I know B H Fairchild’s poetry, and you, sir, are no B H Fairchild.

You do more than include an epigraph from his luminescent poem, “Speaking the Names;” you reference several of the lines and ideas from the poem. But while Fairchild’s poem is an homage to people down on their luck, you portray them as maudlin, morally lazy, and ultimately, not worthy of our respect.

Toward the end of his poem, Fairchild writes,

What became of the boy with nine fingers?
The midwife from Yellow Horse who raised geese?
They turned their back on the hard life,
and from the tree line along the river they seem to rise now,
her plain dress bronze in moonlight, his wheatshock hair in flames.

By incorporating some surrealism straight out of James Wright, Fairchild is able to imbue his characters with dignity, stoicism, and a resignation that does not exclude hope. You may think you portray the nine-fingered boy and woman from Yellow Horse more realistically, more honestly. But in truth, all you are doing is putting them up as straw men to justify the narrator’s bleak outlook –

…though I’ve got no right, I somehow
don’t care. Why not hate the rich? It’s easy,
and some days easy’s what I need….
……….when I open my eyes everything
is shattered. This country I call home is, like yours,
lost, and my people too are lost, like me,

so late me hate with them, let me sit up at the bar
…let me speak the names of the dead and get righteous,
at least for one more round.

Are those last two lines a direct slap at the last stanza of Fairchild’s poem? Is “Pete,” the person the narrator is addressing, a stand-in for B H Fairchild? Are we supposed to think your narrator is more honest than Fairchild’s narrator?

Your mistake is in assuming that the narrator is the focus of Fairchild’s poem. Rather, his focus is on those who have left – either through moving away or through death. But by ending with a narrator who just wants to hate the rich… "at least for one more round,” you focus on a morally flabby man who craves what’s easy.

Wright allows his characters to transcend their harsh environment; you have your main character sit on his butt and drink another round. Wright searches for and finds beauty in his characters; you search for and find despair. As I said in my introduction, you, sir, are no B H Fairchild.

SPEAKING THE NAMES by B. H. Fairchild

When frost first enters the air
in the country of moon and stars,
the world has glass edges, and the hard glint
of crystals seeping over iron
makes even the abandoned tractor seem all night sky and starlight.

On the backporch taking deep breaths like some miracle cure,
breathe, let the spirit move you,
here I am after the long line of cigarettes
that follows grief like a curse, trying to breathe, revive,
in this land of revivals and lost farms…

it is no good to grow up hating the rich.
In spring I would lie down among pale anemone and primrose
and listen to the river’s darkening hymn, and soon
the clouds were unraveling like the frayed sleeves of field hands,
and ideology had flown with the sparrows.

The cottonwood that sheltered the hen house is a stump now,
and the hackberries on the north were leveled years ago.
Bluestem hides the cellar, with its sweet gloom of clay walls and bottles.
The silo looms over the barn, whose huge door swallowed daylight,
where a child could enter his own death.

What became of the boy with nine fingers?
The midwife from Yellow Horse who raised geese?
They turned their backs on the hard life,
and from the tree line along the river they seem to rise now,
her plain dress bronze in the moonlight, his wheatshock hair in flames.

Behind me is a house without people. And so, for my sake
I bring them back, watching the quick cloud of vapor that blooms
and vanishes with each syllable: O. T. and Nellie Swearingen,
their children, Locie, Dorrel, Deanie, Bill, and the late Vinna Adams,
whose name I speak into the bright and final air.

Thank you, ma'am. I am edified. That is a poem.

You certainly scored on this one MA. To quote another guy's work, sarcastically, then use some of his lines in your own work without attribution? Amazing, this Wilkins.

Bottomfish, Wilkins did indeed make an attribution to Fairchild in the use of his epigraph -- "It is no good to grow up hating the rich" -- B H Fairchild.

Nor is it a no-no to refer to someone else's poetry -- T S Eliot did it all the time.

But the problem is, such a use invariably invites the reader to compare the two poets. I don't think Wilkins was necessarily sarcastic, although perhaps he thought Fairchild was wearing rose-colored glasses. At any rate, I do think Fairchild's poem is infinitely better in its handling of theme, in its use of plain-language, and in its use of imagery.

Plus, I'm a big big fan of Fairchild. Here's one of my favorite Father's Day poems --

SONG by B H Fairchild

Gesang ist Dasein

A small thing done well, the steel bit paring
the cut end of the collar, lifting delicate
blue spirals of iron slowly out of lamplight

into darkness until they broke and fell
into a pool of oil and water below.
A small thing done well, my father said

so often that I tired of hearing it and lost
myself in the shop’s north end, an underworld
of welders who wore black masks and stared

through smoked glass where all was midnight
except the purest spark, the blue-white arc
of the clamp and rod. Hammers made dull tunes

hacking slag, and acetylene flames cast shadows
of men against the tin roof like great birds
trapped in diminishing circles of light.

