Issue #14 - Cutting Room Floor
Poetry Reading
If you weren’t able to attend my poetry reading on Zoom, then you can watch a recording of it by clicking the link above. It’s over an hour, which I know is long, so I’ve included timestamps for some of the highlights.
- 5:40 – Introduction and Greetings
- 7:10 – The Local Imagination
- 8:40 – Hard Wood Rima (Palo Duro)
- 13:20 – Some Valley Cheese
- 21:24 – Ulysses Arrives in Amarillo
- 55:00 – Q&A
What Was Cut
I had to cut a large section from the program so I could squeeze it into the hour I was given. I’m including my original script below (including an extra poem) if you’re interested.
Windvanes
For John
In the evening leisure hours, he’d divine
the scrap bucket for suitable hardwoods, and
by the coppering light, show me the bend
of the grain, then explain with blade how to hand-plane windvanes.
“Where are you?” he asked the vane once, grinning. A puff
of wind dusted past my cheek, scattering ribboned oaklocks
from the bench, and the marvel I’m able to risk
these years since is the wind formed first as his laugh.
My grandfather’s name was John Wieck. I know that saying John Wick to this audience, at this point in time, brings to mind certain images. I assure you my grandfather was not an assassin. He was a farmer, the son of a German immigrant, Ludwig Wieck. He asked my grandmother, Edna Artho, to marry him on December 7, 1941. They were married a month later. Then he was drafted into the war as a medic. He returned in 1945 with Italian shrapnel in his wrist and German gas in his lungs. The Wiecks then settled in for a life of farming in their hometown of Umbarger, Texas. Their hometown, my dad’s hometown, and my hometown.
Umbarger is an ugly word. It’s German, too, like Wieck, but it means an ill-mannered or boorish person. The town was named for a man, Umbarger, who was a former Confederate Lieutenant from Virginia. In the 1880s, after the Red River Wars, the federal government granted land through Texas to the railroads, and Lt. Umbarger was the first person to settle here. I mean after the Apache, and Comanche, and Kiowa. And before them the Clovis and Folsom peoples.
Here’s a poem. It has some German in it, but one word in particular Darß is a lake region on the northern coast of Germany, just below Denmark.
It’s written in Terza Rima, which is the verse Dante used for the Divine Comedy. Eventually this poem will be a book length Panhandle Divine Comedy, but this is the opening section. I began writing it when I read a book about how France was planning to memorialize the 100 year anniversary of the first world war. The authors made the comment that: Specialists detect traces of Survivor’s Syndrome in the grandchildren of Holocaust victims…
So people two generations removed, and sometimes continents removed from an original trauma still bear the effects of their grandparents’ trauma.
Hard Wood Rima
1929
Our horses whickered as we approached mesquite
trees on the canyon rim. We tied their oiled reins
to thorny branches and allowed them to eat
bean pods rattling in the wind. Mesquite disdains
no land in which it’s introduced. Taproots draw
ancient aquifer water. One root sustains
a three-trunk tree through sun-bleaching drought and maw-
grinding wildfire. My father heard of this cañon
from Mexican shepherds, so we rode and saw
the rose-petal bluffs, whorled, wilted, carved in sandstone
by long dead rivers. Vast grasslands collapsed in
desert canyons. A landscape my father’s own
low-German tongue flooded with spit to name. It’s then
he turned to me and said, “You’re born in exile.
Liebe das Land, mein Sohn.” Make love in
this land. I was nine. Deutsch had become a stile
between us; like starving cattle crane and nose
fence along the ditch, lowing tongues stretched as if a mile
lay between them and pasture. Only he knows
why he told me then how he’d fled the lakelands of Darß;
that he’d decided as the honking geese rose,
their black mist of beating wings somehow parsed
into V’s, fifteen, twenty, a hundred skeins
caught the wind, migrating to a warmer marsh.
Birthright laws for firstborn sons passed from Viking thanes
on land raids, left him landless. So he stowed away
on a freighter, got caught, and to an Argentine
baker was indentured for five years to pay
for his passage. When the Austrian crown prince
was shot, Dad was off the coast of Uruguay.
His three elder brothers were killed: in Amiens,
Tannenberg, and rot of gangrene in Messines.
By Versailles, he was the eldest. Inheritance
of familial land he’d never see again
reached him after he’d busted sod in Texas.
From the canyon rim, we saw some aught of green
along the creek, cottonwoods and bois d’arc hedges.
