Dick Harris
Writing in Pamplona, 2007
Articulating my Poetic Voice
This weekend, I responded to an e-mail from my instructor for the upcoming workshop I’m enrolled in at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He asked enrollees to send him a selection of not more than 10 poems a month before the workshop so he can start getting a sense of our work.
Articulating a sense, or voice, of my work has been a problem from the start. I write as I am motivated and voice is one of the things I never think about. I leave it to others to define me as a writer.
When I’m backed into a corner I struggle until I find some of my writing that I am, at the moment, comfortable with. In this case, with a lot of help from my “in-house” editor, I selected the following poems. They span from 1995-2012 and are the ones that seem to get the most public attention and response.
As is my practice, I noted the year the event or notion for the poem originated giving it time and place orientation. The year(s) I drafted the poem is in parenthesis. I did not include backstories or narratives that go with several of the poems.
Although I’ve posted most of these and their backstories earlier, I’m doing it again. My question to you: Can you ascertain this writer’s personality from these poems?
Child of the Desert
Dry brush crisscross desiccated
saguaro ribs bound with twisted
fibers to weathered poles. Specks
of shade in a solar sea cast
their patterned light over an infant
sleeping in a hammock gently
rocked by grandmother sitting docile
in her cobbled chair, beside a
castoff table draped with checkered
oilcloth, its tear tucked under an
AM radio playing faux native
music from an Anglo world
across the desert, fifty miles away.
Museum of Indian Arts & Culture
Santa Fe, NM, 2007 (2008)
Eagle Feathers and Rainbow
for Imogene Washington Bowen,
Upper Skagit Tribe (1935-2007)
Looking at you now, Imogene*, in your
cradle of lasting years, I see you in
our picture on the steps of Rockport School,
two rooms at the foot of your family’s
sacred mountain by the river of your
tribe, so many years ago. You are
the pumpkin-faced first grader wearing
a simple wash-dress in the first row,
so sober under your freshly combed hair
and new barrette, Imogene. I’m a second-
grader behind you, all frowns and ears sticking
out, my hair slicked-down. I loved your name,
Imogene . . . Imogene. You see,
I still sing it. In minutes now, elders
will carry you away, to lower you
into an earthly bed under boughs of
cedar and snow on your sacred
mountain. As darkness hovers, Imogene,
your spirit will rise, an eagle passing
through a rainbow above the river.
North Cascades, WA
2007 (2007)
*Pronounced with a long ‘I’.
On a Sunday evening in the cruelest month
Evensong for Margaret
Margaret, unknown and unnoticed,
lay bound for eternity beneath a ghostly elm,
its skeleton reaching the sky among cairns and nameless slabs
in the shadows of a West Yorkshire moor,
steps from dark and dank St. Michael-All Angels.
Shielded by boulder-dyke and fractured shale,
broken rocks in ragged form
encircle her simple marker
with fragments from a quarry on the heath’s far side.
A shaft of light pierces the nimbus sky,
its heavenly aura turns to gold
drifting daffodils,
breaking the cold and
casting its halo over Margaret
embraced in the stony care of her native heath.
Haworth, UK
1995 (1995)
The Ferryman
for Frank Tom, circa 1875-1949, American
Native ferryman on Skagit River, circa 1915-1945
Stout and strong, a man of few words,
he waves a log truck on, holds another back.
He knows when the ferry is loaded
for a river running high, a river running low.
Hand-over-hand, he turns a windlass,
winching bridle cable shackled to line
sweeping upward to a travelling carriage
riding a skyline between spar-trees on either shore.
He anchors the windlass, hurries to the
bankside apron arm, climbs onto its
counterbalance, grips the top rail,
forcing his weight downward, leveraging
the fulcrum lifting the apron. He kicks
a bail over the end, secures it to the deck,
scans the current for swirling debris.
In a bracing stance at the ferry’s stern,
he drives his pike into the gravelly
shallows, pushing out from the calm
of a log boom lea into ricocheting current.
Overhead, the carriage rattles,
jerking forward with each roll of
the current. The skyline vibrates, sings
as spar-tree guys shimmy and strain.
The ferryman unchains the windlass,
presses hard on the brake pedal,
slowly unspools the cable, widening
the vessel’s angle, reducing its speed.
Rockport, WA
(2008, 2012)
Here’s My Two Cents
Looking down as usual,
counting cracks in the sidewalk,
walking to my car.
In grass at the edge,
was a penny, heads down,
propped against the trim.
I stoop over,
pick it up,
turn it over,
rub it clean,
glance at the date.
Nearby,
is a newer one.
Once valuable,
now only good for sales tax.
It cost one point
two-three cents to make.
Please, God:
No more pennies from heaven,
just dirty old dollar bills!
