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.
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
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.)
Howard Miller Steelhead Park Dedication
SKAGIT COUNTY – The Skagit County Parks Department and the U.S. Forest Service have partnered in creating an informational visitor kiosk at Howard Miller Steelhead Park. The kiosk will be dedicated on September 23, 2011 at 2:30 p.m. just east of the Boat Launch at the park. The kiosk honors Howard Miller, a lifelong resident of Skagit County who was committed to public service and enjoyed fishing and the outdoors. Howard Miller served four consecutive terms as county commissioner. During his tenure, Howard was instrumental in the purchase of the first 39 acres of the park’s land. The park has since expanded to greater than 100 acres. The dedication also honors other park proponents, including the Porter, Kerr, and Harris families.
One of the three panels on the new kiosk will serve as a way to commemorate the future friends of Howard Miller Steelhead Park. Each year, a friend of the park will be honored based on his or her dedication and commitment to the betterment of the scenic river and/or park. There are also signs describing the history of the ferry, cabin, and canoe. The Howard Miller family provided photos and stories that assisted in the development of his commemorative panel. The late Jim Harris, local historian and former interpreter for the National Park Service, provided the background and photos for the three historical panels. We are grateful to all who contributed to these great additions to one of our counties' premier parks.
The public is invited to join the Skagit County Parks Department and the U.S. Forest Service in the dedication of the kiosk to help in honoring the important people who help maintain the park.
After the ribbon cutting at the kiosk, visitors will be taken to the new camping cabin recently constructed at the park. This is the first of four cabins the Parks Departments hopes to erect in the next two years. The cabins will allow people to visit the park and stay in relative comfort without the need of towing a heavy trailer.
For more information, contact Skagit County Parks and Recreation Director Brian Adams at briana@co.skagit.wa.us or at (360) 336-9415.
Brian Adams, Director
Skagit County Parks, Recreation, and Fair
315 South Third Street
Mount Vernon, WA
(360) 336-9414
Exciting news: "Sarabande" will be published in CLOVER, Vol. 2 (Bellingham, WA: Independent Writers Studio) on Sept. 25.
During the past several years, I wrote a poem about Seville, Spain, one word at a time. I called it Sarabande for a street dance I first saw there. Last winter, I entered it in the open competition for Phrasings 5, the 2011 Chuckanut Sandstone Writers Theater and Bellingham Repertory Dance Company collaboration of writers and dancers, not expecting it to be considered.
I was overwhelmed when I was asked to read it at the April 1 performance.
****
Poems to be read:
Bug Music by Joe Mackey of Bellingham
Collection by Jim Milstead of Bellingham
Just Sail by Heather Bennett of Everett
Sarabande by Richard Lee "Dick" Harris of Bellingham
Snail Buddha by Jim Bertolino of Bellingham
3 Visions/Vancouver Island by Rick Hermann of Bellingham
Watching my grandson by Cathy Ross of Seattle
Woman in a Red Dress by Bethany Reid of Edmonds
Choreography Category:
Housekeeper by Shannon Laws who lives in Bellingham and choreographed by Vanessa Daines
Reunion and back again by Scott Stodola who lives in Bellingham and choreographed by Diane WIlliams
Beachcombing by Katelyn Hales who lives in Brooklyn, NY and choreographed by Ella Mahler
World Cup by Susan M. Schultz who lives in Hawaii and choreographed by Erika Olson choreographer
From Wire Fetters by Katelyn Hales, who lives in Brooklyn, NY and choreographed by Angela Kiser
The Visitors by Cathy Ross who lives in Seattle, WA and choreographed by Sarah Schermer
Taproot by Carla Shafer who lives in Bellingham and choreographed by Fiona Evans 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
****
****
To learn about the times, dates, and location of Phrase 5 performances and where to buy tickets, go to Bellingham Repertory Dance Company, www.bhamrep.org.
For those lost at sea, March 11, 2011
The earth faults harbor waves
destroys shoreline civility,
sucks shrouds of vitality
into tumultuous brine
of fury and devastation.
Mundane torments are shadows,
sufferings of the heart
vanish into nothingness,
where the sun does not gaze
nor the moon reflect.
When pacific waves break,
these tragic spirits rise
as jewels glinting their crest.
Sendai, Japan
2011
Tsunami translates as “harbor waves” in Japanese.
Our cruise ship was about 250 miles east of Hilo, HI, headed for the mainland, when the tsunami generated by the earthquake that struck Japan, March 11, 2011, passed under us. The only noticeable effect was an increase in wave height from “slight” to “moderate” with a slight pitching motion for a brief period of time.
June 6, 1994. It's almost 10:00 a.m. I'm having my morning coffee in La Patisserie, a little French and Vietnamese bakery-restaurant about four blocks from home. I'm the only customer, typical for this time on Monday morning.
It is quiet at the intersection of Lynn and Northwest. One or two cars pass through every other light change. Three are wandering around the boats in front of Yeager's Sporting Goods across the street, waiting for the doors to open.
Although the street is dry, I drove my '76 Chevy pickup instead of riding my bicycle. Those storm clouds boiling up in the southwest are threatening.
Phan, always polite, always ready to smile, just handed me a freshly baked raspberry cream cheese Danish. As is her habit, she waited for her first customer before turning on the coffeemaker. We exchange a few remarks about the weather and this being Monday morning. I hand her two dollars. She gives me thirty cents change and continues spraying the glass tabletops with Windex© and wiping them with crumpled pages from yesterday's newspaper.
