The Midwest of the Mind: a Conversation with Andrew Grace

OS: The first line in A Brief History of the Midwest is “History is really the history of the thistle.” What does a “brief history” mean to you in terms of this collection? What was the process of using archival research in poems like “—black frost plenty: A Primer for Farmwives” and “The End of the Midwest?”

AG: The title of the book is a bit tongue in cheek as it isn’t actually about the Midwest’s history overall, and a more accurate title would probably be something like A Brief History of My Midwest, but you’re right that a number of the poems have historical documents, diaries in particular, woven into them. What I liked about the diaries is that they allow us to get a sense of individuals’ lives on a daily quotidian level. There is also something urgent in the idiosyncratic nature of these people’s voices. For example, George Heinrich Crist’s sections in “The End of the Midwest” convey the terror of the situation, which was surviving a series of earthquakes having never known previously that there were such things as earthquakes, far better than I could if I tried to write a persona poem in the voice of a survivor of the New Madrid earthquake. The voice in “–black frost plenty” is also that of a survivor, though from the opposite side of the spectrum as it’s about a woman fighting loneliness after her husband temporarily leaves her. The last excerpted lines are from a cookbook from 1824 about how to cook a calf’s heart. I thought that there was something poignant about serving the husband a heart for his first meal after he decides to come home. My hope is that using the historical voices gives the reader a sense of authenticity of the lived lives of these people, and the resilience they displayed in the face of hardship.

OS: The structure of A Brief History of the Midwest is distinctive in that it opens with shorter poems and ends with longer, sequential poems. How do you see the shorter poems and sequences conversing?

AG: I have to admit that I went against the advice I give to my students when we talk about how to sequence poems into a collection, which is to think about more nuanced ways than simply grouping similar things together. But that’s pretty much exactly what I did! The first section is more personal to my own experience of the Midwest, and the third section is all of the poems that include historical material. The long sequences felt so much like their own entities that they should be read as stand-alone pieces. The last section, the long sequence “Boyne River Daybook,” goes back to more personal material, so I suppose that it makes available a circular motion that links back to the first.  

OS: The Midwest is a huge swath of land, stretching from the Black Hills in South Dakota to the Ozarks in Missouri, then east to the Rust Belt. As a geographical indicator, the “Midwest” feels inherently ambiguous. What does “the Midwest” mean to you? What are your associations or definitions?

AG: It’s kind of amazing how fluid everyone’s definitions of the region are, given that these states have by now existed for hundreds of years. The US Census has its official definition, which is that the Midwest is made up of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. But I personally do not accept the idea that the Midwest has mountains in it, so I leave the Dakotas out. I also think it’s important to take into account how people characterize their own hometowns in terms of regionality. A survey of 11,000 by the Middle West Review last year that asked people all over the country if they self-identified as living in the Midwest or not was really fascinating to me, as people from Pennsylvania to Idaho replied yes! And way more people in the former said yes than the later, even though Pennsylvania touches Ohio, which is obviously in the Midwest. And yet only 78% of Ohioans said yes! I take from this that there is the idea of the Midwest as a cultural construct which is separate from geography. The Midwest of the mind. 

OS: This collection doesn’t shy away from contradictions, especially the growth and violence found in the natural world (of which humans are part). In “Knox County,” you write: “Where mill / collapsed / into north fork / life floods / nothing /can be kept out / We live / softly / in a hard place.” What’s your process for writing into these contradictions?

AG: I really like how you highlighted growth and violence, as I hadn’t put the book in those terms, but they do feel like one of the animating contradictions that I write about. I was not very conscious of the contradictions in the book in terms of actively making a decision to include them. I guess they are there because they are so ubiquitous where I live that they just organically find their way into the poems. The fields that surround the village where I live can be seen as pastoral or scenic, but the crops growing in them are genetically modified and sprayed with chemicals that find their way into the water table. So, is that field pastoral or political or poisonous? We use the formulation “God’s Country” to refer to the Midwest, but as I talk about in the book, people do all of the most horrible things to each other, murder, rape, fatal work-related negligence, etc. So, are we living in God’s special pet region, or are we just as surrounded by suffering as people that live in urban areas, and the only difference is density? We have Amish farmers lashing haystacks together after harvest. We have prototype tractor implements that use AI to tell what is a weed or not then burns the weed with laser beams. The contradictions are present in every acre. 