Bellingham, WA
2008 (2008)
Memorial Day
for Mark Harris, 1893-1918
A cloudless sky,
a day filled with spring,
a day to remember those
who lay in common ground,
Fallen without honor,
unseen by us,
whose flags they bore.
As volleys resound in sharp salute
and banners dip to a trumpet’s call,
it is our day to remember
the plaques that cling to crumbling walls,
and plead as we pass by:
Tell them of us and say,
for your tomorrow,
we gave our today.
Bellingham, WA
1995 (1996)
Never Been in a Canoe
“Get in!”
Marcus hollers over a deafening river.
“We’re goin’ widout-chuh.”
“Hurry up, chicken shit,” Frank yells!
Marcus, fourteen, staggers
to keep his footing in the canoe bow,
leans on the pole he thrust into shallows
until it bends, holding the canoe in place.
Frank, thirteen, in the stern,
teeters in a wobbly balance,
pushes his pole downward
to steady the cedar shell.
I wade into water slapping
my knees. Grab the gunnel.
I’m almost nine, never been in a canoe.
“’Not chicken shit,” I whimper.
I glance at the river—
an uprooted cottonwood is diving,
rolling in the current,
coming right at us.
I look down. Shiver.
Blurt,
“It’s not yours! You
dragged it out of the brush.”
“Damn it, chicken shit.
Get in!”
Upper Skagit River, WA
1943 (2008)
Prairie Troubadour
for Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
Through prairie fields,
along river paths,
he wandered,
the road was his home.
From the Gulf to Chicago,
New York to Santa Fe,
for bread, he tramped.
Before senators, the president,
farmers and scholars, the
homeless on the street, he sang
his rhymes of butterflies, cornfields,
children’s verse, and justice.
In his American voice,
his Midwestern speech,
he sang,
and wandered,
wandered,
wandered . . .
this prairie troubadour.
Springfield, IL
2010 (2010)
Sarabande
The sun rises in Seville,
echoes Lorca’s daybreak,
dances in orange parterres,
glints Faith’s smile
into barrio shadows,
the sultan’s chair,
and filigreed portico.
Little bees collect
honey on bitter orange
petals, drizzle
golden dew on
Andalusían tortes,
and bittersweet preserves
on breakfast toast
of Oxford dons.
I look away and rest
my eyes on gold,
ochre, and snowy white.
Carmen pirouettes
from the “telly.”
Her sensuous notes
infuse me with
“Love is a bird,”
bitter oranges are sweet
when the tune is played
upon a blue guitar.
Seville, Spain
2000 (2011)
This River Sings
for my brother Jim (1937-2009)
Snow, avalanche, and scree;
creeks, ponds, and seeps,
collect in reverberating rush,
cascade in mountain pools,
eddies glazed undercurrents.
Mosquitoes and deerflies,
humorless protein,
psalmic multitudes,
survive winter’s minus.
Spring, tempered and wet,
its creeks quicken and swirl.
Tawny duff and flecks of sun
conceal newly dropped fawns.
Eagle, salmon, and raven
sing this river’s song—
sing as it flows—
dammed,
tunneled,
diverted!
This river sings as it
sprays cool mist,
splashes rocks with
syncopated rim-shots.
Cottonwoods rustle in tenor,
maples in baritone,
as softly this river sings
through mist and fog.
Softly, its spirits sing
of a mountain’s ashes
rising in evening drafts.
Wild and free, this river sings.
Upper Skagit River, WA
2009 (2009)
'Earth Day' on the Upper Skagit River, WA State
To Celebrate Wilderness
I drive into the North Cascades
following the Skagit
past civilization's blight
to celebrate its wilderness.
I gaze in awe, this fleeting moment,
at snowy ridges and glacial slopes,
alpine lakes and hanging valleys,
traces of ice from eons ago.
I see barren hills
stripped of hemlock, cedar and fir,
dammed rivers, meadows without life,
mountains raped for gold.
Traveling this trail of refuse,
I ponder our thoughtless greed.
Will we ever recover that which
we have destroyed? I stand on Rockport Bridge, this sunlit winter day. My eyes follow the Skagit past Washington Eddy to Eldorado's glistening ridge. For a fleeting moment, I see snowy ridges, glacial slopes, alpine lakes and hanging valleys, traces of ice from eons ago. Framed by cottonwoods and purple hills, the road edging Mount Sauk scribes the river, gently washing pebbles beneath a winter sky. Travelers pass me in eagle search, skimming the view— a ferry barge, a cedar canoe, our log cabin— artifacts of my youth. These incidental visitors In These Years of Reflection when cold winds swept the slopes, I warmed myself by father's fire and read of life beyond the river. In my youth, when summer rains washed the garden and ruined the day, I did my chores in a myriad of dreams, leaving the Skagit behind. In my adulthood, when fortune shunned me, I recalled neighbors and yesterdays across the river, memories that renewed me. In these years of reflection, I return to the valley to hear nature's melodies
From Rockport Bridge
will never hear eagles call,
see black bear fish,
trout rise to the fly,
witness stars outshining the night,
all that I see from Rockport Bridge.
