View of the Bitterroot ...

I spent a winter in Missoula a number of years ago, and was fortunate enough to sit in on K. Ross Toole's legendary Montana and the West history class. Those class sessions were filled with memorable moments, and one of the things I recall was how Toole lamented the slow destruction of the Bitterroot Valley ... the ongoing replacement of its farms and meadows with a sea of faceless subdivisions.

Of course that was nothing compared to what's happened in the Bitterroot in the years since ... and every time I go down that way I remember Toole's lecture and regret the ever-more-depressing view.

Here's a stanza from Greg Pape's poem, "View of the Bitterroot." Pape is a Missoulian who has taught in the University of Montana's creative writing program for many years.

The new owners of the wheat field
plan to develop the land, cut
the acres, where the sandhill cranes
return each year, down into small lots,
five hundred houses packed in tight
like gold bars in rows
over the shallow aquifer
at the edge of the marsh.

Prairie Sunrise ...

The famed artist Maynard Dixon is best known for his paintings of the American Southwest, but his work was also influenced by a 1917 visit to northwestern Montana. Sponsored by the Great Northern Railway, Dixon's Montana trip included time in Glacier Park, as well as the Blackfeet Indian reservation nearby. In the years that followed Dixon translated his Montana memories into a number of paintings and several poems, including an evocative but slightly over-the-top verse called "Prairie Sunrise":

Ascendent over the world grows the saffron dawn.
Still and dim is the prairie, -- dark is the sod,
And dewy the cool curling blades of the buffalo grass,
And low and faint in the glow the smoke-spirits rise,
Revealing the camp; and here by a mute-solid boulder
An empty buffalo skull, deep-staring and old;
Little birds twitter and flit in the rusty-stemmed willows,
As over the rim comes tremendous ascending day --
The day! The marvelous day, exalting and vast! --
And there as the sun flares up, life-lit in its glory
The red-naked Indian rides, free-chanting his trail song.

Montana Pastoral ...

Today's poem is "Montana Pastoral," by a fairly well-known twentieth-century author named J. V. Cunningham. He lived in Montana only for a few years as a child, in Billings during the 1910s and 1920s, but those years influenced a lifetime of writing. "Montana Pastoral" was written in 1941, and published in an anthology called The Helmsman the following year.

I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.
I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

Thirst where the grasses burn in early May
And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay.

There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat
Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat.

So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove
To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove,

And found no images of pastoral will,
But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.

Montana Inventory ...

I had a conversation with a friend recently, in which she confessed to me that she'd never heard of Richard Brautigan. I was thoroughly appalled by the revelation ... but of course Brautigan was a product of the 60s and 70s, and my friend is of a different generation. Brautigan just isn't going to be a timeless author, I'm afraid.

But his work is still a lot of fun, and since he lived in the Paradise Valley for a time he's worth another mention here. Unlike most Montana authors, though, there are surprisingly few mentions of the state in Brautigan's work. Here's one that I was able to find, an odd little poem called "Montana Inventory." It's from his 1976 collection, Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork.

At 85 miles an hour an insect splattered
like saffron on the windshield
and a white cloud in blue sky above the
      speed-curried bug

Driving Montana, Alone ...

Here's a poem that received some national radio airplay recently, "Driving Montana, Alone" by Katie Phillips. The author is another one of those expatriate Montanans, now trapped way out in Illinois. Anyone who's driven along the Pintlars will likely relate to the images the poem conjures.

I smile at the stack of Bob Dylan CDs
you are not holding in the passenger seat.
Storm clouds have gathered. My "Wow" rises
over the harmonica for your benefit,
but you cannot see that one sunlit peak

in the midst of threatening sky. The road turns
wet at the "Welcome to Anaconda" sign,
and I pat my raincoat, loosely folded
where your lap should be. "Anaconda was almost
the state capital," I say, but that's all I know,

and you don't ask for more. You wouldn't mind
my singing and swerving onto the shoulder
for more snapshots over the car door.
And it's only when I get just south of Philipsburg
that your not being here feels like absence.

I want you to see these dark rotting barns,
roadkill of Highway One. It seems only you
could know why my eyes fill the road
with tears again when a flock of swallows
swoops through an open barn door
and rushes out the gaping roof.

