Published: February 28, 2009 07:00 pm      

On Poetry: We all come from somewhere

My husband and I loved northern Michigan enough to uproot after 30 years on the East Coast and move back here. Well, it seems like "back" here, after all the summers I spent at Central Lake as a child.

I was thinking how writers need a deep-rootedness, their feet planted in some particular soil. Their poignant images -- whatever makes them, and us, commit to the truth of words -- comes out of the truth of the earth. I offer Bob Hicock's marvelous poem as another way to say this.

Before he turned to teaching, Bob owned and ran a successful automotive die design business in Michigan. There are others -- Phillip Levine, whose poems continue to return to his native Detroit, and Theodore Roethke, whose imagination grew out of his father's greenhouse in Saginaw. I could go on. "Let us all be from somewhere," says Hicock's poem. But, as the great poet Richard Hugo says, a poet must then switch allegiance from the triggering subject to the words themselves.

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word "truth,"
can sincerely use the word "sincere."
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we're not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you're from Michigan.
It's like riding a bike or ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there's a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
"Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball"
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn't ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. "What did we do?"
is the state motto. There's a day in May
when we're all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he's from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

-- Bob Hicock, from The New Yorker, May 19, 2008

Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. You can learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com.