Each day was like another. I stood beside him
and watched the lathe spin on, coils of iron
climbing into dusk, the file’s drone, the rasp,

and finally the honing cloth with its small song
of things done well that I would carry into sleep
and dream of men with wings of fire and steel.

Bert Fairchild, 1906 – 1990.

Hi MA,

I too love Fairchild, and had not seen this poem of his before, but I think I read it -- and thus today's poem as well -- differently than you do. I'm not sure. And I'm not saying I think Wilkins was all that successful or engaging (and set himself up by presuming to write a sort of "epilogue" to Fairchild's poem -- but I think that is what he was attempting, and I don't find as much fault with him for trying as it seems you do ...

To me, Fairchild was saying that the farm/country folks he grew up with, grew to react to hardship of their lives (silos to fall to injury or death in, struggling to hang on to their farms -- do you know when Fairchild wrote this one? Perhaps in the wake of the mid-80s when so many farmers were having to sell out, no longer able to make ends meet and being foreclosed, leaving abandoned farmhouses) ... I sense Fairchlid was saying that the hard life had led many of his remembered "names" had come to envy the perceived easier life, had "turned their backs on hardship" and, i'm inferring, moved to cities ... And Fairchild is wondering what has become of them, is conjuring them back, evoking them back to where he wishes they might have found peace and been content with the companionship he misses ...

I sense that Wilkins, then, was trying to pursue the stories of those who "turned their backs" -- and suggest that they were indeed deceived by their "grass is greener" abandonings of farmlife for the cities, that they came to know grief and tragedy and suffering there too, that they would -- in his view -- have been better off -- that we'd all be better off, city and countryfolk alike, if these uprootings and envious ambitions, hating -- but then seeking to "get one's own piece" of -- wealth ...

And Wilkins depicts the reversals -- with the "city guy" being new boss now governing their lives, he and the banker, who represent all that has made the life they once knew get squeezed out -- lead him to -- and here I agree with you -- despair...

I found one line a bit more complex (to fathom?) than the others --
and thought I've got no right, I somehow
don't care. Why not hate the rich? It's easy,

I think he's saying that he's got no right to not care -- that it (should) befall all of us to care, that therein lies the bane of it all, when people stop caring -- the rich stopped caring -- why not hate them -- but he seems to lament what has led people to then emulate them too ...

Was that in fact how you read these two poems and their respective 'messages' too? I'm not sure if my reading is all that different from yours but it didn't lead me to quite the vilification you felt, albeit no particular desire to 'defend' the poem either...

As always, an interesting take, zinya. But I don't think the people Wilkins discusses left for citylife. The Yellow Horse woman's daughter died in a ditch, not at a city intersection. The slender boy who smoked got wiped out on "Highway 12 where a trucker making time / hit him broadside at eighty."

hit him broadside at eighty. But you know this.
You've made your wise peace,

and though I've no right, I somehow
don't care. Why not hate the rich? It's easy

Here, I think Wilkins is directly addressing Fairchild. And note, he mentions the "wise" peace Fairchild has made with the situation.

Like you, I puzzled over "though I have no right." Perhaps he was saying his POV is not necessarily better than Fairchild's POV.

I disagree with your statement about those who left being deceived by the "grass-is-greener" promise. Or, rather, I should say, I didn't see that in the poem. Because at the crucial point when the narrator should say something about those people, he, instead, starts talking about HIMSELF!!

And then he says, "my people too are lost, like me, / so let me hate with them." OK, granted, small town logging towns or other midwest towns are full of people who've endured a lot. But who is this narrator to assume they all "hate." And why the hell should we "let" him hate even if everyone else does so?

Is this a poem about them

or

is it a poem about me and I'm lost and I hate?

He could have written a fine sympathetic poem about how desperate people learn to hate without ever mentioning himself. (And I remember that pretty good poem awhile back about the desperate father who buys bear bile to save his daughter.) But instead, I think he was trying for too much -- discussing the beaten down people AND the poet-narrator who is different from Fairchild.

I say phooey!

Nor is it a no-no to refer to someone else's poetry -- T S Eliot did it all the time.

Eliot made such references, I think, in the context of a shared culture, and a disintegrating culture, dimly recalled images moving at the edges of shared consciousness like certain Giacometti sculptures. Sometimes with footnotes. The expectations he put on his reader were fair, and essential to the poem itself. The problem here is that Wilkins really doesn't invite the reader to compare the two poems, and the second poem doesn't really stand on its own.

The problem here is that Wilkins really doesn't invite the reader to compare the two poems,

I sort of disagree, falcon. Wilkins' epigraph is from the very Fairchild poem he uses in his poem. I suppose he could have mentioned the title of Fairchild's poem in his epigraph. But he does use the title "The Names," which is a direct reference to Fairchild's title "Speaking the Names."

and the second poem doesn't really stand on its own.