Taking the dog out ...

Today's entry is a poem I thoroughly related to ... "Taking the Dog Out at 2 AM," by Keetje Kuipers. As with so many Montana-based poets, she's spent time living in Missoula; for the purposes of this blog we'll have to overlook the unfortunate fact that she's hanging out in California more often these days.

I’ve just slipped past those guards of sleep
who tonight are more like Swedish policemen—
well-meaning but complacent—just as happy
to let me go on my way as detain me here
in this land of the conscious, when you begin
your rhapsodic mantra of barking at the door.

For this I would like to punish you or at least
give a gentle reminder that unlike you, I
haven’t been napping most of the day.

Instead, we are released into air so cold
it works like quicksand on my lungs,
sucking the oxygen from itself as I watch
you canter to the nearest snow drift in your
coat of shimmering black velvet.

With ice cuffs around your ankles,
you look dressed for a midnight ball.

We’re three days away from the longest
night of the year and if I wish for anything
as I count the trunks of the pines you’ve
disappeared into, it’s that heaven, too—
if there is a place we go after this—
will have such a similarly deep and inescapable
darkness for you to root among and for me
to marvel at while I wait for your return.

Spoiled rotten ...

I know I've said this before ... but Montana really has an amazing number of fine musicians, artists, authors, and poets. The number is far greater, it seems, than one should expect from a state so thinly populated and where earning a living is so difficult. And my appreciation for the state's creative talents continues to grow, as I discover more and more new voices.

Today's poem is is by one of those newly-discovered voices, a man named Mark Gibbons. He grew up in Alberton and Deer Lodge and now lives in Missoula, where he writes poetry and reportedly works as a furniture mover to pay the bills. This is a poem called "Spoiled Rotten," first published in a 1995 collection called Something Inside Us:

I was a rich kid in Alberton, pampered inside
an old two-shack, ship-lapped, slapped-together house
right beside the Milwaukee Railroad. Creosote ties
footed faded linoleum floors—they supported us like trains
to the splintered end. Barren beaver board walls

Bled frost and our dreams. . . .

. . . we were spoiled most long summer days
tormenting rattlers and climbing castle rocks, skinny
dipping and fishing up Petty Creek from the narrows

To the old goat farm. We swam the Clark Fork like beaver,
circled and slapped, threw hoots and full cannon balls.
We gorged ourselves daily like Romans or kings
eating filthy-rich feasts, everything in season: green apples,
ripe plums, wild onions, and garden-raided dirt-sweet carrots.

We discovered the neighbor’s basement, ate jars
of silver salmon and gagged smelling limburger cheese.
We sipped on sour dandelion wine, felt our way up the dizzy stairs.
Through a door left ajar, fully framed in a mirror, we saw nipples
round as our mouths—secrets—only told to our dogs.

We lazed under lilacs, read clouds going by, never denied
we were flat spoiled rotten and ruined for good like Huck Finn,
our hero back then. We, too, would have settled for a raft and Jim,
but we damn sure didn’t want to run away. Those days are still
a toy chest so filled—that the lid can never be closed.

Walkin' Jim ...

There's no doubt that Montana has long had more than its share of intriguing personalities ... one of the great things about this state is the way it attracts free spirits. One of the state's freest spirits belonged to a singer and wilderness advocate named "Walkin' Jim" Stoltz, who passed away back in September at age 57.

Walkin' Jim spent his winters working down at Big Sky, but the rest of the time he mostly spent ... walking. He reportedly hiked over 27,000 miles in his adult life, mostly in wilderness, crossing the length of the country in most every direction. He had a guitar along on some of those trips, and the folk songs he wrote led to a second career as a recording artist and concert-giver. His website called him a "troubadour for the Earth," which is a pretty accurate description. A fascinating and memorable guy, indeed.

Jim was also an artist and poet, and I thought I'd share one of his poems here. He penned these lines in 1995 to memorialize Edward Abbey, the famous and eccentric chronicler of wild country in the American southwest ... but the words are a fitting tribute to Walkin' Jim, as well.