In my childhood,
and see ancestral spirits in harmony,
as the wild Skagit tumbles to the sea.
Published in The Storytellers, SunPorch Productions, Bellingham, WA, 1994. [out of print].
Read at North Cascades NP Earth Day & National Park Week Celebration, Newhalem, WA, 1998; Bald Eagle Interpretive Center (Old Rockport School), 2000 and 2001; Upper Skagit Bald Eagle Festival, Concrete, WA, 2/4/01; Concrete High School Class of 1951 Reunion, 2001.
Frank Tom, Skagit River Ferryman
Frank Tom
Circa 1875-1949
Skagit River ferryman
When I was a child and crossed the Skagit River on the Rockport ferry in the back seat of my parents’1929 REO ‘Flying Cloud’ or huddled with my brother and sister under an old quilt on the flatbed behind the cab of Dad’s 1927 Chevrolet truck, Frank Tom was “our ferry man.” As I grew older and crossed the river to school, get the family mail, or play in the school gym, he was the omnipresent ferryman who got us safely over town and back. Since leaving the valley, Frank has become more than “the Indian” who operated Rockport ferry during the years I lived on the south side of the river. For me, he personifies transportation on the Upper Skagit River before high dams controlled floodwater; ferries were mechanized, or replaced with bridges.
Although listed as Upper Skagit-Suattle on Indian census rolls, Frank Tom was known around Rockport as a “saltwater Indian.” This notion is supported in the Washington Death Index, 1940-1996, and by June McCormack Collins in Valley of the Spirits. The first gives his birthplace as Skagit,[1] which is quite likely Skagit City, a trading post community founded on the Skagit River delta in 1863.[2] In Valley of the Spirits, Collins writes that Frank “was the direct descendant of the saltwater ‘chief,’ Patíus, of the last [19th] century.”[3] Patíus, or Pat-teh-us, was the Upper Samish Tribal signatory to the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855.[4] Additionally, the Upper Skagit and Upper Samish tribes lived in winter houses on the same tidewater sites, spoke a dialect unlike other tribes in the area, and shared prairies on which they cultivated native vegetables.[5]
According to his World War I military draft registration, Frank Tom was born on June 20, 1876.[6] In other documents, his year of birth ranged between 1874 and 1878.[7]
Tom’s physique and countenance were those of a Northwest Coast Salish male, relatively short and stocky with flat facial features. He never showed it, but he must have been very strong to winch the cable that angles the ferry in the river current for every crossing with a hand-operated windlass. Additionally, with a pike pole he pushed the ferry free from the sloping gravel river bottom of each landing into the current, an especially difficult task during low water.
Frank always spoke softly, except when shouting over the noise of the river or truck engines, telling drivers where to position their vehicles to adjust the ferry load for the river level and current speed. Never appearing bored, he operated the ferry at least one round trip an hour for just about every daylight hour, the year around, year after year, regardless of weather. Likewise, with apparent self-assurance, he transported foot passengers, automobiles, and short-log and freight trucks across the river, unless he deemed it unsafe.
Frank wore clothes similar to upriver loggers: a long-sleeved chambray work shirt and Levis held up with suspenders over “long-handle” wool underwear. Unlike loggers who "stagged" their pants, Frank turned his cuffs up.[8] I do not know if he was balding, I never saw him without his well-worn fedora. His hands must have been as calloused as shoe leather from years of operating the ferry or poling his canoe on the river without work gloves. I do not recall ever seeing him wearing any.
When he first knew Frank in 1916, Will Jenkins wrote in Last Frontier in the North Cascades, that Tom was a “renowned crafter of canoes” on the Upper Skagit.[9] Although I do not remember him in any canoe other than his shallow, snub-nosed, freighting canoe, nor recall seeing him work on any, I can still picture the racing canoes he housed in a weathered shed near his home.
To touch one of those exquisitely fashioned, sleek artifacts with their razor-edged bows raised goose bumps on young Caucasian boys. This was especially true when they sneaked into Tom’s yard and traced their fingers over the painted totems on their sides, all the time imagining that they were racing war canoes down the river.
In Valley of the Spirits, Collins describes Tom as “very knowledgeable about hunting and fishing.”[10] Although outside my memory, I cannot help but believe that a man of his generation and culture who spent his life on the Skagit River was both a seasoned hunter and fisher.