There a Comanche half-breed had carved war bows,
but we knew nothing of him like the rhexis
of an organ causes pain but outwardly shows
no signs of injury. We turned and mounted
our horses. Below, the descendants of crows
that had feasted on war-killed horses counted
one, two, three on the wing. Their circles flung
wide against an inverted sky, surrounded
by red canyon strata. Behind us, trails of dung
from the horses. Beetles rolled spheres to their burrow.
In time, in heat, invasive new mesquite beans hung
from thorny branches. Long ago, Spanish burro
and caballo bearing conquistador had
feasted too on mesquite, which they called palo duro.
So Old Lt. Umbarger had a ranch and set up a trading post along the railroad, so the Panhandle and Santa Fe rail lines gave the town his name with no mind to what the name meant. Not long after, a German Catholic priest, Joseph Reisdorff, planted the Marienkirche, or St. Mary’s Parish. He also established the town of Nazareth 30 miles south. I haven’t been able to find this in my research, but it’s my understanding that when he came to Umbarger, he intended to call the town Bethlehem. That’s the way the story came to me, anyway, in those background conversations that the adults had at dinner tables and over dominoes, while I was passing through. My grandmother, Edna Wieck, passed away five years ago at 94, and I believe she was the last of a generation that could tell me if my memory on the matter is true.
St. Mary’s
I know, thanks to the miracle of technology, that there are people watching from places all across the United States, and you may be wondering why I think writing poems about a family nearly 100 years ago in an unincorporated farm town in the Texas Panhandle would matter in the year of our Lord 2020, the day after the election… I’ll start my answer to that question with a poem by W.H. Auden:
“A poet’s hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”
On a first reading, we might think it’s a silly, throwaway poem about a poet’s vanity, but I think Auden was being very serious when he wrote it.
He’s making a distinction— along with poets like Patrick Kavanaugh, Seamus Heaney, and Wendell Berry— between the Provincial and the Parochial. The ambitious person sent to the boonies, to the provinces on the errands of the empire, as opposed to the people who have chosen to live in a place, a parish, like St. Mary’s, with aims to put down roots and steward life there.
The provincial person, says Wendell Berry, is always looking over his shoulder to see if anybody thinks he’s provincial. Whereas, the parochial person is always assured of the imaginative sufficiency of the parish. The local place. That the local imagination is sufficient.”
As Auden said in his Memoriam of W.B. Yeats, mentioning another local valley:
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry and now that you’re gone, Ireland has her madness, and her weather still For poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its making where executives, politicians, would never want to tamper.
So back to Umbarger, and specifically the St. Mary’s Parish. It’s a small church in an inconsequential town, barely worth noting to anybody who didn’t grow up here, except for the artwork inside the church.
In World War II, Allied forces moved through Italy, and any Italians who surrendered were shipped to POW camps back here in the United States. In fact, 5,000 of them were shipped to a town about 30 miles from the house I grew up in. I’ve been pheasant hunting there with my good friends the Schlabs. Some of these Italian POWs were conscripted to paint murals inside the church. Here’s a picture of the annunciation.
I know that there were no teenaged girls in ancient Palestine that were blond haired and blue eyed. A person might even have told me that these depictions show a cultural bias for people who look like us. There is certainly something to that.
But since I grew up in Umbarger, I know that this particular Mary is modeled on Gerry Gerber, who is still alive, but in 1944, she was a teen-aged girl who would bring the Italians lunch. And that if you look in the background on that flat horizon, you’ll see a farm. And if you had been there in 1944, and that wall wasn’t there, you’d be able to look north and see Otto Skarke’s farm with the barn and grove of weeping willows. And I think the idea is that the announcement Gabriel was making to Mary was supposed to be good news for anybody, even an immigrant girl living in a country that was highly suspicious of your parents’ German language and allegiance to a pope, who lived right in the middle of a country we were at war with.
Of course, if you’d have been there in 1944, then you’d also be aware of the minor scandal when rumors circulated that Gerry Gerber had a crush, maybe kissed, one of those Italian soldiers during those painting sessions.
