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LUCIEN STRYK: Perhaps the best way I can begin is to read the first sentence of my introduction to Heartland II, Poets of the Midwest. I didn't think it was such a bold sentence when I wrote it. After, someone told me they thought it was.

But this is how it goes. I read it to you because I still believe it. I hope I shall never stop believing it.

"A small town street, known for years, reaches through the universe. To the eye alive, nothing is without its wonder."

Now, behind my endeavors in this field-- that is, the collecting, editing of Midwestern poetry-- that is the principal assumption, that to the eye alive, nothing is without its wonder.

Curiously, and since none mentioned it, and since I have felt obliged from time to time to refer to it, my interest in Asian thought-- this is really very paradoxical, I know. But my interest in Asian thought, particularly zen, has made me feel that. Other things have too, of course. But that perhaps more than anything else.

For example, in my introduction to my new zen book, The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry, which has just come out in London and over here, I say approximately the same thing in altogether different contexts, speaking of Chinese and Japanese zen poetry.

Now, one doesn't have to have an interest in zen, of course. And few of the writers whose work I've collected have such an interest. They came at that truth naturally. I had to go to the Far East. And by the way, I admire them very much for coming at it naturally.

Now, I want to read some poems from the anthology Heartland II, Poets of the Midwest, selecting rather carefully to illustrate some of the principles I shall be discussing. For the most part, they're poems. And I'm choosing rather short ones by not very well-known writers.

I like to feel that they may become well known soon. In fact, curiously, when I edited the first Heartland-- it was published in 1967-- I had poems by, among other young writers, James Tate and Dennis Schmitz. They had not done books yet. I think a year after, in each case, they brought out impressive books. I like to feel that some of the poets I have included in the second Heartland will achieve equal prominence.

In any case, let me read, with the first sentence of this introduction in mind, a poem by a young poet from Springfield, Illinois, who seems to have discovered that-- and I repeat-- "A small town street, known for years, reaches through the universe. To the eye alive, nothing is without its wonder."

Here's how it goes. David Curry is the writer in Springfield, Illinois. And he writes a poem called "Thinking Back Seven Years and Being Here Now."

"Thumbing through someone else's book in a sublet New York apartment,

I found intense marginal notes written in a curious backhand.

None of them made sense to me.

Passages in the text were underlined.

And I couldn't imagine why.

Bold exclamation points drew me to the words that did not astound.

The book and the notes were written in the language I was born to,

By men with flesh like mine.

Outside my window was the world.

Ahead of me was a future I have come to.

While you do what you do, wherever you are,

I shall walk to the Midway Liquor Store, the largest in Central Illinois,

Under a Springfield winter's gray-white sky,

And cherish it."

There's another poem by another modestly known poet, a good friend. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago in Ohio. A simple piece but very telling in what it says. His name is Robert Flanagan. And this poem is called "State Message, A Midwestern Small Town."

"The dozen clocks of this courthouse reflect a dozen different times.

A 13th is heard,

Erratic ringing of tower chimes.

Place is the only certain fact we can live by.

The land may sprout a people,

A thing change to an eye.

But it will not happen in time.

The wind does not root seeds.

A buried, measureless dream is what growth needs.

Above each clock, I would place a box to sound the voice.

This is chaos or local clarity.

Citizen, it's your choice."

Here's how William Stafford put the same thought. And since he's Bill Stafford, he put it much better than I could hope to put it. I quote it with Bill's permission in the introduction to the Heartland Book. I believe in it. And I know he does. And his poetry proves that he believes in it much more than mine does, perhaps, or most anyone else's.

Bill Stafford says, "All events and experiences are local somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences, all the arts are regional, in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life. It is this immediacy that distinguishes art.

And paradoxically, the more local of feeling in art, the more all people can share it, for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground. Artists, knowing this mutual enrichment that extends everywhere, can act and praise and criticize as insiders. The means of art is a life of all people.

And that life grows and improves by being shared. Hence, it is good to welcome any region you live in or come to or think of, for that is where life happens to be, right where you are." And it thrills me with its eloquence. And I hope you feel the same about it.