Several incidents come to mind that demonstrate Frank Tom’s sense of community and his knowledge of the river.
The earliest happened when Jenkins and his brother were young men and before Rockport was taken up with World War I. Frank crossed the river with the brothers in a “little cedar dugout” before sunup after they had spent all night at a community dance and party in Rockport, so they could hike home to their mother’s timber claim, six miles up Illabot Creek.
Another incident involved cattle rustling during World War II. Fred Martin, whose family’s homestead was 5-6 miles up the road from the ferry, drove our school bus until the end of the war. The Martins took advantage of open range laws to run their beef cattle on the logged-off land between their ranch and the first student pickup. Periodically, Fred would leave early enough to stop along the way and see where his cattle had wandered. Once in a while, usually on Mondays, he would discover a butchered animal. Frequently, the hindquarters were missing and the rest left for coyotes and other scavengers.
On these Mondays, after Fred parked our bus and chocked the wheels, he and Frank would have a private conversation outside of our hearing. We younger riders always wanted to know what they were talking about. The older ones knew. Because Frank knew every local driver, the make and model of their cars, and their travel patterns, he could tell Fred about any unusual crossings, including the county designation on each car’s license plate and other telltale signs, during the past weekend.[11] I do not know if any of these rustlers were caught. I am sure they were.
When Frank judged the river unsafe, he’d tie up the ferry on the Rockport side, walk up the hill to his county-owned cabin overlooking the landing, and watch for the river to calm down. When he thought it was safe, he would untie the ferry and in his imperturbable manner begin crossing again. To my knowledge, everyone who knew him trusted him.
Everyone, that is, except Mom. She trusted Frank all right; it was the river she didn’t trust. She was terrified the first time she crossed it in 1937; a pregnant 22-year-old with two toddlers moving into further isolation until the last time she crossed it before the bridge was opened in 1961.
One incident involved me personally. Early in the summer after my tenth birthday, my mother began sending me to Rockport, once or twice a week, to get the mail and buy as many groceries as I could carry.
When it took me far longer than it should to walk two miles, cross on the ferry, go to the store, and return home, she probably suspected that I was playing around Rockport with some of my schoolmates. What took her by surprise was Frank telling her that I was “swimming” in the river!
What actually happened is that I would often arrive at the landing and see the three or four other boys from the south side swimming in an eddy caused by a boom jutting out from the bank to divert the current and ease the ferry’s approach.
Wanting to be one of the boys, but not knowing how to swim, I would strip to my skivvies and splash around in the eddy, going out as far into the river as I could and still touch bottom. Frank was concerned that I was venturing too close to a sudden drop-off and the dangerous undertow he knew was there.
The rest of the summer, my trips over town were restricted to once a week with strict time limits. I didn’t so much as put my toe in the river because I knew that Frank was watching me.
When the river was too high and turbulent for the ferry to cross and someone on our side had an emergency, Frank was always trusted to respond in his canoe.
My brother wrote about a time during a prolonged flood that Frank came to our family’s rescue in an emergency of sorts, the particulars of which Mom didn’t know until well after the event. He canoed Dad, who couldn’t swim, and Jim, only five or six years old, over town to buy gifts at Rockport Mercantile, the only store in town, so we would have presents under our Christmas tree.[12]
Frank operated the Rockport ferry at the time he registered for the 1917 draft, and he operated it until the close of World War II.[13] For almost half-a-century, he transported those of us living or working on the south side of the Skagit River, to and from Rockport and the outside world. As a child, if you had asked me who the ferry belonged to, I would have said, “Frank Tom.”
Frank died on September 30, 1949, in Rockport on the banks of the river beside which he was born, and on which he spent his life: working, fishing, and plying his shovel-nosed canoe.
[1] Washington Death Index, 1940-1996.
[2] P. 38, June McCormack Collins, Valley of the Spirits, 1974.
[3] P. 247, ibid.
[4] Pp. 2 & 67, Chief Martin J. Sampson, Indians of Skagit County, 1972.
[5] Both the Upper Skagit and Upper Samish were Northwest Coast Salish.
[6] Ancestry.com
[7] 1920 & 1930 U.S. Censuses, 1934 U.S. Indian Census Roll; and Washington Death Index, 1940-1996.
[8] Loggers “stagged” their pants by cutting the cuff hems off so as not to catch on limb stubs while scrambling over felled trees or through underbrush. If a “stagged” pant leg did catch, it ripped, reducing the chance of falling on the sharp tools they always carried.
[9] P. 68, Last Frontier in the North Cascades by Will D. Jenkins, Skagit County Historical Society (Mt. Vernon, WA), 1984.
[10] P. 247, ibid.
