“Iowa, / detestable state”? I don’t know, strikes me as a
bit snotty maybe. This poem is pretty flat, as a poem, though the last stanza
makes a bit of a pronouncement. “perplexed as the Irish whether to shout or
mourn / over man’s riddling fate: alter, or stet:
/ Fate across all them rolls.” Alter or stet: Make changes or keep things as
they are. Progressive or conservative?
Ireland has had much to mourn, and much to shout about. The
potato famine on one hand, Yeats and Joyce on the other. That much is obvious.
B. throws Iowa a bone: Doubtless there must be some soul or two in Iowa feeling
the same complexity about fate and life that the Irish live with. On the whole,
though, Iowa is rich & ignorant. Well—it’s not about Iowa, per se, is it?
It’s about Americans, and Iowa, America’s corn & swine heart, stands in as its typical representative. Rich & ignorant. Well, sure, sometimes: These
days we have a madness abroad in the land we call “open carry.” I had someone tell me once, “I
choose not to believe in evolution.” I’d bet my left leg that more Americans
know who Kim Kardashian is than William Butler Yeats. Or John Berryman for that
matter. I’m glad to say that I’m not one of them, since Kim Kardashian is a
name I hear all over the place but I’m still not sure what for. Am I this stuck
up about it? Maybe just a little. But, jeez, you don’t know who William Butler
Yeats is?
You travel to a place like Ireland to learn about yourself
as much as anything else. B. is making the comparison here that all travelers make.
What does my homeland look like from so far away? I’ve had the experience of
visiting an American grocery store after some time abroad and being astonished
at the panoply of food and stuff cascading off the shelves. I lived in
immediate post-Communist Eastern Europe for a time. If you wanted, say, some
jam, you could always find it. Sure! Right over there: Today we have six jars of
apple. It was delicious apple jam, too. The American counterpart has eight, ten,
a dozen makes of every fruit you’ve ever heard of, including weird stuff nobody
really even wants like fig and merlot jam, green tomato preserves, or jalapeno
pepper jelly. You get used to it again soon enough, but that first re-encounter
is a shock. My Hungarian cousin needed a toothbrush, and we stood in front of
the fifteen-feet of aisle space devoted to toothbrushes, literally a thousand
toothbrushes, and we just started laughing. I could see it through his eyes, how
ridiculous it was to have that many examples of something as basic as a
toothbrush. We’re rich, and ignorant of the absurdity of such profusion. And in
the meantime, we don’t read Yeats. And when fate rolls across us, are we
unprepared for fate? That’s the accusation. Plenty of corn and pork for now
though. Given B.’s artistic values, and the vocation to which he has dedicated,
even sacrificed, his life, a bit of sneering back at home seems understandable.
I lived in Iowa around the time this poem was written. So I guess I should be offended. And I recently enjoyed fig/merlot jelly, so I guess I should be grateful.
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