OS: Rural landscapes are often considered rugged, mundane, and unchanging. What does it mean to observe a landscape? Are there any repetitive images that link the poems together in your collection?

AG: Way back in the day Amazon had this thing when you looked at a book for sale towards the bottom of the page called a concordance which was a kind of word cloud, and the most commonly used words in the book were put in larger font. For my first book the biggest words were something like “Light,” “Day,” “Heart.” It made my book sound so lame! But if that function still existed for the new book, my guess is that some of the words would be “field” and “river.” Again, like I said above about contradictions, I don’t spend too much time consciously choosing certain words to repeat, but rather they come from my preoccupations and immediate surroundings. Here in Gambier, Ohio we have the Kokosing River at the bottom of the hill, which runs throughout my long poem “Knox County” and up in Northwest Michigan where I spend a few weeks every year they have the Boyne River. Both places have rolling hills and farms and woods. These images get repeated because they are at hand. When I make a metaphor, one half of it is usually something to do with rural spaces, whereas I imagine that someone who lives in a city would use something from urban living to describe something abstract in concrete terms.  

OS: Does writing about the grief for a loved one relate to writing about the grief for a landscape? How does the feeling of “home” factor into these poems?

AG: Good question. Yes! The loss of my father and my relationship with the farm where I grew up, Shadeland Farm in Urbana, Illinois, are deeply entwined. My father, who was a farmer, died in an accident in our machine shed. So when I go back to visit, that experience is very viscerally with me. Last year the house where I was raised was torn down, which was very difficult. It was a family decision that I did not agree with. Now I can stand where my room used to be and look across the barnyard to the place where my father died. So I have my grief about these things, all tied up in this one acre of land. But, as I hope comes through in my poems, I love that acre deeply, and it informs all of my art. I guess that’s how I would answer the second question here, that “home” can both be an endlessly evocative place, but also can force you to share a room with your losses.

OS: A Brief History of the Midwest is your fourth book of poems. How has writing changed for you over the years?

AG: Before this book came out last May, I hadn’t published a book in twelve years. So the poet that wrote book three was very different from the poet I am now, if in no other way than basic life circumstances. Back then I lived in California and had one daughter. I had barely started my career as a professor. Now I have two daughters, a PhD and live in rural Ohio where I’ve taught at Kenyon for over a decade. So my days and weeks are so different, and it’s really the rhythm of my job and family life that dictate my writing. Like all busy parents that write, I write when I can. It’s as simple as that! And for those of us in the academic calendar, the summers generally present the most time to work on our own writing. I try to keep poetry alive during the semester even if it’s just something like jotting down notes in a file I always keep open on my laptop, so that if I do get a little time, I can have something to start with. 

I also think that I care less about revealing things that are deeply personal. I always write about personal matters, what poet doesn’t, but I usually papered it all over with style or abstraction. Now I care less and say what I mean. It’s not that I’m more brave now, just less bothered. I have benefited so many times from a poet being radically vulnerable in their work in ways that help me process life, so I like the idea that it’s possible that someone would read this book and feel that connection.

OS: Is there a single poem in this collection that means the most to you or that you resonate most with the experience of writing? Can you tell us about it?

AG: You’re catching me at a moment where I’ve been giving a lot of readings from this book, so I am currently sick of every single poem in the book and of the sound of my own voice. But to try to answer your question, there is one poem, “Do You Consider Writing to Be Therapeutic” that I haven’t read out loud to an audience and probably never will. It’s the one that cuts straight to the core of my bullshit. And it’s the one that people who have read the book want to talk about the most! It appeared on Poetry Daily and I got a bunch of responses to it there too, more so than most of the other poems I’ve ever published. My editor went out of her way to praise it when we were working on the manuscript. So I guess that all makes it worth it. The title is a question that I’ve been asked a lot over the years, so I decided to answer it once and for all in the poem. So the answer in the poem is a resounding NO, and yet, seeing that people are connecting with it in particular probably means that it makes them think about their own grief and its relationship to art, which can be therapeutic for them after all, and for me.

A Brief History of the Midwest is out now from Black Lawrence Press.