Having grown up as a poet on regional Midwestern anthologies like Common Ground, Beyond Borders, and Prairie Volcano, I was introduced early on to the conventions of deep image poetics. And as a native of rural Minnesota, the landscapes and communities depicted in those anthologies just seemed natural to me—not a stylistic by-product of surrealism’s slow saturation into American poetics. Life was really like those poems. Consciousness moved from surface to depth, and was connected with incomprehensible feelings that had become attached to mythic imagery drawn from western traditions.
These years later, I wonder what a new Midwestern anthology would look like—a collection that could follow traces from those mid-twentieth-century poetics into the poetic and cultural world of the early twenty-first century. If Common Ground were collected today, what would it look like? How do contemporary Midwestern poets explore that conventional deep image sense of the live center of life, the pulsing image at the core that can be glimpsed but never fully known?
This was the mindset I occupied when I dove into new collections by Minnesota poets Ken McCullough and William Waltz. McCullough’s new full-length collection, Broken Gates arrives from the region’s Red Dragonfly Press (even the press’s name is a good emblem of the Midwestern deep image tradition), while William Waltz’s chapbook Confluence of Mysterious Origins, from Factory Hollow Press, comes out of Amherst, where Waltz went to graduate school and which has its own fabulous poetry community. (I should also say, by way of full disclosure, that I’ve met both gents a few times at poetry readings, and I’ve served as an Associate Editor for Waltz’s literary magazine, Conduit, for the past few years.)
From its first line, McCullough identifies with the kind of old school Midwestern poetics that I’m probably unfairly characterizing, here:
Tiny nest, perfect, woven from horse hair
To find such a still point, manifested in the physical world, seems like the existential quest Midwestern poems have famously embodied. For a certain reader, this line might even call back to James Wright’s shy and rippling “Indian ponies” in “A Blessing”—ponies that electrify Wright’s verse and launched this historic thunderbolt in American poetry:
Suddenly I realize
that if I stepped outside my body I would break
into blossom
The poem is a major touch-point for Midwestern poetics, set as it is near Rochester, Minnesota (rumor has it there’s a plaque at an I-90 rest stop honoring the poem’s inception), and, moreover, illustrating the magical ineffability that poetry can almost touch at the center of a moment—a palpable energy that’s better approached through metaphor and imagery than through philosophical logic or taxonomy.
McCullough’s title premise for Broken Gates is underscored by the book’s epigraphs, including this one from Edith Sitwell, on William Blake: “Of course he was cracked, but that is where the light shone through.” In his poems, McCullough seeks moments of pure light in a blissfully broken world. In “The Time,” he cleaves to his visions, physical and symbolic.
I would like the time
to spy on the pond
where the coyotes congregate
I would like the time
in the hollow oak
until vines
wind around me
The act of seeing, of being in the world, hones the observer’s desire to live, and a pure incorporation into the natural would be a best-case scenario for death. Later in the poem, the speaker regrets the “chemlawn halitosis” of his neighbor’s riding lawn mower and the “laptop implant” his partner has acquired. McCullough’s late romantic oaths show his fealty to contact with an uncorrupted world, still inhabited by fellow creatures, whose presence remains available to us:
oh, in time
before oblivion takes us
I’ll wake you
and walk you to trees
where silver eyes watch
Throughout the collection, McCullough draws on a wealth of traditions and travels to a variety of locales; the poems understand the speaker’s place in time and within a weave of natural and cultural histories. As one of the cover blurbs notes, McCullough has a shamanic way of adjusting the existential level of his poems—from the box elder bug to the sense of prehistory we carry in our bodies. Yet if the main desire is to connect with something transcendent, McCullough’s poems are also up for complexity and connectivity.
They might
raise the level of your essence or
dapple the lone rider on your horizon.
They might sink intact into the
Akhasic record and all you remember
is invisible hands on your back.
In short, Broken Gates is a nimble, fluent collection situated in a great tradition of American poetics. McCullough’s presence is thoughtful, passionate, and kind. Reading the book is like having an excellent conversation with someone who’s smart and wise and welcoming.
I fully realize that “Midwestern” is unnecessary, as is “Minnesota” earlier in the essay. It’s not about identifying allegiances to a state or region. It’s much more about the persisting legacy of deep image poetics, which could be considered a little surprising, given how long we’ve known that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Maybe we’re a speck elapsing on a speck in an unraveling dust bunny, but we still like when poems come to rest. Is that Midwestern? No. Probably it was all Spanish to start out with. Maybe French, or Italian. Yes, if we’re Midwestern at all, we’re probably secretly prone to the occasional dream of being Italian.