[11] Each county in Washington was assigned an alpha designation as the first character for their car license numbers according to their population when licensing was established. King County (Seattle) was A; Skagit was M, etc.
[12] Jim told this story with more dramatic detail in his unpublished memoir.
[13] WWI Draft Registration (1917-18) Record.
"The Ferryman"
The Ferryman
for Frank Tom, circa 1875-1949, ferryman
at Rockport, WA, crossing, circa 1915-1945
Stout and strong, a man of few words,
he waves a log truck on, holds another back.
He knows when the ferry is loaded
for a river running high, a river running low.
Hand-over-hand, he turns a windlass,
winching bridle cable shackled to line
sweeping upward to a travelling carriage
riding a skyline between spar-trees on either shore.
He anchors the windlass, hurries to the
bankside apron arm, climbs onto its
counterbalance, grips the top rail,
forcing his weight downward, leveraging
the fulcrum lifting the apron. He kicks
a bail over the end, secures it to the deck,
scans the current for swirling debris.
In a bracing stance at the ferry’s stern,
he drives his pike into the gravelly shallows,
pushing out of the calm of a log boom lea
into the ricocheting current. Overhead,
the carriage rattles, jerking forward
with each roll of the current.
The skyline vibrates, sings
as its spar-tree guys shimmy and strain.
He unchains the windlass, stomps on
a brake pedal, slowly unspools the cable,
widening the ferry’s angle, reducing its speed.
Upper Skagit River, WA
World War II
Interlacing description and emotion
One workshop I've enrolled in this summer at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival is 'description and emotion for all genres.' Interlacing these without going overboard either way is tricky. It will be interesting to look back at some of my poems, such as this one, and see what improvements I can make.
I’ve taken the first steps at setting up a Twitter account. Tweet me @dickharrispoet, with your thought on how well I’ve interlaced description and emotion in the this poem.
She startled me as I sped
towards the forty-ninth parallel,
a matriarch motionless
on a ribbon of grass
between the shadowy lee of boreal curtains
emerging spring and melting winter,
and a ditch choked with cattails in murky water.
Clothed in motley camouflage—
tawny, gun-smoke and brown,
tints of black on snout and tail—
she stood paramount
to the multi-wheeled menaces
speeding this wind tunnel.
A solitary life, haggard
from subzero survival, calving and suckling,
deceptively feigning slow footedness and tranquility
until angered by predators
stalking her offspring bedded in the understory,
or startled by naïve walkers crossing her path.
Return to Iowa Summer Writing Festival
Some say I’m foolish, others question whether or not I will ever “pass.” Then, there are those who say, “Whatever!” In spite of
- waiting for as many as 14 hrs. in hot or sultry airports for aircraft and crew to complete my flight,
- watching out the window as our plane’s wing tip mows the grass at the edge of the runway,
- taking a 30 minute flight and dodging thunderstorms from Duluth to St. Louis to Rapid City and up the Ohio River Valley for six hours and two tanks of gas waiting for a chance to land in Chicago,
- enduring triple-digit heat,
- surviving seven successive nights of dusk-to-dawn thunder and lightning,
- evacuation from campus midweek and from two hotels when a one-hundred-year flood overflowed sandbagged dikes and chased us to higher ground to wait for what seemed like days for the water to recede from the back roads to the airport so I could fly home as a distressed passenger,
- circling Minneapolis at night while a backup radio tower was activated,
- spending 20-30 minutes under an oak tree canopy halfway to my room while a storm cloud drenches my path home and floods the streets,
- and more,
I’ve enrolled in the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival for the 11th time.
The workshops I’ve chosen, “Generating & Editing Poems for Publication” and “Description & Emotion,” are areas that I feel incompetent, and are led by facilitators who vitas and work experience are unbelievably enviable.
Why Iowa in the summertime? You tell me.
"The World Will Be"
It was a thrill yesterday, to open the new issue of Whatcom Writers & Publishers and read “The World Will Be,” a poem I’ve been researching and drafting for a year-and-a-half. Of course, the first time I skimmed it I picked up changes I wanted to make. Oh well, that’s the life of a poet—never willing to let go!
Here’s the latest version of the poem and its story:
I began thinking about this poem as I read Fanny Howe’s comments in October 2010 Poetry after she had translated Ilona Karmel’s work and sorted through her personal effects. Ilona (1925-2000) told Howe that when they were interned in Buchenwald, their mother advised her and her sister, both teenagers, “to behave well because ‘the world will be the world again.’”
Ilona and Henía were born in a Kraków ghetto. When the Germans occupied Poland at the beginning of WWII, the girls were uprooted from their comfortable middleclass childhood and interned with their mother in three successive labor camps. The last was Buchenwald. Their father was sent to a separate labor camp and not heard from again.
