MPR’s Sea Stachura reports on new poetry collection "Where One Voice Ends Another Begins: 150 Years of Minnesota Poetry." Stachura interviews a poet and editor of collection.
For decades Minnesota poetry has been characterized by images like cornstalks and writers like Robert Bly. But as a new poetry anthology shows, today's Minnesota poets mix diverse politics and heritage with prairie soil.
SEA STACHURA: At Patrick's cabaret in Minneapolis, four poets are performing.
SPEAKER 1: Shadow man chants.
SPEAKER 2: Shadow man chants.
SPEAKER 3: Shadow man chants.
SPEAKER 4: Shadow man chants of soldiers. A viper's crawling in the fields and fire beetles tickling his nose. He wraps--
SEA STACHURA: Patricia Kirkpatrick, Wang Ping, and Margaret Hasse echo Angela Shannon as she reads her poem, "Shadow Man." As the evening progresses, they continue linking and interjecting into each other's work. These are disparate voices, but they're exploring common themes. Shannon says she moved to Minnesota from Florida and Oklahoma. She says here, she's found a wide range of poetry and a place for her to maintain her particular voice as a writer.
ANGELA SHANNON: Place is really important. I know that I carry history with me. I feel like I'm always aware of my history, of culture, of ancestors. And at the same time, I'm moving forward. I'm trying to figure out what is it for me here, what's in Minnesota for me.
SEA STACHURA: Shannon is just one of the new writers included in this anthology. She's African-American. Wang Ping left China after college, and Hasse is originally from South Dakota. Robert Hedin gathered these voices along with many others. The anthology spans from the Ojibwe tradition of 1850, F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, Robert Bly in the late '50s, to Mayli Vang today. He says his goal was to create a comprehensive collection that showed the evolution of the state's poetry.
Hedin says a lot of people were writing when Minnesota was still the frontier, and even when Fitzgerald left for France. But most of it wasn't very good. He says Minnesota's evolution to great poetry is marked by the arrival of Robert Bly and his surreal images.
ROBERT HEDIN: What Bly has called for years a leap of the imagination. And you combine all of those kinds of things, the rhythms, the imagery, the sense of place. And it all combines into something that was not seen in Minnesota verse prior to 1962.
SEA STACHURA: Hedin says Bly's work has a sense of place, and all great American writers like Hawthorne, Frost, and Melville have that deep, clear sense of place. This is Bly reading "Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River."
ROBERT BLY: I am driving. It is dusk in Minnesota. The stubble field catches the last growth of sun. The soybeans are breathing on all sides. Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats in the small towns. I am happy. The moon rising above the turkey sheds.
SEA STACHURA: Turkey sheds wouldn't likely appear in Melville's writing, which is based in New York. But Hedin says a region's literature is about more than knowing the landscape. It's a distillation.
ROBERT HEDIN: Of getting to know the self and the land and the relationship between the two so well that you're able to articulate it, or are allowed to articulate it.
SEA STACHURA: That applies to Minnesota's latest writers, like Lao native Mayli Vang and Ojibwe poet, Heid Erdrich. In these cases, the sense of place does not necessarily include the land. But Hedin says, instead, there's a politicized voice.
ROBERT HEDIN: It has to do with alienation and disenfranchisement. These poets being kind of caught in a no man's land, I guess you could say, between their old cultures, the cultures in which they find themselves firmly rooted, and a Minnesota culture that denies them the possibility of any meaningful kind of assimilation.
SEA STACHURA: Hedin says these poets seem to be speaking with collective or communal voices of their cultures. As with Angela Shannon and Margaret Hasse reading Wang Ping's poem, "Sequoia," those voices share and make space for one another. I'm Sea Stachura, Minnesota Public Radio news.
SPEAKER 3: Lilac's tongues.
SPEAKER 4: To burst open--
SPEAKER 3: To burst open--
SPEAKER 4: Your blazing hearts.
SPEAKER 3: Your blazing hearts.
Digitization made possible by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
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