Not sure. I was lucky I was able to come up with the Fairchild poem Wilkins was referencing. But even without that, I think the poem is (mostly) understandable. The only problematic lines are "You've made your wise peace" and "This country I call home is, like yours, lost."

Overall, I do think some poems can be appreciated without an understanding of all the allusions.

Gotta go listen to NPR on Miz Clinton and Mister Obama....

MA

Surely it matters that in this poem hating the rich is something best done when drunk. It's not a permanent stance or an answer: it's a posture, and the speaker knows it to be a posture. Hating the rich is a trap because its an admission of defeat (a bit like drinking the another round sounds to me not like an ending but the beginning of a long evening, and a hangover besides). The narrator recognizing that making peace is wise

Since I'm here anyway, I will defend the poem. First on grounds that the point is not hating the rich, it's understanding a moment in which the speaker allows himself to hate the rich. Second on grounds of sound. I like the loose syllabics, I like the assonance (beat, mean, wheat, flame in the opening lines, hate, bar, banker, chaps in the last stanza -- also speak/least. The speech feels natural to me. If the narrator isn't saying anything interesting, that's no great trick, but well, maybe it's just a mood that hit me.

Hi to you both!

Surely it matters that in this poem hating the rich is something best done when drunk. It's not a permanent stance or an answer: it's a posture, and the speaker knows it to be a posture. Hating the rich is a trap because its an admission of defeat (a bit like drinking the another round sounds to me not like an ending but the beginning of a long evening, and a hangover besides). The narrator recognizing that making peace is wise

Astute comment, august, but help me with the last two lines --

let me speak the names of dead and get righteous,
at least for one more round.

The word I have a problem with is "righteous." Is he saying that his anger is righteous, or is he criticizing Fairchild? For me, the word "righteous" has a negative connotation. And it is Fairchild, after all, who, at the end of his poem, names the people.

Also -- in vino veritas -- when we're drunk we tell the truth. But the narrator is the one sitting at the bar. He doesn't mention anyone else with him. As I said in an earlier post, I wish Wilkins had concentrated on the other people, instead of injecting himself into the narrative -- except as the one who has read Fairchild. (an admittedly tough combo, to be sure).

I agree with your premise, august, but I just don't think Wilkins was able to pull off the poem he was trying to write.

Hi yourself, august. I've been saddened lately, thinking about all those Chinese families who trusted the government, had only one child, pinned all their hopes on that one child, had that child die in one of the many many schools that collaspsed during the quake when the buildings around the schools stayed up, and now, now, the government decides to arrrest the protesting parents. I would like to think the central government would be smart enough and honest enough to get to the bottom of the corruption and dismiss the local officials who let the shoddy construction happen.

MA

PS
If you're in Baltimore Thursday night, I'm doing my usual Li Po and Tu Fu routine at a local library....

Unreferenced, this poem still had apparent meaning. Obviously, upon reading your critique and companion poem, it wasn't precisely the meaning Wilkins intended, but face value meaning nonetheless.

Even without a referential poem, this one keeled over. Especially in light of all the hijacked, badly appropriated moments, it just about sunk itself.

Still, I like these lines:

Why not hate the rich? It's easy,
and some days easy's what I need.

well, actually i'm amazed you made any sense at all of my post - I can't. I only slept 3 hours last night and somehow i think the fallout first kicked in while writing that post - sentences that went nowhere and i'm not sure my meaning did either ... and now i'm completely crashing, at the magical 5 pm downcycle hour for crashing ...

I don't think even I really meant to say the Wilkins characters had died in the city ... but if I did, then i at least retract that ...

Just writing to throw in a few more wrinkles on my way to crashdom...and heaven knows why i'm dithering on this but... it seems kind of perversely fun at the moment [given how much work i'm not doing instead but have no braincells for]

Okay, I looked up Ingomar and Highway 12, which places this poem in Montana (there was also an Ingomar near Pittsburgh but no Hwy 12... But look at this wiki "bio" of Ingomar (how does this place get its own wiki page?):

Ingomar is a small, unincorporated village in northwestern Rosebud County, Montana, USA, along the route of U.S. Highway 12. The town was established in 1908 as a station stop on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, then under construction in Montana. Although the land around Ingomar attracted numerous homesteaders during the decade following the railroad's completion, the region proved to be far too arid and inhospitable for intensive agricultural use, and by the 1920s the town was in decline. The railroad through the area was abandoned in 1980, and only a handful of people remain in Ingomar today.

So now I have a problem with a problem situating people in the 90s (ten years after Reagan bankruptcy) in a place that was abandoned already by 1980 ... ??

