, as he paid a quarter for the Laurel Edition of Longfellow, I commented that it was heartening to see that there were still one or two readers of Longfellow left in the world. He replied that Longfellow was unjustly under-rated and, to prove his point, recited on the spot, from memory, several stanzas from “The Jewish Cemetery.”  The extent of poetry he could recite at will in several languages—from Goethe to Valéry to Lowell—was something wonderful and, in Dinkytown in those days, it was a gift that was widely admired.

Omanson's poem "Closing Inventory" short-listed for 'Best Poem of the Year' at The Milk House

"Closing Inventory" from BJ Omanson's Stark County Poems, has been short-listed for "Best Poem of the Year" by The Milk House, a collective of rural writing based in Ireland.

Closing Inventory

                                        Along the upper Spoon River, 1935

 

When they found him at last, he was face down

in a pool of milk out behind the barn,

an empty tin pail against his boot.

They summoned the doc, who declared him dead,

then they laid him out on the bed of the truck

 

and carried him back to the funeral home.

The following day they returned to the house,

where none of them had been for years,

intending, as well as they could, to put

his affairs in order, collect his receipts

 

and documents, and close his accounts.

Upstairs at the back, they found his bed

as neatly arranged as if he were still

a married man, although he had been

a widower now for some thirty years.

Volume II of Clendaniel's history of the 85th Pennsylvania now available

 

Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War.  Vol. II: 1864-1865.  By Dan Clendaniel.  (Monongahela Books, 2021).  Maps, illustrations, appendices, 220 pp.

From the Introduction:

.

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

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

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

Knocking around the Olympic Peninsula in Robert Lee’s 2-gear sedan

Three Years on the Nowhere Road: The Awakening of a Poetic Sensibility.  Volume I: Autumn '72 to Spring '73, by BJ Omanson.  Illustrated, 93 pp. $15.

Excerpt: 

The best days of all were when Robert Lee went visiting and took me along. Visiting meant driving north— never south for some reason, and never to a town or city— but always to somewhere remote and out of the way, invariably down a narrow winding dirt or gravel road to some tucked-up little place in a hemlock grove or on the bank of a creek or at the wooded edge of a pasture. Robert Lee didn't seem to know anyone who lived in town or, more probably, no one who lived in town would have wanted Robert Lee showing up unannounced on their doorstep. He was not a sight for civilized eyes. 

      He stood six feet four inches, was well into his sixties, was inordinately strong, and all-in-all possessed the physique of a medium-sized bear. He seemed to have just one set of clothes which he washed rarely if ever, and in which he appeared to sleep, even to his boots. His hair was perpetually tousled as if he'd just crawled out of a hollow log, and he usually wore three or four days-worth of stubble. There was no running water on Robert Lee’s property, but he did have that big icy river close at hand which he could always make use of when absolutely necessary. I tried to stay upwind of him just as a general precaution.       

       As Robert Lee's sidekick, I visited out-of-the-way parts of the Peninsula that I would never have seen otherwise and met a cast of distinctive backwoods characters who lived too far off the grid to have ever been encountered under normal circumstances. In Robert Lee’s company I felt I was seeing a part of the old America that had long since vanished everywhere else except maybe in forgotten pockets of Appalachia or the deep South, or far up the road in Alaska. We traveled in whatever old wreck from his junkyard was deemed most road-worthy at the time. None of them was actually licensed, but that didn't seem to concern Robert Lee in the least, and I certainly didn't give it a thought.       

       The car we used most often was a low-slung rusted sedan whose make I can no longer call to mind. It was a good old runner on the whole but for one crippling peculiarity. The transmission had seen better days and possessed neither a workable first gear, nor a reverse. Driving without first gear didn't present much of a problem, provided you started out on a downhill slope. You could even start out on the level in second gear, if you had the right touch, and for a veteran trucker like Robert Lee it presented no problem at all. Reverse was another matter, for you could very easily find yourself on a backwoods road that just petered out, where the option of reverse was an absolute necessity.       

