News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Moving is a lot of work and not very much fun. I probably won’t get this email sent out next week as we’ll be in transit, but in two weeks, I hope that the stacks of boxes will be dwindling instead of still rising.
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Rebecca Skabelund reflects on Shanna Swan’s Count Down and takes stock of her sobering findings about how our culture’s toxic chemicals are causing infertility. She concludes on a note that should be resonate with Porchers: “Funny how everything comes back to the soil. It’s not sexy, it’s not going to make anybody gobs of money or bring anyone lasting fame, and it certainly isn’t something that very many people aspire to, but if we humans want to ensure that our families endure, we’d better get on our knees and tend to the earth, together.”
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Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern small town, particularly in relation to Masters’s famous Spoon River Anthology. In Spoon River and its echoes throughout literary and popular culture, innocence struggles with cynicism, tradition with modernity, and a persistent populism with a perpetual elite.
What’s on the docket for next week? A review essay wrestling with a family history of racism and colonialism and one tracing the interconnections between collectivism and violence.
This week the poet Malcome Guite recorded a brief video in which he reads a couple of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems and articulates why he finds them profound and necessary. Guite is a fine reader of poetry, and this example is no exception.