After the war, Ilona and her sister migrated to this country, where Ilona received a degree from Radcliffe, married physicist Francis Zucker, and became an award winning novelist. Between 1979 and 1995, she was a senior lecturer in creative writing at MIT.
Ilona and Henía wrote poetry on worksheets they stole from their Buchenwald work stations. The poems were published as A Wall of Two after the war. (The book is available from the University of California Press. An English translation of Ilona’s novel An Estate of Memory is available on Amazon.com.)
Fannie Howe was principal translator of Karmel’s work.
The World Will Be
for Mita (Rosenbaum) Karmel and
daughters Ilona and Henia.
Think of a mother and her blossoming
daughters, their father, a number
dying in an unknown labor camp.
Think of them as floors echo
with reverberating boots,
each step a cloud of dirt and mites
swirling into cobwebs draping
concrete walls of their infested barracks.
Think of them each midnight hour
as they huddle in their bunks,
fearing that they will
be dragged to a rail siding,
thrown into a cattle car,
and disappear,
not knowing
whether they are going
right to work and starve,
or left for gas and freedom.
Think of a mother telling
her daughters to behave well,
“the world will be the world again.”
Check out WW&P’s website, http://www.whatcomwritersandpublishers.org.
Vachel Lindsay, Prairie Troubadour
Before I visited the Vachel Lindsay Home in Springfield, Illinois, a month ago, Vachel Lindsay was just a multiple-choice answer on a high school American lit quiz. Besides, I never was quite sure of how to pronounce his first name. Now that I have been to his home and am reading his story and poetry, he is becoming a personality whose work and role in 20th century poetry is becoming increasingly significant in my eyes.
The Vachel Lindsay Home, an Illinois Historical Site on the National Registry of Historic Places, was built in Greek revival style in 1843, with an Eastlake style addition in the 1890s. Currently, the Vachel Lindsay Association is managing the site, and restoring the interior and a conservatory to the way it was in the early twentieth century when Lindsay’s parents owned it.
Born here in 1879, Vachel Lindsay found sanctuary in this home, moved his family into it when he could not financially support them elsewhere, and took his own life in the bedroom in which he was born.
The day I visited, the docents were forthright, knowledgeable, and empathetic relating Lindsay’s prolific, mercurial, and tragic life. They had met Lindsay’s son Nicholas and two cousins when the three visited the home, giving them a personal relationship to the poet and his family. A documentary narrated in part by Nicholas was both thoughtful and stimulating.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was the second of six children born to a Scottish country doctor and an artist-teacher mother. Both were religious fundamentalists, a life perspective that had a pervasive and lasting influence on Vachel and his poetry.
Springfield, its environs, resident personalities, and the events that transpired during the nineteenth century were a continuing impact on Lindsey. Most notably were his Lincoln poems, his publication The Sangamon County Peace Advocate (1909), his lectures at the Y.M.C.A. following a deadly race riot, and others foretelling his vision of a Springfield of the future.
After failing in premedical training and in art institutes in Chicago and New York City, Lindsay set out to hike through the country, “sharing the lives of and bringing hope to the common people in the depths through his poetry and art. He would support himself by trading poems and pamphlets for food and shelter.”
Strong rhythms in American vernacular, religious fundamentalism, patriotism, and socialist and racial justice, in Midwest themes, were the poems Vachel Lindsay wrote and dramatically delivered in living rooms, public venues, and to private audiences from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., Florida to Chicago, and Springfield to Santa Fe. He called his verse singing poetry, to be sung or chanted in the tradition of the ancient Greeks.
After the sale of two poems to a New York publisher in 1904, Lindsay enthusiastically handcrafted his first book. Unable to generate any interest in it or any of his other art and poetry, he resorted to selling what little he could on the street.
Following his first hike, a 600-mile tramp (his term) from Florida to Kentucky in 1906, Lindsay wrote to a friend that “no one cared for my pictures, no one cared for my verse, and I turned beggar in sheer desperation.” He continued these tramps, writing and reciting poetry mixed with day labor for bed and board, crisscrossing the country through the summer of 1912, thus gaining his reputation as “Prairie Troubadour.”
Although Lindsay’s parents’ disappointment had turned to hostility by 1908, he returned home and “borrowed” money from his father to self-publish pamphlets that he freely handed out to bemused passersby. His public failure turned to success in 1910, when his self-published first edition of The Village Magazine was well recieved.
Lindsay began to be recognized as a serious poet in 1912 when his self-published “The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotus” celebrating the joining of eastern and western cultures by the Panama Canal was distributed to Congress on the day the Panama Exhibition opened. National exposure came in 1913 when Poetry magazine featured “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.” This resulted in his first trade publication, “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” and Other Poems.