Northern lights blazing over the desert,
Dancing eagles crying in the sky,
Coyote knows that somethings gone,
The canyon wind mourns good-bye.

Your words, dropped so,
Led me by the hand,
Opening doors I never thought to look behind
Desert pearls
Like grains of sand
They piled up fast and spread with time.

Northern lights rolling ‘cross the night,
Lion screaming at the highway’s shoulder,
The canyon sleeps
While miles away
Another needle
Falls from the pinyon.

Three poems on the same theme ...

A little over forty years ago, three young men from the Creative Writing Department at the University of Montana decided to take the day off and go fishing. On the way home, they ended up stopping for a few drinks at the only bar in the little town of Dixon. The place was evocative enough that, on a whim, they decided that each of them would write a poem about it. They gave themselves two weeks to do it, and then they vowed to send the poems off to a publisher together -- all or nothing.

When the three poems were finished -- each one titled "The Only Bar in Dixon" -- the trio packaged them up, and rather brashly sent them off to the New Yorker. And to their amazement, the magazine bought all three of them! They appeared together on a single page, arranged alphabetically by author, under the heading "Three Poems on the Same Theme." A minor achievement, but a cool one, and a story that I quite like.

Here's the first of the poems, written by the great Montana poet Richard Hugo ... the best-known of the three creative-writing fishermen:

Home. Home. I knew it entering.
Green cheap plaster and the stores
across the street toward the river
failed. One Indian depressed
on Thunderbird. Another buying
Thunderbird to go. This air
is fat with gangsters I imagine
on the run. If they ran here
they would be running from
imaginary cars. No one cares
about the wanted posters
in the brand new concrete block P.O.

This is home because some people
go to Perma and come back
from Perma saying Perma
is no fun. To revive, you take 382
to Hot Springs, your life savings
ready for a choice of bars, your hotel
glamorous with neon up the hill.
Is home because the Jocko
dies into the Flathead. Home because
the Flathead goes home north northwest.

I want home full of grim permission
You can go out of business here
as rivers or the railroad station.
I knew it entering.
                         Five bourbons
and I'm in some other home.

It's not the West any more ...

Grace Stone Coates was a teacher and the wife of a Martinsdale rancher ... and one of Montana's best-known authors from the first half of the twentieth century. As with so many other Montana literary figures, she was long affiliated with the creative writing program at the University of Montana; she helped edit its literary journal, and wrote well-regarded poetry and fiction.

Here's an excerpt from a 1932 poem of hers called, "The Old Freighter Comes Back in a Ford." It expresses some sentiments that many Montanans would identify with today, but that also must have had some relevance almost eighty years ago.

We're having fun at the tourist camps --
Humanest people, just like the rest,
Some of them honest, and some of them scamps,
But half of them sighing, "It's not the West,
Montana isn't the West, any more!"
I smile -- at something I've heard before.

My father was one of the forty-niners,
Down by the Isthmus, and back by the Horn,
But when he landed, part of the miners
Were getting restless, and saying forlorn:
"Too many pilgrims here for me;
It isn't the West like it used to be!"

The West! The dusty pine scent spills
It's memories. August snows remote
Look down. The fervor of blue hills
Stings in my eyes and stabs my throat.
I wonder if to find the West
A man must carry it in his breast.

Lothrop, Montana ...

Only those with a particular interest in American political history are probably familiar with the name Whitaker Chambers these days, but 60 years ago he was a fairly big deal ... a darling of the far right and one of the instigators of the anti-Communist hysteria that characterized the McCarthy era. His best-known writings were very political, of the sort that politically inspired Ronald Reagan.

In his younger days, though, Chambers was definitely a Bohemian ... and an aspiring poet, to boot. His first published work wasn't a political polemic, but rather a subtext-laden stanza of free verse titled "Lothrop, Montana." (Lothrop was a tiny settlement in eastern Mineral County, across the Clark Fork River from Alberton.)