Contemplating Oxford

 

Two Views of Oxford,  by Marc Harshman.  (Monongahela Books, 2021).   Illustrated with period engravings and printed on semi-gloss paper. Approx. 4.5" x 7". Staple-bound. 15 pages. 

Two descriptive meditative poems in the pastoral mode by the current Poet Laureate of West Virginia.

Oxford

  
It was not the age, nor the beauty
    of the worn stone and iron,
    the medieval lancets and
    crenellated towers and walls.
  I am not so taken, e9s well, by symbols:
               the pelicans and monsters, unicorns
                            and witherless ponies.
Distantly, I admire the craftsmanship, can even
   translate it to, but not start it from,
   the heart.
I distrust the space between
   art and act, between
                  symbol and need.
But I did trust somehow the little boxes, the
   little pans hung from windows
   in which stood the pink-faced geraniums, the
   purple and white petunias,
   the glossy-leathered begonias and fuchsias—
   these, and a clean lawn
   with ancient trees:
                  oak crutched and saved, 
                  opening upon red cows
                  afloat in the blue distance.
And other colors, too,
   banks and borders of lettuce and chard
   green flowering among the bright
   lights of cosmos and dahlias,
   dusty millers a gray mist
   for red-chalk and cream nicotiana
   to spear up out of, pennants
   for a Near Sawrey world
   of squirrels and rabbits and
   these, also, saved, allowed,
   kept by someone
   who beyond reverence for the dead, beyond
   reverence for the abstract, reveres
   the particular living, and beyond reverence 
   gets the pasturing done, the
   cattle and sheep in, the plants
   watered, the world loved.

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

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

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

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

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

The Aging Widow in the Third Pew

Her faith had little to do with church

and even less with the long succession

of ministers who had come and gone

since she was a child.  It had to do

with the wind from which there was no relief,

that carried the rain and gave teeth to drought

and tore the roof from the barn and haunted

her nights with wailing.  It had to do

with the cooling summer breezes that turned

the pages of scripture without a touch

and caressed away the sweat of her brow.

That the seen is shaped by an unseen force

was something she never thought to doubt.

In church, when she was told in the Psalm

to lift up thine eyes, and she turned to see

through the open window a falling leaf

suspended a moment, then lifted away

on the wind, the tears welled up in her eyes

and she picked up her purse and slipped away

through the basement door and out on the grass

and lifted her face to the cloudless sky.

"The Old Hotel at the End of Night," a dystopian narrative poem about America

The Old Hotel at the End of Night, by BJ Omanson.  (Monongahela Books, 2020).  20 pages.  $7.50.

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

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

 Excerpt:

I emptied my glass and was starting to pour

a second when I happened to notice

another old gent in a long gray beard

sitting alone with a half-empty bottle

in a far-off shadowy nook of the room

and he nodded me over.  I picked up my glass

     and dragged myself slowly across the floor

     and he kicked out a chair for me to sit.

     “The name’s Walt,” he said, and I told him mine.

     “And what brings you out to this god-forsaken

     hotel at this time of night,” he asked.

     “You’re a good way from home, by the looks of you.”

     I told him I really had no idea

     how I’d come to this place.  I had made a wrong turn

     somewhere back in Missouri, I thought,

     and then my old Buick had thrown a rod

     and I’d just been walking along ever since

     for what seemed like a decade or more until

     I came to this crossroads.  “And doesn’t this night

     ever end?” I asked him.  Old Walt leaned back,

     extended his long legs and shoved his fists

     deep in his pockets.  “It’s always the same

     old story,” he said.  “They make a wrong turn

     at a junction back in Missouri, as if

     Missouri was even a place anymore.

And their Chevy or Buick always breaks down

for there aren’t any Chevies or Buicks out here,

I can tell you that,”  and I heard a soft chuckle

from the gentleman at the end of the bar.

I started to feel a peculiar unease,

the likes of which I had never known.

“And the night?” I asked him, “when does it end?”