Can you imagine the rumors that you were snogging one of Mussolini’s fascists? Especially, while my grandfather, John, was sprinting through the Italian Apennines administering morphine to American boys who’d been shot by those fascists? Especially, since an Italian had launched a grenade from his Tromboncino M28, that exploded and put grandad in a hospital that had been gassed by Germans, and gave him asthma for the rest of his life, so that when he returned home and confessed in this church, he wheezed. The locals also know that those Italian POWs were released at the end of the war, and they attended Mass in their own parishes in Italy. And 50 years later, they returned to St. Mary’s in Umbarger, Texas, and they took Communion with my grandparents. God, I think that is beautiful.
Hawk Lie Down with Rabbit
“…the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” - Isaiah 11:7
“Is this what it’s like…a little blood here, a chomp there…must everything whole be nibbled” - Annie Dillard
Hawk’s hooked beak
clips Rabbit’s spine, clips her screech.
Rabbit rolls her eyes to see
a strip of her own twitching meat
worm free through her ripped pelt-pleat
like a maggot sprouts from a spilt gut,
or a playful lover teeth-tugs
a lower lip.
For a moment she has the same
terrible vision as Hawk
atop a thermal loft:
the navel topos of the crops;
the axised earth eastchasing
the sun, convexing tantric
like the deep-heaving
breasts of day,
or the onion uncellaring
of death’s undominion.
To refuse this little death would set
the centrifuge askew:
A peach-stone could
not sprout through
hawk-scat pellets of rabbitfur refùse—
and thus rèfuse the green fuse,
undriving the blossom,
denying Rabbit’s son
the nibble of peach nodes
under skies starved of starved Hawk shadows.
Death eats with three stomachs.
Am I resolved to believe that Hawk’s hooked beak
will sometime be hammered into Hummingbird’s flute?
Could we all be sustained on the nectar of a peach
clinging to a tree?
Amos and Homer
I’ll turn now to another valley. The Tekoa region in Israel outside of Bethlehem. While not a literal valley, one scholar described it as 15 miles of chaos sinking into the Dead Sea. It would be safe to say that it was not an area of consequence. No one would say it’s where things were happening. Let me fill you in on some ancient Israelite history. Once the kingdom was established, they had three famous kings who most people know about: Saul, David, and Solomon. If you don’t know any kings after that, it’s because it gets complicated. After Solomon, there was a civil war. Eleven of the twelve original tribes split and form the northern kingdom of Israel, while the single tribe of Judah retains the southern half. Jerusalem is the capital of Judah, and Samaria becomes the capital of Israel. So to recap: there’s a civil war, the country splits into a northern and southern kingdom, and there’s a lot of injustice happening between the two. Picking up the story, the Old Testament shows us a man named Amos. A shepherd and dresser of figs from Tekoa, in Judah. Not a prophet or the son of a prophet, a shepherd living on the edge of the wilderness. While he was following the flocks, he has a vision of a lion roaring. The Lion of the Lord roars, pacing, crisscrossing, if you read the first couple of chapters, you can almost imagine the lion stalking its prey across both kingdoms before he finally arrives in Israel to address evil King Jeroboam with a message concerning injustice. Modern day readers would recognize some of the imagery: Let justice flow down like water is a line we get from Amos. Martin Luther King Jr, imagined himself in the mold of Amos, marching across the southern kingdom until he could reach the capital of the north to address the leader about matters of injustice. Amos and Dr. King were local, but the moment called for them to be prized elsewhere. The local imagination proved to be sufficient.
Writing about 50 years apart from Amos was a minor Greek poet, you may have heard of him. His name was Homer. But his project was different. He was building a nationalist mythology, as the Greek empire unified from scattered provinces into a world-changing superpower. He told the famous stories of the Trojan War and of Agamemnon and Helen and Achilles and the wily Odysseus.
In Homer’s words, Odysseus was a clever hero beset on all sides by the gods, but just wanting to return to his home on Ithaca. But empires have a way of ending, and some other empire comes along and rewrites the mythology. The Roman poet Virgil made Odysseus, whom he called Ulysses, into a deceiver and a villain. Later the Italian poet Dante, taking his cues from Virgil, put Ulysses in the seventh circle of hell where traitors go. Still later in England, when the sun never set on the British empire, Lord Tennyson rescued Ulysses from hell and again made him a hero, setting off in old age from Ithaca in search of new lands to conquer. And James Joyce, an Irishman, under British rule, made Ulysses a more ambiguous figure in the character of Leopold Bloom.
The rest of the program, which includes “Ulysses Arrives in Amarillo” can be heard in the link at the top of this email.
I’m Seth Wieck. Thanks for the company.