The poem was first printed in the June 30, 1926 issue of The Nation. Here it is:

The cottonwoods, the boy-trees,
Imberbe -- the clean, green, central bodies
Standing apart, freely, freely, but trammeled;
With the branches inter-resting -- for support,
Never for caressing, except the wind blow.
And yet, leaning so fearfully into one another,
The leaves so pensile, so tremulously hung, as they lean toward one another;
Unable to strain further into one another
And be apart;
Held back where in the earth their secret roots
Wrap one about another, interstruggle and knot; the vital filaments
Writhing in struggle; heavy, fibrous, underearthen life,
From which the sap mounts filling those trembling leaves
Of the boy-trees, the cottonwoods.

James Welch ...

I remember being introduced to the work of James Welch back in the 1980s, and being struck by the power and (especially) the bleakness of his writing. Welch was a Native American from up on the Hi-Line, and another product of the great creative writing program at the University of Montana. His novels are despairing things, capturing the desolation and hopelessness of Montana reservation life with a poignancy that other authors have largely been unable to match.

He certainly didn't paint endearing pictures of our part of the world, though. Here's a stanza from a poem of his, titled "Harlem, Montana: Just off the Reservation." It was first published in the April 1968 issue of Poetry magazine:

Harlem, your hotel is overnamed, your children
are raggedy-assed but you go on, survive
the bad food from the two cafes and peddle
your hate for the wild who bring you money.
When you die, if you die, will you remember
the three young bucks who shot the grocery up,
locked themselves in and cried for days, we're rich
help us, oh God, we're rich.

Poet laureate ...

I bet most of you didn't even know that Montana has an official poet laureate! We've had three of them, in fact ... the title was created in 2005, and recipients hold the position for two-year terms.

The first Montana poet laureate was a woman named Sandra Alcosser, who studied under Richard Hugo at the University of Montana. She now lives down in the Bitterroot Valley. Here's an example of her work -- the final two stanzas of a poem called "Approaching August":

Today I had a letter from France.
"What a truly civilized nation," my friend wrote
as she drank her morning coffee with thick cream
in a country cafe near Avignon. "To my right
a man in a black tuxedo sips raspberry liqueur
and soda."

Here on the same latitude we lie back at dawn
on the caving bank of the Bitterroot.
A shadow slips through the silver grasses.
And then a moth.
And then the moon.

To be so happy again ...

Maybe it's just where my tastes lie, but it seems to me that a surprising amount of Montana poetry evokes images of long, empty roads and great skies. Here's one such work, a poem called "Once in the 40's," by an Oregon poet named William Stafford:

We were alone one night on a long
road in Montana. This was in winter, a big
night, far to the stars. We had hitched,
my wife and I, and left our ride at
a crossing to go on. Tired and cold--but
brave--we trudged along. This, we said,
was our life, watched over, allowed to go
where we wanted. We said we'd come back some time
when we got rich. We'd leave the others and find
a night like this, whatever we had to give,
and no matter how far, to be so happy again.

Miles of land without people...

I posted a fragment of a Richard Hugo poem here last summer, but his work was good enough that I think another one is definitely in order. This is the final stanza of "Driving Montana," one of my favorite Hugo poems:

Tomorrow will open again, the sky wide
as the mouth of a wild girl, friable
clouds you lose yourself to. You are lost
in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.

Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana ...

Back in 1925, a young man named Eli Siegel completed a long poem called "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana," that was published in The Nation. Only nominally about our state, the poem was in large part a celebration of the beauty of Earth ... it received wide acclaim, and helped propel Siegel to a measure of literary fame.

In part using the Montana poem as a foundation, in 1941 Siegel proclaimed a new approach to philosophic thought that he called "Aesthetic Realism." Siegel described the philosophy as being based on the premise that “The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis." The statement was certainly admirable, but eventually the movement evolved into an often-inappropriate self-help agenda that became thoroughly cult-like. Today, the Aesthetic Realists are a tiny and eccentric fringe group, probably wondering why the Scientologists are the ones who get all the attention.

But I don't think the whole Aesthetic Realism thing really lessens the literary merit of Siegel's Montana poem. It's too long to fully reproduce here, but here are a few sample lines:

Indians, Indians went through Montana,
Thinking, feeling, trying pleasurably to live.
This land, shone on by the sun now, green, quiet now,
Was under their feet, this time; we live now and it is hundreds
of years after.
Montana, thou art, and I say thou art, as once monks said of God,
And thought, too: Thou art.

