“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
G.K. Chesterson
Since we've moved back to Missouri, we've enjoyed a monthly magazine we get from our electric company. The Ozark Electric Cooperative publication Rural Missouri spotlights different things going on around the state in culture, agriculture, food, farm, music, and history. I've learned all kinds of things that I had no idea about. For example, there is an internationally successful sculptor named Brandon Crandall that makes his headquarters in Brashear, MO….Huh? I grew up five miles from there. That's near the bottom on the list of occupations I would have guessed would come from that diminished little place. Also, based on the monthly food features, it's evident that Missouri remains fond of all things meat, potatoes and frying whatever ya got.
This month there was an article on the state's new poet laureate. In addition to his new duties, Justin Hamm lives and teaches school in Mexico, MO. His college baseball career was short-circuited by an arm injury. He joked that if he couldn't be an athlete, the obvious next step was poetry. He's published five books of poetry, the most recent, Drinking Guinness with the Dead. He writes primarily in free verse and describes his work as rooted in the Midwest, its people, landscapes and experiences.
When people hear the term poetry, they generally groan. It takes them back to the flowery, inscrutable stuff written by old dead folks that they were made to read in school. Those have their place, but like Justin Hamm, there are hundreds of current day poets out there writing about things that modern readers can identify with …if they give ‘em a try. And they don’t make your head hurt.
I include a Justin Hamm poem here without permission. I'm not worried. There's not a poet on earth who would object to the possibility of someone, anyone, reading their work.
My good friend from Ogden, Utah, asks me about Missouri…
and I tell the story of a man, a Vietnam veteran, my next-door neighbor of twenty years, how on the night before his final factory shift, retirement now a fully ripened fruit just bobbing on the vine out in front of him, the polar vortex descended over Kirksville and Moberly, Columbia and Jeff City, dipped far below the I-70 corridor so that hundreds of schools closed, courthouses closed, business names scrolled across the bottom of the TV news, how anybody would have called in, I thought, and said the truck won't turn over, the roads are too icy, or even I've done this for decades and I just don't feel like it anymore, fifteen below with a minus forty-five windchill, pipes bursting in a constellation from one side of town to the other, how he could have been like me, a teacher half-awake under my electric blanket, listening for the notifications from my superintendent, but sometime before daylight I hear bootsteps, plastic scrape glass, then his truck shudder once, twice, and fire to life in the snow-white silence of or neighborhood — and that, I say to my friend from Utah, is what I know to tell you about Missouri.