Rust / River / Remembering

You know you're in the Midwest when...

I've missed you, dear petticoat rustlers! For the past week, I've been traveling through the Midwest with my husband and our dog, visiting family and friends and remembering the rusty, gritty beauty of that part of this country. I am delighted to share some highlights from that trip in the form of photos and musings... 

From the shores of the Mississippi in Iowa, we watched a decades-old battle take place. Since 1987, the town of Le Claire, Iowa has pit its finest tug-of-war competitors against competitors from Port Byron, Illinois. A giant rope, weighing nearly 700 pounds, is stretched across the Mississippi river where it divides these states. This Twain-esque tug-of-war sends river water splashing into the air as the rope emerges from the Mississippi and gets taut as the teams struggle to win more rope. Eleven teams comprised of twenty strong people battle for three-minutes at a time; the winning state is victorious in at least 6 of these eleven contests. It was thrilling-- I lost my voice from cheering so loudly...

Rope stretching between Iowa and Illinois, pulled taut over the Mississippi river.

In the photo, they look very serene... but I can assure you, they are pulling with all of their might. 

An Iowa tugger, feeling strong (and mysterious).

My husband grew up along the Mississippi, in Iowa, and so while we were there we visited landmarks around his hometown that he used to pass all the time as a kid. These landmarks included hand-painted signs, murals, hidden drives, and... the Mississippi itself. I think sometimes it is easy to take for granted the mystery and allure of a major body of water if you grew up next to it. So after touring neighborhoods in the car, we hopped onto a boat and toured a little bit of the mighty river itself...

I also grew up next to a major body of water: Lake Michigan. The lake is so big it can be seen from outer space-- I remember many times looking out over the waves and easily convincing myself it was my own little sea... The waters of Lake Michigan carved their way into the state of Wisconsin, and created some of the most beautiful freshwater beaches right next to my home city, Milwaukee.  

Milwaukee is where I grew up, went to college, met my husband, and got married. That city is full of memories and family, rust and bricks, beer and water. We only had about 6 hours to visit Milwaukee, but in that short amount of time, we tried to see as many of those things as possible. The lake, the art museum, the parks, the buildings, the people...

        

Details from inside Milwaukee Art Museum

From the Milwaukee Art Museum's exhibit on turn-of-the-century tattoo artist, Amund Dietzel

The unbeatable delights of my friend's new restaurant in Milwaukee, Café La Paloma

From Cafe La Paloma

The great big custard in the sky means you've arrived in heaven, otherwise known as Leon's. 

We went back to the Midwest with both the fresh eyes of forgetting and the wise eyes of remembering. Quotidian, casual details can be accidentally and easily forgotten when you go away; returning and finding those details, just as you'd left them, can unexpectedly remind you of their significance. Those things that you have etched into your memories, on the other hand, seem changed when you visit them after a long time, and you happily (and a bit melancholically) see evidence of the march of time, despite your absence. It is a relief to know things you love will change-- murals will fade, families will grow, water will recede and swell, buildings will burn, get repainted, tumble down, or get new occupants.

The Midwest is made of the wonderful (and crazy) people that live there, the rust-belt architecture of industry and hard work, and in some small way, the Midwest is made of the people that used to live there and who left behind a tiny mark of their presence. Like Amund Dietzel who, after arriving shipwrecked in Milwaukee's shores, pressed ink into pages and skin and history, forever affecting the legacy of the region and the style of its people.

It is a place in which I will always feel at home, a place I will always feel compelled to return to, a place I will constantly be remembering and forgetting.  

Black and Blue: Noir, Blues, and Soulfood mourning in Kevin Young

Photo source

Kevin Young is without a doubt one of my favorite English-language poets of the 21st century. With an economical use of words, he readily opens the unfinished wooden doors of his poems to his readers-- the seemingly simple words of his verses spread in your mind like a strong liquor, doubling and tripling in meaning as you work your way through his books and drink in the uniquely American spectacle of blues, jazz, hardboiled detectives, and soul food. 