Riding on a Rail ...

Back in 1900, a man named Robert Vaughn compiled a book called Then and Now, or, Thirty Six Years in the Rockies. The volume is a collection of letters and essays describing life in late nineteenth-century Montana ... lots of nostalgia for the vanishing frontier, and lots of politically-incorrect tales of Cowboys and Indians. It's an uneven but entertaining read.

Todays quote is an except from the book, part of an essay by Vaughn extolling the joys of turn-of-the-century travel on the Great Northern Railway... so much more comfortable than a horse and saddle!

Think of the perils, hardships and delays the traveler encountered "then" and the comforts and accommodations he is having "now." "Then" for protection against hostile Indians he had to equip himself with gun and ammunition, "now" for comfort and pleasure he equips himself with Havana cigars, daily newspapers and magazines. And he sings:

Riding o'er the mountains in a buffet car,
Writing loving letters, not a shake or jar;
Leaping over rivers, flying down the vale;
"O bless one, ain't it pleasant riding on a rail."

Poetic art ...

One more post about Vachel Lindsay before we move on. Though Lindsay was best known as a poet, he was also a pretty interesting graphic artist, and many of his published poems were accompanied by some fairly intriguing line art.

The drawing below, from Lindsay's 1923 book Going-to-the-Sun, is a good example of his visual style. I think it's pretty cool, although from looking at it you might think that Glacier Park has volcanoes!

Vachel Lindsay ...

I imagine that only the English majors reading this have heard of someone named Vachel Lindsay ... but back in the 1910s he was one of America's best-known poets. He was as much a troubadour as anything, really, wandering the country and reading his poems aloud to eager audiences.

In the early 1920s Lindsay and a friend paid a visit to Glacier Park. He fell in love with the place instantly, of course, and the result was a 1923 volume of poetry and art called Going-to-the-Sun. Lindsay decided that he liked this part of the world so much that he moved into the Davenport Hotel in Spokane the next year, and a sequel called Going-to-the-Stars was published in 1926. The books weren't well-received, though ... the American public had apparently decided that Lindsay's style had become passé. He ended it all in 1931 by drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Here's a sample poem from Going-to-the-Sun, titled "The Bird Called Curiosity":

Round the mountain peak called "Going-to-the-Sun,"
In Glacier Park, a steep and soaring one,
Circled a curious bird with pointed nose
Who led us on to every cave, and rose
And swept through every cloud, then brought us berries,
And all the acid gifts the mountain carries,
And let us guess which ones were good to eat.
And even when we slept his sharp wings beat
The weary fire, or shook the tree-top cones,
Or rattled dead twigs like a fairy's bones.
The vulgar bird, "Curiosity"! When we
Were tired, and lean, and shaking at the knee,
We put this bird in harness. He was strong
As any ostrich, pulled our packs along,
Helped us up over the next annoying wall,
And dragged us to the chalet, and the tourists' resting hall.

And when once more we were young, well-fed men,
He'd beat the door to call us forth again.

Dimming trails of other days ...

There's no doubt that Montana has one of the strongest literary traditions of any of the states, and it's one that extends back all the way to our frontier era. One of my favorite Montana authors from a century ago is a man named Frank Bird Linderman ... a fine storyteller and artist who lived on the Hi-Line and in the Flathead Lake country. His books are filled with wonderfully evocative tales of Montana's Native Americans and frontiersmen.

Today's entry is a sentimental poem by Linderman, printed as an introduction to his 1920 book On A Passing Frontier: Sketches from the Northwest. The volume is dedicated "to the good town of Malta, and to the camps in the Little Rockies where the old west is making it's last stand."

O, dimming trails of other days,
Your lure, your glamour, and your ways
Will last while those who knew you live,
And, fading, to the past will give,
To guard and to forever hold,
A wealth of stories never told.
The winters pass and take their toll;
Where tramped the bear now crawls the mole,
And grasses, spurning steps so light,
Are blotting you from human sight.
The same winds blow, the seasons change,
But white men's ways are hard and strange;
We tread on ants, and lo ! 'tis thus
Eternity will tread on us.