The Dream Songs look to be progressively
sliding into less ambitious territory. Instead of “life, friends, is boring,”
or “incredible panic rules,” Civil Rights or the Cold War, art and fame, this
one is about snow, the wife and daughter away in Iowa, the car won’t start in
the cold, the speaker is home alone and snowed in and stir crazy. In verse. Life, friends, is boring. At
least, he’s saying, he didn’t actually have to go to Iowa, which would have
made matters even worse. Snotty dismissals of Iowa are so easy, though,
especially for a someone posing as a literati sophisticate.
Here’s what we have to riff on
today: Iowa. Snow and ice. Being home alone and missing loved ones. Winter and
cold. Boredom. Iowa.
I don’t have much experience with
Iowa. When I was a kid, our several family vacations out West usually featured
Des Moines as the first stop after driving all day from Ohio. Here’s what I
remember of Des Moines: “Hey, kids, there’s Drake University.” A
college-looking building with a tower, a tree-studded lawn, college-age people
walking around and lying in the grass, some with books. That’s it. A restaurant
called The Smorgastable, where at eleven years old I ate so much fried chicken
I was in genuine distress and pain and was actually, seriously worried I had
injured myself. Lots of cornfield once on the road again. That’s it. I know a
writer from Iowa who writes brilliant, dryly hilarious essays about his life
and childhood there. I read, and have taught six or seven times, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a tremendous novel
that peels away the conservative rural Iowan orthodoxy and finds something
very, very dark underlying the whole society. It’s an A+ of a novel, one of the
recent American greats. The uniforms of the University of Iowa’s football team
are patterned after the Pittsburgh Steelers, which makes me like them less,
though I will admit Pittsburgh has one of the best NFL uniforms. No matter, we
hates the Steelers forever, Precious. U of I shouldn’t emulate them. Then there’s
the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, which recalls for
me a subtle touch of resentment since they rejected my application. No matter
that either, Indiana University’s MFA program was an experience that made all
the difference for me, and I’m quite content now that I didn’t get into Iowa.
That’s about it. Anything else?
The St. Louis arch is in St. Louis, which is in Missouri, so that shouldn’t
count. Kansas has lots of wheat, and Arrowhead Stadium, a great stadium where
the Chiefs play—except it’s in Kansas City, Missouri, too, now that I think of
it, but either way that wouldn’t count because neither Kansas nor Missouri are in
Iowa. Nebraska, I seem to recall, has these great buttes and Chimney Rock and
lots of sagebrush. Doesn’t count because it’s not Iowa either, it’s Nebraska. My
brother and I climbed all the way up the cone at the lower end of Chimney Rock all
the way to the base of the big chimney-looking formation, then squatted and slid down on our
shoes. It was a wild, fast and dangerous blast. Dad never knew it until he got his
Ectachrome slides developed once we were home, and there we were, up there at
the base of Chimney Rock in our bright t-shirts. But of course, like I say, Chimney
Rock is in Nebraska. I don’t remember having even driven through Oklahoma, sure-enough
cowboy and Indian country, but I must have, but that wouldn’t count anyway
because it’s Oklahoma, not Iowa. There surely must be some Indian people living
in Iowa, but any cowboys are there by mistake, strays. Nope, that’s about it. I
can now add this dull and pointless poem, Dream Song #189 by John Berryman, to
my scant mental repository of Iowa-themed clutter, though the whole point of it
is that the speaker didn’t actually have to go to Iowa, which I take was a
mercy for him. I doubt that’s fair, but who knows? Iowa is a scarcely populated
mental region for me, like that empty area of space NASA pointed the Hubble
Telescope at.
Turns out there was a lot more
going on there than they ever expected. Iowa is probably like that too if you
look hard enough and your telescope, pointed from, say, Kentucky, has enough
magnificational power. Better yet would be to go there, walk around amongst the
galaxies and get to know them. There’s probably something going on no one
outside of Iowa knows about.
It’s raining hard, and I’m
housebound myself today, with my wife’s car in the shop so she took mine. I
sympathize with B. in this poem, to be honest. Thoughts of Iowa arrive most
naturally on this most blah of summer days, though even blah days in summer are
a gift. I’m heading outside anyway. But as for thoughts of Iowa, the rain and
loneliness do seem to encourage them. It’s funny how that works.
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