Young has the ability to capture these manifestations of Americanness as beautiful, magical, sensual. Yet  he laces the very same lines that celebrate these traditions with a dose of the intense pain and longing which forged them. Through this integration of pain and beauty, Young creates moods and ambiences which bridge the personal and the universal through the sharing of food and drink, music and memory, mourning and loss.

He is a prolific poet, with 7 books of poetry published to date. Of these 7 books, so far I've read Jelly Roll (inspired by the blues), Black Maria (poems that tell a hardboiled detective story, complete with a femme fatale and thugs), Dear Darkness (odes to soul food and the poet's father), and For the Confederate Dead (poems about the painful legacy of American slavery and Jim Crow laws). 

Jelly Roll was his third book of poetry and the first one I read (I actually got to hear the poet read a selection of poems from this book!). Jelly Roll is a collection of verses that draw heavily on the prominent motifs of American blues. Without being derivative or forced, these poems become fully blues in their rhythm and voice-- a sexy and sorrowful melody that feels both past and present at once. 

For example, in his poem "Sorrow Song," Young expresses that traveling lovesickness that causes concern over one's very soul. Young marks the poem with dashes and parenthesis and line breaks that seem to become the breaths and moans in the songs that inspired these verses:

Photo source

"Saying goodbye to the body

her body, to what

we knew or growed

used to--

on the subway

home, her mouth still

on my mouth 

like the gospel

(thick as a cough

or its syrup) hummed

by a woman on the loud

orange seat beside me.

What else besides us

is this? working

down a bone, a bright

hymn--asking, asking."   

Le sigh. See what I mean?! Brilliant. I love this guy. 

In so few words, there is already an atmosphere and a mood established; the fresh memory of love is burdened by a goodbye and the uncertainties of the path one is (not?) taking. The rhythm of the poem holds true to an old blues song, but the subway is such a contemporary image of progress-- here we have cause to sing the blues once more, for even as the world progresses, heartache and doubt can still trouble a man's mind. And the poem provides this sad moan-- the woman beside him humming "thick as a cough/ or its syrup" accompanies his lonely journey home. 

Of the four books of Young's poetry that I have read so far, my favorite is Dear Darkness. This is the first book of poetry that Young wrote after dealing with his father's untimely death. Many of the poems in this book combine descriptions of soul food dishes with the process of remembering and mourning a family member. 

The juxtaposition of these two activities--eating, a life affirming activity, and mourning, an activity directly tied to death--unveils an inherent and lovely strangeness of human experience in which, a meal that lasts only the 10 minutes it takes to be eaten, can contain the continuity of a family's history.  

I am utterly in love with "Ode to Kitchen Grease" and "Ode to Pork"in which Young addresses, in second person, the kitchen grease like a family member ("... Grey/ grandfather, once clear/ your grew cloudy/ with age so we put you/ in a home, & out/ of ours. ...") and pork like a lover ("Your heaven is the only one/ worth wanting--/ you keep me up all night/ cursing your four-/ letter name, the next/ begging for you again.") 

In many of the other odes in this book, Young slips in details about his father or mother or cousin or auntie-- details that link the sensory experiences to very specific people and events and remind the reader that, in spite of the humor Young manages to write into all these poems, they also contain hurt and sadness. 

***

I cannot recommend Young's poetry enough, and I discovered that last year (2012), he published a non-fiction book of essays called The Grey Album: on the Blackness of Blackness, a book that takes on cultural criticism, and lyrical chorus to illustrate the African American tradition of lying-storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, 'jazzing,'" according to his website. I also would really like to get a hold of his other books of poetry that I'm missing, including To Repel Ghosts, a collection inspired by the visual artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

...In the meantime, the Band of Wild Petticoats gallops towards new literature...and new poets. Until next time!