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MARK VINZ: Maybe rightly so. But there's another use of region, use of place in the sense that all poetry, really, all art is made up of the particular and perhaps something implied beyond the particular. People have called it universal. I'm not sure that's a very good word. But that sort of mixture takes place. And I think most writers are tied in some way to the particular. And one of the most obvious ways to be tied to the particular is through a particular region or place.

BILL SIEMERING: And yet it is the job of the poet, as you say, to generalize from the specific, to strike those universal feelings and experiences if they can.

MARK VINZ: Yes. Yes, I believe so.

BILL SIEMERING: Maybe you could read a couple of those that would illustrate that.

MARK VINZ: This is a poem called "Heartland," which was written-- again, it's a very Midwestern poem. It deals with experiences that I've had and many people have had driving in the Midwest and the feelings I get, especially from the sort of things one sees. This poem deals especially with the dead and dying animals one sees at the side of the highway. It's called "In the Heartland."

"Who can say where the birds in this country crash so hopelessly against the windows of passing cars, the ditches by the highway are filled with their broken wings, the intestines of rotting rabbits, raccoon fur, a calf trying to rise from the pulpy mound that used to be his hind quarters,

Three dogs, one without a head, a cat hanging from a thin wire noose on a dead elm tree branch. All along the main streets, TV sets are turning off. The houses look like old men squatting in long rows, ready to pitch forward into the Earth as easily as pebbles slipping into still water."

This is a poem called "Line-Storm," and it deals with, again, a personal experience I had as a child visiting a farm and a fascination I always had for the different varieties of farm machinery, which seemed to me as a child to have mythic animal qualities. And so I wrote the poem as a sort of fantasy invoking that quality.

"Line-Storm." "Only the wind is moving now, The grass turning in upon itself, The boots of the farmer stand empty on the front porch. Even the windows sleep. Suddenly the eyes of the clouds are open. The lightning stalks, the wind rose five miles down, closer and closer. Out in the fields, all the abandoned machines begin to awaken.

Corn pickers, combines, balers circling in a heavy dance, rooting the ground with their snouts. An ancient John Deere tractor is leading them westward toward the conspiracy of clouds, the iron voices of the lightning. And now they are waiting, steaming and shuddering in the first assault of rain."

BILL SIEMERING: Certainly anyone that's spent any time outdoors and seen the farm machinery at harvest would find that a particularly meaningful poem, I think.

MARK VINZ: This poem deals with a recollection to childhood in a small town in North Dakota to a train that I was very attached to that used to roar through the town. It's called "The Oriental Limited." And that explains--

BILL SIEMERING: It's a very romantic title to go through the prairie.

MARK VINZ: There are many romantic things in the prairie. In fact, probably too many. Anyway, this is called "First Summer, a Reckoning."

"They told me it was my home town, but I had never lived there. My eyes were for cities, conspirators from a land of great brown buildings. Not this place with its one post office, one hospital, garage, greenhouse, theater. I had seen them all before, seen them in quadruplets no one here could even dare to conjure.

But had never seen a meadowlark or weeping birch, had never tasted the infinite cold water from a neighbor's well, nor heard the crickets underneath the immense darkness devouring the car sounds and street sounds until there was nothing at all.

Peonies and raspberries gossiping beneath the windows. Acres of gardens, straight and proud, and never again the oriental limited galloping those far Dakota fields. That thin green streak of windows deep within the most secret midnight forever growing fainter in my ears."

BILL SIEMERING: That's very nice. We all have that growing experience, I guess. Whether it takes place in the prairie or the city, that's a common one that--

MARK VINZ: And it's something that always has to be returned to, I suppose. Again, many writers, maybe even most at some time have to have to always perhaps go back to those sources and examine them, see what they mean and see what changes they take on.

BILL SIEMERING: Yeah. Is it going back that you see the change? Is that the reason that you would like to recall some of those things?

MARK VINZ: That's part of it. Yeah. I think it has to do with what one is as an individual, in a sense, a looking. I think this is one of the whole things in the so-called regional movement in American poetry. Many people are searching for lost ties. They may be the ties of their own background.

They may be the ties of the land, of the new interest in American Indians, the new interest in the West, both the mythic West and the real West. And I think always that sort of backward search for meaning. It's a point of stability in a world that seems to provide very few points of stability. It's a home. It's a sense of roots that perhaps our mass culture and mass technology tend to deny us.

And I think that's one reason that many writers are returning or leaving the cities or aligning themselves with one particular region or another. And I have to qualify this in saying I don't think the Midwest has anything over any other part of the country. This is a process that is going on all over.