He looked out the window a good long while

before he responded.  “The night is what came

when the Old Republic finally died---

and now there’s only the night and myself

and Bob over there always plunkin’ away

on the upright piano and Henry down there

at the end of the bar, who never says much

at all anymore, who just stands and stares

out the window from time to time, although

there’s nothin’ to see out there but the night.

So there’s only the three of us now, and whoever 

blows in off the highway."  A thousand questions 

     occurred to me then, but just as quickly

     I knew the one answer to all of them

     and so I said nothing.  I noticed a blank

     sheet of paper upon the table beside

     a black fountain pen, and I wondered if Walt

     had been writing a note or perhaps a letter

     or maybe even a poem, but I knew

     there was always something that it was better

     to leave alone, and so I kept mum.

     Walt was wearing a long baggy coat,

     gray-striped trousers, a gray slouch-hat,

     and his shaggy mane and his beard were gray

     and even his eyes, if I recollect,

     and he seemed as remote and as out of time

     as everything else in that strange hotel,

     and somehow I knew I would never again

     behold a sunrise or hear a cock crow

     or a mourning dove call its plaintive call,

     for the Old Republic had fallen at last

    and somewhere old ghosts were gathering

    for a final hurrah, but I wouldn’t be there.

  

" . . . the uncanniness of the commonplace . . ."

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

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

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

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

"

The entire review may be read here.

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

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

The Proverb of the Three Hotels

 

There was a time in Toulon, long ago,

when the number of wayfarers passing through

was so large it required three hotels

to accommodate them.  Jeffrey Cooley,

a loyal Republican through and through,

was the owner of The Virginia House

which, on a chilly October day

in 1858, was favored

by a country lawyer named Abe Lincoln

and his entourage.  Across the street,

the hotel of Democrat, B.G. Hall,

found favor with Senator Douglas and

his entourage. The remaining hotel,

Elias Stockner’s The Toulon House,

with no party loyalties either way

but a first-rate saloon in the basement,

found favor with both political camps

and prospered for many a year, long after

each of its rivals had bitten the dust..

A poem from Jared Carter's "The Land Itself" appears in Ted Kooser's newspaper column, American Life in Poetry

 A poem from Jared Carter's The Land Itself has been chosen for inclusion in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry project.  The poem is "Changing the Front Porch Light."  

Kooser's project, in partnership with the Library of Congress, was inaugurated while Kooser was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States.  He describes it as follows:  "American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser.  The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so. "

Kooser's weekly column appears in newspapers across the United States and in 72 different countries around the world.  All poems which appear in his column are archived in the Library of Congress.

Jared Carter's earlier book, Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems, was the first book in Ted Kooser's Contemporary Poetry series, published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Carter's poem, and Kooser's comments about it, can be seen here: https://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/detail/786

A new collection of voices from Spoon River

 

Stark County Poems , by BJ Omanson.  (Monongahela Books, 2019).  Map, illustrations. 59 poems. 225 pages.  $15.

Consisting of over fifty poems, from short lyrics in a variety of forms to lengthy blank verse and free verse narratives, Stark County Poems portrays the history of a small rural county in central Illinois, along the upper Spoon River valley.

