I have a strange pair that worked together in my head as I composed the poems for “Boomtown.” Yusef Komunyakaa underscored for me the need to continue to engage with the very human context of culture. His poetry is steeped in an awareness of and speaks back to the literary and mythological canon of many cultures. It is instructive to note that his new and collected poems is titled Pleasure Dome. But his erudition does not overwhelm the work. His control of small narratives was also an inspiration, especially in the poems of Dien Cai Dau. Because of poems like “Jasmine” and “Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom” I wanted more music in my manuscript—songs from each of the eras I worked with—but there was only so much time. The other poet whose erudition I paid careful attention to is Brenda Hillman. Her book Cascadia suggests that there are many different ways to grapple with place. Unlike any of the previous poets, she works in a more, for want of a better word, experimental vein. Her intellectual engagements are far more aggressive than Komuyakaa’s, and I am not sure I enjoy her work as much. For example, her poem “Styrofoam Cup” uses space and a total of fourteen words to suggest dismay over that nigh indestructible artifact of the twentieth century (21). The experiment is interesting, but it does not draw me in. However, her work did continue to remind me that there are many ways to engage and explore place, and a strict adherence to plain speech is not always required.
One last poet kept coming to mind as I worked. Jimmie Santiago Baca pays careful attention to family and place. In particular, he describes intergenerational relationships so that we, as readers, participate in a broader sense of what it means to be human, to live the social lives of humans. Examples of this kind of focus include “What’s Real and What’s Not” and “Family Ties.” In the former, two old friends take a camping trip into the desert. The poem is about the relationship of the two men, but it ends with “[w]e enter city limits, / and the torch my body is / dims to old darkness again” (56); too much humanity degrades the spirit. And in the latter poem, Baca feels “no love or family tie,” even when surrounded by them (62). Still, when he heads out into the landscape, he takes his wife and children. In a poem about the issues of land ownership, he finds his own family calming. Throughout Baca’s work, human and non-human are fairly intimate: animals, plants, and landscapes inform his poetry. But the nature that emerges in the poems does not seem to appear as if by special arrangement. Baca engages with nature in a way that lets the non-human act as itself: each actor has their own mind and agenda. They follow their own whims, which the poet quickly notes.
In the end, I could not resist the power of the timeline in crafting “Boomtown.” I struggled to find another organizing principle, but I am content with the shape the project has taken. The book as it stands allows for a variety of voices, of poetic styles, and, yes, of research into its pages. “Boomtown” connects a broad sweep of history—both human and non-human—to the many lives and stories of Lincoln, Nebraska. The book celebrates the sometimes troubling but always interesting diversity of a small city born of imagination and desire, a city that has managed to thrive despite having no real reason to do so. At each step of the composition process, from research to draft to revision, I worked to cultivate the ecopoetic principles I outlined earlier, and at each step the engagement with a larger world, with broader contexts, led to interesting choices and stronger poems. This project has convinced me that ecopoetry is a powerful aid to the imagination and has the potential to offer substantial, important work to local, regional, and global culture.
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