5 March 18 Prairie Entry Point

This post offers another upbeat three-stanza work. This price-winning piece probably won its reward because it struck the Minnesota judges as a work close to our environment, close to the Prairie lands of the Dakotas. After all, as Garrison Keillor used to say about Minnesota, “out on the edge of the prairie.” That’s where we Northwest and Western Minnesotans live. North and South Dakotans, of course, have us beat with their remaining prairies, and they kick us in our thousand lakes with their gorgeous Black Hills which only the Minnesota Arrowhead Region can begin to measure up to – sort of. But aha! Minnesota’s nearly 60 state forests has it all over both Dakotas’ combined at 13. But that’s another story.

For this post, we’ll stick to North Dakota because it is the Dakota that borders far more of Northwest Minnesota, and because it has that infamous city, Fargo, popularized by a television series of the same name. Before European/American settlers trekked west, the prairie grasslands covered most of what would become North Dakota. Sad to say, the Dakotas, and many other states and Canadian provinces have all but lost their once grand prairies. Of the original size of the prairies, only .9% remains. That’s point-nine, not nine. This is the most endangered ecosystem in North America. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection to the fact that this same area is one of the most intensive crop-producing areas on the continent. 

Prairies are a big deal in NoDak. Prairie Dogs abound in their prairie towns (you can get maps for these little burgs); unfortunately, there is also prairie dog hunting. Another critter is the Greater Prairie Chicken. The human species had its own creature: the frontier Prairie Bride, a prominent feature of the Prairie Wedding. You can visit the Prairie Pothole Region. (Maybe something to do with those prairie dog towns? But no, this region is a naturally occurring glacial phenomenon.) The Prairie Rose is the state flower and a town named Prairie Rose still exists – population 73.

The town of Prairie Rose brings up the subject of Prairie Madness or Prairie Fever. This mental health illness afflicted European settlers in the 1800s. The new living environment was extremely harsh and marked by extreme isolation. Symptoms included depression, character alterations, sudden violence, and suicide. Both male and female settlers suffered from this condition. It seems the only cure was to move back East.

I guess one could call this week’s poem a song to the Prairies. This is not the verses’ only interpretation, but it’s an important one. Imagine yourself sitting amid the great grasslands now or in the past. Listen with your heart.

Prairie Entry Point

A day will come when everyone will know
  what I know now
For the present, it is best I only
  hint at what I see

I remember as if it were last hour
  surfacing to look up at the sky’s
  round blue pool soaring endless
Sitting small in the Center of Great Prairies
  a jade ocean of tall grasses writhing
  a million twisting serpents around
  me in a hissing circle – green and yellow
  protective blades – as I crouch low
  submerged on pale, flat-rooted rock
at the grass-sea’s bottom

Even then, I knew something tremendous
awaited discovery – would be found
  in distant deeper pools
  measuring blue soundings
  murmuring with the prairies
                    at the point of entry

Background: This poem comes from a time when I was a very young person, now looking back with some sentimentality on this immature girl who had very little idea of the beauty of the place she lived day after day. But surely, this is the case for many people. Finally, decades later, I did appreciate the rooted place where I grew up, and I wrote this poem which was subsequently revised and revised again over the years, getting lost, and happily found again, several times. 

This prairie is a real place in the middle of an airfield in the middle of two runways that intersected with their four terminal points approximately pointing to the cardinal directions. Near the center of the intersecting runways, hidden in the tall prairie grasses was a large flat stone that I used to sit on for hours at a time, when I wasn’t crawling through culverts, or perching on the edge of the tiny pools at the outlets of those culverts. Yes, I grew up on a prairie, however small, and I learned the secrets of meadowlarks and the ways of skimming dragonflies.

Exploration 1: In general or specifically, where is your “entry point”?

Exploration 2: What are the possibilities that the speaker is alluding to when she says, “everyone will know what I know now”? In other words, what is it that everyone will know?

Exploration 3: Currently, why must the speaker “only hint at what she sees?

Exploration 4: The speaker seems somewhat anxious when she speaks of “protective blades as I crouch low.” Based on the rest of the poem, why is she anxious?

Exploration 5: In the “sentence,” “I knew something tremendous awaited discovery,” what might the speaker be referring to?

Willa Cather

No treatment of the Prairies would be complete without respectful homage to Willa Cather, especially her partially biographical novel, My Antonia. In this book, a major character, Jim Burden, delivers an impassioned description of the Prairies:

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass. . . . I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Finally, for this post, I came upon a short poem (not mine) that has nothing to do with Prairies, but that I really have to share with you. It appeared in The New Yorker, 16 February 2015 (pg. 69), and the author is Andrea Cohen. Amazing what a very short poem can do.

LIT

Everyone can’t 

be a lamplighter.

Someone must

be the lamp,

and someone

must, in bereaved

rooms sit,

unfathoming what

it is to be lit.

Be well, and stay lit,
Jack Pine Savage