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.

Overburden

Overburden

Larry Gibson, Keeper of the Mountains, 1946-2012

Island of kin and courage, his Mountain rises
as profits leach the seams surrounding rows

of headstones his generous No looked to, his stars
cradled in the mountaintop above the scores

that death-treads rasp after trumpet blasts
loosen the veil of earth. For as long as it lasts,

(and it will last if money can be made)
Larry Gibson from Kayford Mountain said,

No. I will not sell; this much is certain
silent though he is. Once, the rock’s wild burden

and idle summer grasses hushed until
his notion shook the dragline’s swoop and spill;

a buyer’s truck emblazoned with white dust
descended dumbly towards the sacrificed;

hundreds lay in an appalachian sleep,
save one -- he never compromised his keep,

whose summit-memoir summons our burdens, too:
Now that you’ve seen it; what are you going to do?  

With Larry peaceful as the mound of grass
he kept close as he could to what it was,

Kayford’s birds, small stars who persevere,
sing sure as water down a hill, and as clear.

poem by Jacob Strautmann (forthcoming in Poetry Northeast, Spring 2013)

Larry Gibson 1946-2012

I never met him.  I regret it.  I only make it back to West Virginia once a year, and the extra three-hour trip south from the Northern Panhandle seemed too long this past summer in between family commitments.  Now, it seems like it would have taken no effort at all to make the pilgrimage so many have made to Kayford Mountain.  My friend Mike had the good fortune of visiting him the summer before.  He said Larry was very clear.

He had a specific question for his visitors:
"Now that you've seen it; what are you going to do about it?"

from the New York Times Green Blog

and this video from the Guardian.

Frackin' Fracking

The business person laughing about the increased traffic really burns me.