These were quickly followed with more publications and more recitations throughout the Midwest. In 1915, Lindsay was invited to recite his poetry for President Wilson and Cabinet at the White House.
Between 1915 and 1922, Lindsay was almost continuously on tour, reciting, lecturing, and writing, with his activities frequently on the front pages of newspapers. His list of publications, self-publications, and journal contributions grew. In 1920, Lindsay became the first American poet to speak at Oxford and Cambridge.
During this time, Lindsay is credited with “discovering” Langston Hughes waiting table in New York City, and in writing the first book on film as an art form and its impact on society.
Although his popularity waned with the changing literary climate of the late twenties, Lindsay continued to publish. In 1925, at the age of 45, he married 23-year-old Elizabeth Conner. As the decade closed, financial difficulties that had plagued him throughout his life, mounted. In an attempt to abate them, he undertook a marathon speaking tour and continued publishing with diminishing interest. By 1929, he was forced to move his family from New York City to his parents’ home in Springfield.
Financial worries, failing health resulting from an exhaustive six-month road trip, and a sense that he had returned to his life as a poet without an audience deepened Lindsay’s recurring depression in late 1931. In early December, he drank a bottle of Lysol and died in the bed of his birth.
A good introductory site to the life and home of Vachel Lindsey is www.vachellindsayhome.org. For a detailed chronology of Lindsay’s life, go to www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lindsay/chrono.htm. Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/vachel-lindsay) has a comprehensive biography, an extensive bibliography, and a selection of Lindsay’s poems. Over prairie fields for bread, he tramped. Before senators and the president, farmers and scholar, the homeless on the street, he sang his rhymes of butterflies, cornfields, children’s verse, and justice. In an American voice he sang, Springfield, IL, 2010 Exciting news: "Prairie Troubadour" will be published in CLOVER, Vol. 2 (Bellingham, WA: Independent Writers Studio) on Sept. 25.
How I reimagine Vachel Lindsay:
Prairie Troubadour
and river paths,he wandered,
the road his home
From Gulf to Chicago,
New York to Santa Fe,
Midwest speech,
and wandered, wandered,
wandered . . .
this prairie troubadour.
William Stafford Tribute
Thursday, 1/19/12, I posted the following on Facebook:
“At 2 p.m., Sunday, in the Village Books Reading Room, 'a bevy of poets' will celebrate William Stafford's birthday (1914-1993) by reading 1-3 of their poems reflecting his influence on their work. This was originally scheduled for Tuesday evening, but weather intervened.
“If you're in the area and you have the afternoon off, stop by. You'll hear some pretty good poems by authors who knew Stafford as teacher, workshop leader, lecturer, or U.S. Poet Laureate. Several of us did not know him personally, but through his poetry or iconic attributes. Jim Bertolino will emcee.
Although I never met Stafford, I see his focus on everyday events, common people, our relationship to place, and our search for quiet places, in many of my poems.
It will be fun and stimulating. I hope the date and time change, or remnants of this week's storm, don't keep the chairs empty. It ain't no fun readin' to empty chairs!
***
Sunday evening: It happened. A dozen poets read from Stafford’s and from their own. It was not quite SRO; there were a few vacant chairs.
It was a good party with its own anniversary with Jim Bertolino celebrating his sixth year as emcee, for which he was given a hearty round of thanks.
***
My contribution was with the following comments and poetry:
Kim Stafford wrote in “Afterword” of Even in Quiet Places that one time a woman in the audience said aloud during one of his father’s readings, “Why, these poems are so simple, I could have written them myself.” Stafford replied, “But you didn’t.” She looked up at him, and he said, “but you could write your own.”
All I can say is, “Teacher, I try.”
***
I must admit that I had recently read William Stafford's “Traveling Through the Dark” when I wrote the draft for this first poem while sitting in the Calgary airport:
The Commute
During an early dawn commute
in the after-fog of a summer storm
north of Calgary
through a windshield blurred with road oil
I see tire skids in the gravel
plowing ruts to the brink of a ditch
and
a deer half-buried in turgid muck
belly up
neck twisted
one bulbous eye staring into cattails
I drive on
***
My second poem is dedicated to Anglican priest and Anglo-Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, a contemporary of William Stafford who shared similar attributes and foci, although he lived 7-8 time zones and a culture away.
Welsh Hireling
“If you can till your fields and stand to see
The world go by, …”
—R. S. Thomas, “Iago Prytherch”
A miniature tractor works a not-too-distant field
raises clouds of dust from
behind an age-old fence of rocks and impenetrable hedge
as it circles the tight corners
of a medieval field enclosed by clergy and crown.
A metallic clatter resounds across the hillside
as harrow teeth spring and snap the rocky terrain,
preparing for midsummer fallow
before seeding a new grazing cycle.
