The first writer I ever interviewed was Bob Hicok. This was like 8 years ago, and the interview was executed over email. Lots of that interview remains in my mind for any number of reasons, but maybe most resonant still was his line “I’m dropping a mouth as we speak.” He was talking about fatigue, about repeated images or ideas that arose in his poetry and how his writing was a matter of fatigue with what he’d done recently or already. All writers have these things we return to.
I’ve now lived away from Minnesota for five years, and the place I identify first when asked where I’m from or who I am has gotten clearer in my eyes as I’ve been elsewhere. For instance: Minnesota really does have one of the best education systems in the country, at least from what I’ve seen (NY, VA, IA); MN is also, because of who knows what confluences, a place where the principles of liberalism and progressivism are more entrenched than even (I think) those folks who live there may realize.
This is not a post about Minnesota, though I’d love it to be.
Penguin has recently published The Real State of America Atlas, which is subtitled Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States and which I’d argue is one of the essential nonfiction books of the last decade, if not longer (+ my spouse tells me that Joni Seager’s [one of this book’s co-authors] The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World is great as well).
River is one of the things I end up always stuffing into my poems. Window. Math shows up everywhere for me. We could do this for any number of writers: Lily Brown‘s got birds galore in her fantastic Rust or Go Missing, Frost’s landscape is so tree-filled one smells the branches on each page, etc. You can list your own instances if you wish.
The Real State of America Atlas is as sobering a book as I can presently imagine. Here’s what’s weird about the United States: because the eventual perfection of the union’s a dream or idea, because America’s constantly becoming, we’re allowed and occasionally encouraged as citizens to overlook certain unfair or divisive aspects of life here which, we believe, will eventually be tackled and transformed–cutting taxes, for instance, will lead to thinning the social safety net, which is bad, maybe, but not as bad as the government spending so much (or something like that), or not as bad as “job creators” having more money to create jobs. This sort of thinking may not be toxic in small doses but it can get treacherous. At the Big Picture, Invictus absolutely nails (I think) one of the biggest political and social and everything problems we have at present, which is: a significant percentage of Americans votes and acts as if they believe they’ll be wealthy in the near future. A recent poll, being reported today, says the percentage has drastically dwindled since the recession’s start, but that’s a new thing: in the booming 00’s, most people believed they’d be rich soon, just another couple months.
Like a lot of people, I spent parts of this past decade wondering darkly who the hell are we and what is this country I live in? I spent the 00’s in my twenties, so I would’ve been asking those questions even had no towers fallen or no wars begun.
Like a lot of people who write, I tell myself that one of the reasons I write is to better understand the world, and to better understand my take on it, my own thoughts. This is where the problems of mouths or rivers or trees or birds appearing regularly in poetry arise, to me: I write the world I see, and the world I see is massively influenced by the world I’ve come from and know. Of course I go back to rivers: I’m from Minnesota, and spent essential years working on boats on the Mississippi.
Like a lot of people, I go to some books to be confronted with intelligences other than my own, to be confonted by information which is novel or exotic to me–stuff which makes my world larger and stranger contoured. I can think of very few books which so effectively and thoroughly force or lead me to be confronted by perhaps overlooked info as The Real State of America Atlas. Did you know 68% of the country as of 2001 believed in the devil? (And do you automatically now wonder when in 2001 that data point was mined?) Did you know there was a $2.9B increase in the amount of payday loans made between 2004 and 2009 (and one’s got to assume that number’s only risen since)? Did you know hispanic boys drop out of high school at a rate almost four times that of white boys? Can your head not spin at these things? When confronted with a whole book detailing this info?
This is not, at all, a post about the need to write more political poetry. This is not a post calling for a shift in subject matter–I’ll continue to write about rivers, I really hope Lily Brown continues smuggling birds into her work, Bob Hicok will or will not drop mouths (or who knows, all the years later, what he’s dropping). What I’m left confronting after holding and reading Atlas for several weeks is background material: I’ve been writing, for a long time, about the America I came of consciousness in, the one I grew up in, the one I hope to eventually have kids and grow old within. It looks very, very different at present–or, at least, lots of the data provided by The Real State of America Atlas.
This really isn’t about the need to write political poetry. This really is about a fantastic new book everyone should have a copy of. This really is about the ways writers work, and how we often default back to positions we know or are comfortable with. This really is one reader and writer wondering if some of the taken-for-granted aspects of America need to be, by all of us, seriously reconsidered. Recall the subtitle of this book: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the US (for those interested in fonts after last week’s post: sans serif, probably Helvetica, on the cover). Those of us who write have to set our work–fiction or poetry–somewhere, and all places have their myths and truths, facts we either see or do not. Who knows if the country is at present historically troubled; what seems clear is that the narrative has been massively irrevocably, non-bounce-backingly shifted, and we need to write and read that way, not just live it.