Kansas poets celebrate Kansas in paeans to the state (+video)

It’s National Poetry Month.

But we’re Kansans: not always parochial, but we are today.

With our poetic chip on our shoulder, we’ll assert ourselves – and showcase stanzas that Kansas poets write about Kansas.

Why not? There’s news about Kansas poetry, said poet Roy Beckemeyer of Wichita. And the news is good.

But first let’s celebrate ourselves and quote poet Jon Kelly Yenser, who grew up in Riverside and is giving a poetry reading at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Fisch Haus, 524 S. Commerce. He’s telling off non-Kansans here about how they get it wrong about our home.

From his poem “Railing Against People Railing Against Kansas”:

First of all the fields

are not endless and there’s no point

saying that just for emphasis.

This is a soccer field.

That is a field of alfalfa.

You can see the difference.

That’s keffer corn

and those are beans and that’s

something else and so on.

The Rockies will rise by and by.

See? A little chip-on-the-shoulder parochialism – and that’s good.

And now for the news.

Beckemeyer has published poems in several poetry magazines and in his recent book, “Music I Once Could Dance To” from Coal City Press.

Several leading Kansas poets jump-started poetry here in recent years, he said. They did it in spite of government cutbacks and other changes that diminished public support.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, the 2009-2013 poet laureate of Kansas, boosted poetry across the state by creating incentives, Beckemeyer said.

So did others, but Mirriam-Goldberg did the heavy lifting. She inspired a community of nearly 150 poets to contribute stanzas.

“It was one big poem about Kansas written by people who love Kansas, each person adding 10 lines to the poem as it unfolds,” Mirriam-Goldberg said.

She and others found new poetry across the state and published a book of poems written by Kansans and edited by her: “Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems.”

Other Kansas poets came together in a closed group on Facebook, Beckemeyer said. It inspired people across the state to write a poem a day for an effort called 365 poems, 365 days.

Incentives like that got Kansas poets inspired not only to write more but also more profoundly, Beckemeyer said. One idea fed off another.

“One poet would write about barns, and then other people write about barns,” he said. “There was a lot of this infusion of ideas and a real enthusiasm for getting in and writing something.”

The poets were all different, he said. But as all Kansas poets eventually do, they wrote about the Kansas sky.

Here’s Beckemeyer:

the sky’s blackness

falls all the way

from the vault of the meridian

to that always receding westward line

of earth and grass –

somewhere there are trees

framing the sky,

but out here things are

unrestrained, wild and arching

and open as your soul.

It’s not just the sky, poets say.

It’s the weather.

Here is Ronda Miller, author of the book “MoonStain.” She grew up near the Arikaree Breaks. With our history of tornadoes and of turning dirt, “Kansans are either watching the sky or examining the earth,” she said.

the rain does thrash

against window pane

as wind bends bough

of willow, grass and

human form. Break

the wave from sound

upon the shore to heal

this wrath upon

our earth, to reside

in silence yet once more.

Mirriam-Goldberg grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and in New Jersey but came here and fell in love with Kansas long before she became poet laureate. She inspired poets, Beckemeyer said, but she said they inspired her.

“We loaded up my old minivan and many other vehicles, and poets drove all over the place, sometimes five or more hours just to read one or two poems,” she said.

Everything about Kansas surprised and inspired her writing after she came here, she said.

“I fell in love with the sky here,” she said. “I found a lifetime here of material for my own writing, plus a wonderful writing community – including people like Denise Low, Roy Beckemeyer, Ronda Miller, Bill Sheldon, Kenneth Irby, Wyatt Townley and so many others.”

“You come through the gate,” she wrote in “Welcome,” a poem only someone from Kansas could write: “and your life on earth begins:

light wavering green into the hue

of early spring, the growing

heat pouring leaf into form

just as you did, are doing, will do

with scarcity, rain, rivers,

kisses, wind, and horizons

that come each turning of the day.

You stand up in your dream,

lean on the fence, look wide

toward the stars just beginning

to burn through the sky

that carries the world.

A thunderhead powers upward,

spends itself over the past.

You take it all in, welcome

as rain in the tall reach

of the weather holding

this body of earth.”

Yenser grew up knowing that some Kansans (and Wichitans) knock their state or talk about it as though it’s inferior.

Rural folks don’t do that, he said. He used to ride our lonely roads with his father, a traveling salesman. “Farm kids don’t feel that way.” Maybe it’s because they can see their work literally growing out of their own ground, he said.

He likes Wichita, faults and all. “They haven’t yet discovered turn signals here,” he said of Wichita drivers. “And when they do, it’ll be a good thing.”

He was a good football and baseball athlete at North High, where he graduated in 1963. He remembers how pungent the cut grass smelled in those ballgames. He remembers his journalism teacher at north lighting a fire under him about words and poetry.

It’s much about listening, she told him. “And when you talk, you are not listening.”

Only a Kansan like him, who had worked hard and suffered losses and who had ridden the roads of southeast Kansas could write these opening lines of his poem “The Salesman.”

My map’s always in my head.

the roads thin as veins in an eyelid,

trickles through the gashed prairie

east of here – heaps of slag, sickly scrub, rusty milo.

It’s no territory for faint hearts.

Last week I clocked a six-point buck

near Coffeyville and still made my quota.

This story was originally published April 5, 2016 at 6:56 PM with the headline "Kansas poets celebrate Kansas in paeans to the state (+video)."