Issue #21 - The Poet, the Place, & Regional Empowerment
The Poet and Place
There's an easily quotable line in Wallace Stegner's essay "A Sense of Place" -- no place is a place until it has had a poet.
He quickly clarifies, "No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry."
Of course Stegner was a writer, a writer's writer even. I can imagine a farmer expressing the same sentiment: No place is a place until it has received my plow.
And the banker chortles at them both.
The Place
Regardless of your trade preference, it requires human attention to draw a place in from the edges of the map where sea monsters and chaos rule. A cartographer inking boundaries encourages people to imagine one place as distinct from another.
My region called the Texas Panhandle is bigger than West Virginia but contains fewer people than Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's comprised of 26 counties, nearly half of which were sold off to pay for the largest capitol building in these 50 states, including the one in Washington D.C. There's a line in the 2012 movie "Bernie" that recognizes the Panhandle as being left out of the rest of Texas. Sparse population simply means lack of human attention. What is there to make of a place where there is no one to make it.
What our area lacks in people, it makes up for in agricultural produce, wind, and petroleum which people in more populated places exploit. Wind farms have become a common feature of our landscape, but not a single kilowatt hour is consumed here. The locals don't even own the windfarms. Google owns a $200 million stake in a massive 161 megawatt farm west of Amarillo. It powers 60,000 homes in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex; the profit goes to California; we wipe grit from our eyes. Meanwhile, we use coal shipped in from Wyoming, speaking of sparse populations. At least we're independent of ERCOT. Sometimes it pays to be forgotten.
Regional Empowerment
The current president of my alma mater, West Texas A&M University, has been publishing a series of posts about the aims of a regional research university.
Regional Empowerment | Reflections On Higher Education
Walter Wendler, West Texas A&M University President and John Sharp, The Texas A&M University System Chancellor Second in a series on Regional Universities. Borrowing from a working paper, &…
The school was founded as a teachers' college to supply educators for the region's new towns springing up around ranches and oil rigs.
WTAMU recently celebrated its 100-year anniversary. A lot has happened in that century, including a very public skirmish with a billionaire, but overall the university has grown and adapted and been successful. Since I graduated in 2003, they've added new dormitories, a fine arts and performance building, expanded their engineering program, built an athletic complex, commissioned new art installations, and recently unveiled a massive veterinary research facility. The goal is to be a top regional research university that can increase our area's economic viability. I have several friends who work there, and as a poet, WT has been kind to me, inviting me to opportunities my publishing record does not warrant.
Researching agriculture, engineering, and petroleum opportunities all make sense, but I wonder how effective they can be if they aren't also developing the area's imagination about itself.
Dr. Alex Hunt at the Center for the Study of the American West seems to be on that track more than anyone. Still that organization's reaches are mostly limited to academia.
For a while, WT hosted a writer-in-residence. The author had a nice office in the Cornette Library where she kept minimal office hours, churned out two romance novels per year, and was obligated to teach a small workshop/conference in the summers. She's a nice lady and had been a perennial bestseller for decades before WT offered her the position, more for WT's prestige than any benefit to her. I'm told she took the modest salary they offered her to vacation in Europe every summer.
When she retired, the position was offered to the legitimate poet and novelist Chera Hammons. There was squabbling in higher admin meetings about the value of that position and within a year the writer-in-residence lost the office, received a teaching load, then finally was cut from the budget all together. I wrote then how a regional university ought to be subsidizing the stories we tell about ourselves in the same way that they're conducting veterinarian research. Here's one reason why: when that grumpy billionaire Boone Pickens packed his bags and left the Panhandle, he said it was easier to get people to move to the moon than Amarillo. You can't get good help if there is no vibrant stories for those people to enter into. There is economic value in good writing, even if the commodity of the writing itself doesn't fetch a high price.
I've been reading Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination. It's a staple of 20th-century Christian theology, and therefore, admittedly, outside many of your concerns. But he speaks of a prophet as someone who is concerned about justice for a community. He says that a prophet must be able to criticize a community's enculturations as well as energize them to take on new ways to imagine themselves. A poet and a prophet are not the same thing, but I think they can overlap sometimes. I'll paraphrase a couple of his points replacing the word "prophet" with "poet."
The poet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.
He goes on to describe how a prophet ought to imagine an alternative community from that which the empire prescribes.
- The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and history-making community.
- This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace genuine breaks from imperial reality.
- This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire.
Again, I'm interchanging the words prophet and poet here, and they are different vocations. For one, a poet is merely someone with a facility for language. That skill can be co-opted to write commercial jingles or presidential speeches. A prophet, who has a great interest in the community's tradition and the systems of language, should never be co-opted by the community's imperial enculturations.
As bummed as I was that WT axed Chera's position, maybe it's better that there is no "official" poet. That should be an independent position where one is free to criticize and imagine alternative communities. Sometimes it pays to be forgotten.
In sort of related news: James Decker, the mayor out in Stamford, Texas, seems to appreciate the power of local imagination, in a parochial sense, not the provincial. He writes a new essay every Friday about the nuts and bolts of what makes a small town work. It's always worth reading.
I'm Seth Wieck. Thanks for the company. If you liked something here, feel free to share it or respond to the email.