More poetically of interest, what i was going to throw into the hopper before falling on that little nugget has to do with pronouns:

Who is "you" in Wilkins' poem? There is no "you" in Fairchild's, only "they" and "me" ... But in Wilkins, there is not only a "me" and a "they" (and the "they/them" has now been ratcheted up into the role of the "they/them" who are typically objects of hatred, in this case "the rich") but also there is a "we" and a 'you" ..

Is the "you" perhaps Fairchild (who's "made his wise peace"?), that Wilkins is addressing? Is it some unspecified imagined crony? is it the hapless reader (but have we made our wise peace?) who then gets sucked into being part of the "we" that choked on cigs on the playground as well? Whoever the "you" is, is part of the "we." Is "you" some abstraction? (Like the "ideology" in Fairchild's poem -- and which ideology was that? was it progress?)

Well, that's enough for now ... I'm thinking there could conceivably be something to appreciate buried in this haystack of a poem but i haven't gotten there yet and am not wagering that there is ...

which places this poem in Montana

I'd mentioned this in my critique. It was this first point of reference which spurred my line of thinking about the narrator being Native american and about the title having Native significance.

The Fairchild poem notwithstanding, this interp. still holds its shape.

Now I'm thinking maybe Wilkins' narrator had some credible griping to do. Even the rich in this town would evoke pity: <link>

Mostly, I was 200 miles west of there in a town that was on the slopes of the Crazy Mountain which were foothills to the Rockies. My experiences were disastrous but the landscape was stunning.

Indeed you did. Hi, wnc, in my sleepless zombie state i had not made it beyond MA's thread but have now seen yours and confess i had not thought of a native american pov but it does seem valid to me and adds some sense to some lines which otherwise are more 'unseizable' ...

nice photo you came up with ... i have been to such parts of the US, where it does feel like another world though not in this part of Montana - I only know the northwest corner, but in Wyoming and upper Nevada i've seen similar locales. But our ole friend Powder River here at PF is from the neighboring county to Ingomar's so he could certainly visualize what this poet is up to conjuring...

Well, okay, on the riff of the geography of the poem, add some sociology to back up the poverty, also from wiki -- seems the Native Americans (1/3 of county population) would likely be Cheyennes - and the largest component of the 2/3 white majority is of German descent

two excerpts and a link... fwiw...


This wiki excerpt is about Rosebud County, which Ingomar is part of (oh, and the Ingomar public school is on the registry of historic sites - presumably where the poem's cigarettes-at-recess occurs):


As of the census[2] of 2000, there were 9,383 people, 3,307 households, and 2,417 families residing in the county. The population density was 2 people per square mile (1/km²). There were 3,912 housing units at an average density of 1 per square mile (0/km²). The racial makeup of the county was 64.40% White, 0.23% Black or African American, 32.41% Native American, 0.29% Asian, 0.65% from other races, and 2.01% from two or more races. 2.33% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 19.8% were of German, 7.2% Irish, 7.1% English and 6.9% Norwegian ancestry according to Census 2000. 87.6% spoke English, 8.3% Cheyenne, 1.9% Spanish and 1.0% German as their first language.

There were 3,307 households out of which 38.70% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 56.00% were married couples living together, 11.80% had a female householder with no husband present, and 26.90% were non-families. 24.30% of all households were made up of individuals and 8.40% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.81 and the average family size was 3.34.
In the county the population was spread out with 33.50% under the age of 18, 7.20% from 18 to 24, 25.70% from 25 to 44, 24.80% from 45 to 64, and 8.90% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females there were 100.90 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 99.20 males.

The median income for a household in the county was $35,898, and the median income for a family was $41,631. Males had a median income of $38,688 versus $20,640 for females. The per capita income for the county was $15,032. About 17.80% of families and 22.40% of the population were below the poverty line, including 31.80% of those under age 18 and 15.10% of those age 65 or over.

and another (about Rosebud County), with some photos too, from:

http://www.rosebudmontana.com/

This is also near the spot where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer camped along the banks of Rosebud Creek on the way to his ultimate defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. North of Rosebud on MT 446, Far West State Recreation Area, along Yellowstone River, offers swimming, fishing, boating (a boat ramp is provided) and tent camping.

Rosebud Battlefield State Park
This 3,000-acre Eastern Montana rolling prairie park preserves the site of the June 17, 1876, battle between the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians and General Crook’s soldiers. Remote, quiet, and undeveloped, the park includes prehistoric sites and the homestead and ranch of the Kobold family. Take your own food, your camera, and plenty of time to appreciate a slice of time and place.

The population density was 2.0 persons per square mile in 1997, making Rosebud County a frontier county.

The Northern Cheyenne Reservation is located in Rosebud County.
The county's leading source of income is the electric, gas, and sanitary services industry.
The county is served by a county health department located in Forsyth and a Board of Health.