Does its driver hunched over his controls,
lurching in continual jolts,
own the field he tills?
Or is he a hireling, whose birthright,
his claim to the land,
was forfeited by ancestors?
Does he work from hire to hire,
wasting his muscles
as this incessant wind thins his hair,
furrows his brow, and
dissuades his dreams?
***
“Stand by the river
listen to the sound,
to the voice speaking
the truth of this place.”
—RLH
These words epitomize Stafford’s The Methow River Poems, and could easily do the same for my Upper Skagit River poems.
This River Sings
For my brother
Snow, avalanche, and scree;
creeks, ponds, and seeps,
collect in reverberating rush,
cascade in mountain pools,
eddies glazed undercurrents.
Mosquitoes and deerflies,
humorless protein,
psalmic multitudes,
survive winter’s minus.
Spring, tempered and wet,
its creeks quicken and swirl.
Tawny duff and flecks of sun
conceal newly dropped fawns.
Eagle, salmon, and raven
sing this river’s song—
sing as it flows—
dammed,
tunneled,
diverted!
This river sings as it
sprays cool mist,
splashes rocks with
syncopated rim-shots.
Cottonwoods rustle in tenor,
maples in baritone,
as softly this river sings
through mist and fog.
Softly, its spirits sing
of a mountain’s ashes
rising in evening drafts.
Wild and free, this river sings.
Remembering the Less Honored
Remembering the Less Honored
Richard Lee “Dick” Harris
Each Memorial Day we proudly wear our Red Poppies and decorate graves. And, when I attended two-room Rockport, WA, School, we recited, “In Flanders fields where poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row . . .” (John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields.”)
With each new Decoration Day, my thoughts turned more and more to the less honored who died in the service of their countries and our remembrance of them. These gradually coalesced into a poem.
As I drafted the poem, three individuals came to mind, giving the poem a face. Foremost, was my great-uncle Mark Harris who grew up in Maple Falls, WA, died in the closing days of World War I, and is buried in Bayview Cemetery, Bellingham, WA. The others are a brother and sister from North Yorkshire, England, who died during World War II, and whose epitaph intrigued me.
I learned about my great-uncle in 1984 when I read my Aunt Belva Harris Poldervart’s newly published book, “On The Move” From Oxcarts to Motor Homes. With this information, his draft registration from Ancestry.com, and The Trail Through The Woods (Frances B. Todd, 1982), I created a picture of Mark.
Harris was born to Lydia Baker Harris and Civil War Veteran Chancy Harris on March 20, 1893, in Bradford, Chickasaw County, Iowa, ninth of 12 children. In 1907, he moved with his widowed mother and six siblings to Maple Falls with a “colony” of destitute Iowa residents recruited by a team of Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad agents to begin a new life in the Pacific Northwest. Their ticket: passage in a boxcar!
On June 5, 1917, when Harris registered for the draft, he was medium height and build, with blue eyes and dark hair, and had a crooked finger on his right hand. He lived at 2226 Franklin Street, Bellingham, with his mother and brother, whose dependency he claimed as grounds for exemption from war. He was employed as a shingle weaver by Holly Shingle Company in Mill Town, Skagit County, WA.
Bivouacked at Camp Vancouver, Washington, during the 1918 flu pandemic, Mark contracted bronchial pneumonia. He died on October 22, 1918, five days after falling ill. He was buried in Bayview Cemetery on October 27, 1918.
It is unlikely today, that those who pass by grave 8, lot 15, section 3, notice the unadorned headstone on, with scarcely enough room for great-uncle Mark’s name and mismarked dates of 1894-1919.
For the last verse of the poem, I chose the epitaph on a plaque in Fountains Hall, a Jacobean mansion now a ruin, in North Yorkshire. It commemorates the lives of Elizabeth Vyner, an 18-year old nurse who died with encephalitis while on active duty in 1942, and her brother Charles, who was missing in air operations off Rangoon, Burma, three years later.
Memorial Day
for Mark Harris, 1893-1918
A cloudless sky,
a day filled with spring,
a day to remember those
who lay in common ground,
Fallen without honor,
unseen by us,
whose flags they bore.
As volleys resound in sharp salute
and banners dip to a trumpet’s call,
it is our day to remember
plaques that cling to crumbling walls,
and plead as we pass by:
Tell them of us and say,
for your tomorrow,
we gave our today.
“Memorial Day” was originally published as “Memorial Day, 1995” in Tough Guys Don’t Give Up, ed. Mary Hamilton [Gillilan] (Bellingham, WA: SunPorch Productions, 1996). Currently published by the author in Reimagine: Poems, 1993-2009 (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2010.)