Chronologically arranged, and incorporating letters, newspaper articles, obituaries, family stories, early county histories and diaries, the poems cover a century of the county's history, from the 1830s through the 1930s.

~~~~~

BJ Omanson was raised in the Spoon River valley of Stark County, Illinois, where both sides of his family have lived and farmed since the mid-19th century.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Proprietress of the Party Line

 

It wasn’t so much that she listened in
on our every call, it was that she took
not the slightest trouble to mask the din
and clatter of pots and pans as she cooked,

or bothered to set the receiver down
as she bellowed out the door to her boys
or cursed a pig off the porch. All the town
had to talk above or around the noise

of Lucinda’s chaotic life, and yet,
we’d not have embarrassed her on a bet
by letting her know we knew she was there---
the dullness and drill of her daily fare

had left her, like most of us, deadly bored;
whenever she blew off steam, we just paused
and held our tongues till the turmoil passed:
we wouldn’t want her to miss a word.

In the words of the soldiers themselves

Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War.  Vol. I: 1861-1863.  By Dan Clendaniel.  (Monongahela Books, 2019).  Maps, illustrations, rosters, death lists, 248 pp.

From the Introduction:

        As much as possible, I wanted the men of the 85th Pennsylvania to tell their story in their own words. For this reason, this book includes quotations from 50 men in the regiment. As the war progressed, men from the regiment were killed or went home, reducing their overall size as well as the number of potential sources. (This was especially true in the cases of Lieutenant Colonel Henry A. Purviance and Private Robert Roddy, newspapermen in the 85^th Pennsylvania who wrote detailed accounts for readers back home during the first two years of the war). I therefore turned to accounts written by men from their brigade or division. I also quote from Confederate soldiers, the Official Records, and period newspapers. The stories of the men in regiments with whom the fought and the stories of the men they fought against help to tell the story of the 85th Pennsylvania.

The quotations included by the author are often paragraph size or larger. Using large blocks of quotations is normally not recommended in writing history. Despite recommendations to use shorter quotations, I have chosen to quote the men in more substantial segments because I believe it adds context to their experiences. Furthermore, I like the way the soldiers of that era expressed themselves with the written word.

This narrative tries to follow the soldiers’ stories as they lived and tried to survive the war. For example, many men recorded their thoughts about Confederate land mines left in the road as they retreated from Williamsburg, Virginia in 1862. Not many men were wounded by these “torpedoes,” including none in the 85th Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, the author included a half dozen or more stories of the soldier’s reactions to these “infernal machines” to supply the reader varying perspectives from the men as they trudged up the Virginia peninsula. The author often has included multiple accounts of the same event, such as how Fort Wagner (South Carolina) was booby-trapped by Confederates just before their departure in September of 1863.

In each chapter concerning a battle or campaign, the author will provide an overview of the event, and then go back and tell the story using the words of the participants.

Although the 85th Pennsylvania was not involved in turning points events such as Antietam, Fredericksburg, or Vicksburg, they nonetheless had many fascinating experiences. Some of them helped Professor Thaddeus Lowe launch his celebrated observation balloon in 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign. Others in the regiment were cared for by Clara Barton, the war’s most famous nurse. They were also stationed with African American troops in Charleston and were in reserve for the famed assault on Fort Wagner in 1863 led by the 54th Massachusetts. They experienced trench warfare at both Charleston and around Petersburg. Some, including, Stephen Clendaniel, were involved in a large exchange of prisoners in 1864. And finally, some others including John Clendaniel were in the front lines for the surrender of Lee’s army on April 9, 1965 at Appomattox.

This book is meant as a tribute to John Clendaniel, Stephen Clendaniel, and the rest of that group of a thousand or so western Pennsylvania farm boys who served their nation and their cause with determination and honor.

Dan Clendaniel

~~~~

For more information about the 85th Pennsylvania, visit Dan's blog, The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War.

Reading & Reception by Jared Carter at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, on July 22nd, 2019

 

A poetry reading by Jared Carter, followed by an informal reception, will take place on Monday, July 22nd at 7:30 in the Wayside Community Gallery in the Fruitlands Museum, located at 102 Prospect Hill Road in Harvard, Massachusetts.

Fruitlands was the short-lived agrarian utopian community established in the 1840s by the Transcendentalists, Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane.

Jared Carter recently published a collection of poetry and photographs with Monongahela Books (The Land Itself, 2019) and a selection of poems from three decades with the University of Nebraska Press (The Darkened Rooms of Summer, 2014).  Both books will be available for purchase at the reading.

Carter received the Walt Whitman Award for his first book, Work, for the Night is Coming, and the Poet's Prize (awarded annually for the best book of verse by a living American poet), for his second book, After the Rain. He has received literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a recipient of the Indiana Governor's Arts Award.

Additional information about the reading and reception may be found on the Fruitlands Museum website.