Mining the Imagination

A year or so ago I wrote a poem called "Benwood Mine and Queen Anne's Lace."  This month it came out in Salamander Magazine's 20th anniversary issue.  (See the publications page for a link directly to the poem.)  The idea for the poem arrived years before and maybe only found the right form in 2011.  In fact, most poems have a hazy crossing of weigh stations between the kernel and the draft making its way out into the public.  Sometimes, in fact, the first public sighting of a poem may not be its final configuration.  Always I'm spurred onward by someone's famous truism that a poem is never finished, only abandoned.

One weigh station I am forever sure of though: I will show my poem to my mother! Not much different from my first grader bringing home her latest puppet to show me she can make things -- except I identify now a wish to show my folks -- whom I've moved far away from -- a psychic connection to them through my connection to my home state.

One of my current (and I acknowledge absolutely adolescent joys) is the way non-poetry reading folks react to poems.  My mom works in a bank and shares my poems with her co-workers, and I hear back how bleak they are, or how unhappy I must be in the north! I always ask her to send them around, and see what they have to say, but "Benwood Mine..." made a bigger impression.  It is a poem in which I imagine a lone miner trapped from the perspective of his family members above ground.  It outlines the path most "trapped miner" news stories seem to follow, and maybe I only picked Benwood Mine because of an album by Tom Breiding, and yet...  My mother's co-worker was glad for the poem. He'd lost his great-grandfather in the Benwood Mine Disaster.

Graveside service for miners lost in Benwood coal mine

I had to look it up.  119 men.  Their names are listed here on Wikipedia. Read their names.  It was 1924, but nearly the same conditions contribute to the explosions we've seen in the past decade.  This is a weigh station that matters. This is one of the events that dig ruts into the psyche of a people.  Someone can say, "I lost my great-grandfather there," sixty years before he was even born.  Our state is only 150 years old, but our imaginations carry these losses into the future.