Memorial poems

We returned a day or two ago.  I was reluctant to leave my family back in Illinois, though it was good to be home, back among my animals and books and garden. I completed the poem for my father the day before leaving town, and had it printed with two others, all centered around the [...]

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1. the two rivers: the Styx and the Spoon

From the beginning I was drawn equally to those two primary streams of early modern poetry, which I tend to think of as the Styx and the Spoon.  I cannot remember quite when or where I was when I encountered either of them for the first time.  The earliest memory of the Styx, river of death, dream and forgetfulness, was in some old book [...]

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. 6. Shadows across the Spoon: midwestern gothic

In the Spoon River country where I was raised there is an element of unremitting hardness. It was more prominent in my father’s people than in my mother’s. She was German, a hard enough race, to be sure, but he was Scandinavian, and their hardness is obdurate to the point of pathology: their calvinistic religion [...]

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. 7. From the Spoon to the Marne: poems of my grandfather’s war

Of the thirty-odd poems located along the Spoon River, perhaps a third center around the figure of my German grandfather, and of those a good many concern his experience in the First World War and the lingering effects of that experience once he had returned. The following poem, a narrative in blank verse, portrays my [...]

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. 7b. Another tale from Spoon River: “The Revelation of Sam Hackett”: a pastoral parable of violence, war & the devil

This poem, like many in the Spoon River series, grew out of a true story about my grandfather. This one took place during the Depression, on my grandfather’s farm where he ran a sorghum mill. Many of the hired help were “gypsies”, or at least that is how they were known. They weren’t migrants, but [...]

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