The Deserted Heartland

Posted on May 1, 2004 in Class Poetry

Another theme B.H. Fairchild touched upon in last night’s reading was that of the damage being done to the nation’s heartland by the collapse of its rural populations. He described going to one Kansas town — formerly of 500 souls and 35 businesses — which had in the twenty years since he had last visited dwindled to 67 people, all elderly because there were no jobs for young people. Fairchild marks this as a cataclysm on the order of that observed by Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

The culture that produced Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and others is dying. I sit here on my short street, looking out across the concrete and the asphalt that separates me from my neighbor Chris and reflect on what kind of poetry and prose will charge this voice, far removed from the Main Street that Sinclair Lewis decried. We hated Gopher Prairie, once, but having grown up in San Bernardino — a city of 100,000 with a small town mind — and living now in Orange County where “Heartland Values” are enshrined in the Crystal Cathedral and a Christian broadcasting company housed in a building that looks like a cross between a Pompeian pleasure garden and a hat box, I believe that we’re seeing a vulgar Heartland-Metropolitanism arise. Part atheist, part fundamentalist, it clasps at certainties and sets us down before televisions and poorly written best-selling novels, telling us not to think high, but to abandon the intimacies of our lives to bathe in a River Jordan that has gilded turds floating in it.

I think, too, of T.H. White’s The Book of Merlyn where Arthur enters the world of the ants where there are only two adjectives: Done and Not Done. “Oh, I dew love that Mammy Mammy Mammy song! It’s so done!” We’re striving to join the Hive Mind and we’re every bit as addle-headed in our chaos as an ant. Things get done but only because there are a lot of us. And when we look at what we have wrought often — as in the case of The Crystal Cathedral — it is bad, soulless art.

These murders of the psyche come to mind this morning. I see hope in these things: that people still stop to listen to poetry when they hear it declaimed in a bookstore, that poets still write even at the risk of not being published, that some of us see what is happening to us. Our songs may yet form the shadow of a better world coming down the corridor.

Be courageous: look to your street and populate your visions with the souls you see there.

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A good film on the issue of the deserted villages in America is The Trip to Bountiful which features as Geraldine Page as an elderly woman trying to go home again.