I place my Danish on Table #6, "my spot" near the window, and go to the service counter for a spoon, fork, napkin, and a couple creamers. By now, the coffee is ready. I pour a cup.
There’s nothing visible on the street noting the significance of this day, a pensive one for me.
My thoughts have skipped between this day, fifty years ago, and the televised commemorations held on the Normandy beaches in France, 4800 miles away. My reverie is deepened by the subdued and plaintive background music coming over the speakers: "I'll Walk Alone,” "Till Then,” "When the Boys Come Home," interspersed with Glen Miller and Duke Ellington renditions.
I flash back to that morning on June 6, 1944. I’m ten years old. School had been out less than a week. I’m sitting in the cab of Dad’s 1927 Chevy flatbed truck on the ferry, crossing the Skagit River. We are on our way to Grant Nelles’ blacksmith shop, west of Concrete.
I didn’t expect to cross the river until the middle of the month. Normally, I’d be in a hayfield walking along the newly mown swathes, shaking loose the heavy bunches of green hay with a three-tine pitch fork so they could dry more quickly. The mower broke down before Dad could start cutting.
Dad said he’d take us to the Strawberry Festival and to see Grandma Harris in Burlington, if the hay is shocked, if he can get our 1930 Reo Flying Cloud to run, if he has any leftover gasoline ration stamps, and if the river isn't flooding. He’d have to draw some money from the Mitchell Brothers, the "gypo" loggers for whom he was working. That is, if they’d been paid for their latest shipment of logs. (Smalltime loggers were probably called “gypos” because they moved from site to site, frequently logging areas too small to be worthwhile for larger companies.)
When I asked Dad if I could go, I was surprised that he said, “Get in.” Loretta and Jim knew better than to ask. They’re too young and Dad would be busy helping the blacksmith and swapping stories with others waiting to repair busted-down equipment. Besides, Mom didn’t want them running around the hot forges with their flying sparks and getting in the way.
Dad always repaired our farm equipment himself. He would rummage through the pile of parts and pieces in "the old milk house" or scavenger from some derelict machine rusting in the blackberry vines and nettles in the back of one the neighbors' fields until he found what he needed. If the part were wooden, he would carve a new one from a vine maple sapling he’d cut from the brush growing behind the barn. This time, he couldn't find a part to fit the old relic of a mower that had been around since it was freighted up the river in a canoe in the 1880's when the place was homesteaded. His only remedy was to weld the part back together. This meant a trip to the only blacksmith shop upriver.Seldom did the sun shine long enough this early in June to dry the fields enough so Dad can cut, rake, and shock the hay before the next storm soaks it and rot begins.
Not only does he lose haying weather with these breakdowns, he loses a valuable day of unpaid vacation time. Also, each repair usually takes the last money in the house, and burns up precious gasoline.
Frank Tom, the operator, had just dropped the ferry apron at the edge of the river where the road sloped down to the landing on the Rockport side, and Dad is starting the truck engine, when a neighbor literally skipped through the shallow water and onto the ferry. He sticks his head though the hole in the door on Dad's side where the window used to be. "Did ya' hear?” he blurts out. "They landed in France!"
"They did?” Dad responds, as much in surprise as disbelief.
"Yaah! They got those krauts on the run." (Kraut is a derogatory term that everyone I knew called Germans, especially German soldiers.)
"Well, it'll soon be over," Dad says, as he steps on the clutch and slowly shifts into first gear. It is good news, but his mind is on the broken mower and the time he is losing.
I didn't say anything. After all, I was just going into the sixth grade. And, I’m not so sure that the Germans will be quickly defeated. I’d been following war as closely as I could until the battery packs on our radio ran out, a couple weeks ago. Mrs. Baughman, our teacher at Rockport School, had let a couple of us read her newspaper when our lessons were done. Even if the Germans are defeated, the war with the Japanese in the Pacific had to be won.
The engine whines as the old truck creeps off the ferry and inches up the incline, over the railroad tracks, and onto State Route 20 near the Rockport Hotel. It is an hour's drive over Rockport Hill and winding down the valley to the blacksmith shop.
My second cup of coffee is gone. It's time to leave a tip, climb into my old Chevy pickup, and go home. Maybe the rain will hold off long enough to mow some lawn.
***
(Here's a couple pages from Upriver Images, my mixed genre memoir. Let me know if the POV works, or has inconsitencies. Please, no 'junk' or pseudo-messages designed to link your website advertising your product. I WILL NOT APPROVE!)
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


Most recently the “something to read while waiting” for me, has been the monthly issue of Poetry. Carolyn Forché’s article “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art,” particularly the Q & A, in May was most insightful and stimulating. Her exploration of “ . . . we can’t know what the poem means because we can’t know what it will mean later” led me to attempt articulation of the meaning of my own poems. The following is the best I can come up with at the moment:
As a poet, I can only know the meaning of a poem at the time I write it. The next day, it may mean something different; and the next day, different still. Likewise, a poem’s meaning to a reader when he or she first reads it might change each time it is read. Meanings may deepen or dissipate, or simply change. Also, each reader will read into a poem his or her own meaning.
As a poet, my responsibility is to communicate as clearly as possible with the imprecise language that is available to me, so that the essence of a poem’s initial meaning may carry forward, regardless of when or who reads it.