Well, I put it in a different way. I said in thinking of planning the first of my Heartland collections that one of its most important purposes-- that is, the purpose of a book like Heartland-- and it could be fiction as well as poetry.

"One of its most important purposes would be to offer proof that what appears to many a colorless region is to some rich, complicated thrilling, that, in short, the Midwest is made up of the stuff of poetry. And once those living in it begin to see its details-- cornfields, skyscrapers, small-town streets, whatever-- with the help of their poets, they will find it not only possible to live with some measure of contentment among its particulars but even miraculously begin to love them and the poems they fill."

Now, one has to be a kind of fool, perhaps, to have such beliefs in our day. And in fact, when the second Heartland was reviewed in a Chicago newspaper-- and it was reviewed well as a book. But the reviewer took me very sternly to task for being so optimistic in my introduction. He said, how strange to think that there are people out there waiting for poetry.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, here are the kind of poets that I thought of when I wrote that. A young, I think, Minneapolis poet, if she's still around-- Jenny Andrews. Is she here?

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]

LUCIEN STRYK: Oh, yes. Well, I was hoping she was here, in fact. I'm sorry she isn't. In any case, Jenny is one of my chief contributors to the Heartland II book, a lovely poet. Beautiful work.

And if any of you know her, please tell her that I'm very grateful for her contributions. I have told her in writing, of course. The poem I'm going to read expresses so beautifully the feeling that I tried to get into the prose passage I just read and Bill Stafford got into his more impressive passage. It's called "The Reach of Winter."

"In the north, winter continues.

Friends are snowed in on Minnesota farms,

Dreaming of Russian planes.

We welcome the fifth month of cold in ice on the pale,

No water.

A recovery of necessities nearly forgotten that wake an old motion in our lives

Before cities when, like birds, we hardened in making the year meet us.

This unending reach of wind and snow can only be answered by dreams of escape, conspiracy,

Or finding new eyes in the night.

It becomes necessary to make all the days into battlefronts,

With the nature of things beginning.

The finish is unimportant."

A couple of years ago, another fine Minnesota poet, who became a great friend of mine in our correspondence, died. If ever I have a chance to do another Heartland collection-- and I'm so much hoping that I have-- the book will be dedicated in part to Franklin Brainard's memory. I hope his poetry, some of you. It's remarkable.

He died, by the way, of leukemia and wrote occasionally of his illness, very remarkably of it, without self-sorrow, with great precision, feeling more for others than for himself. The poem I'm about to read is a Minnesota poem. It's called "Roubaix Cemetery."

By the way, he was a poet in residence, in the last year of his life, in Mounds View, Minnesota, for the public schools there. "Roubaix Cemetery."

"I have looked at the Roubaix Cemetery.

Its pines have fallen from another world.

Have caught a mountainside to hold the rupture and the carving of an age while eating it slowly.

When sun comes, the Earth is speckled like the breast of a grouse.

The columns of created light carrying dust older and finer than soil.

I have looked into the Roubaix Cemetery,

Where bones of the Finlanders lie undertaker straight,

Boxed against the raw half soil and rawer stones.

Their passions are somewhere else, dancing.

Their old hands that grew to tools no longer milk,

No longer turn the separator.

Their madness no longer asks them why.

Let me lie there.

I shall leave the troubles of my marrow,

Shall leave my madness,

Shall leave the loves of ruptured.

And in the grouse light, climb the columns of dust and disappear in sun."

If you don't know Franklin Brainard's work, I hope this proves to be an enticement. A superb poet. And like so many superb poets, hardly known. In the past, it was difficult for those interested in promoting regional consciousness in the arts to accept the possibility-- and this is really rather interesting, I found, as a collector of Midwestern poems.

It was difficult for some to accept the possibility that the city exists. Indeed, by some, among them distinguished artists, very distinguished artists, the city was the enemy. Now, this may surprise you. I'm going to read something from Grant Wood, which I included in the introduction-- I quoted in the introduction to the Heartland II anthology.

This is what Grant Wood wrote. And by the way, let me again mention that in all the regional anthologies I consulted before beginning my own, I found practically no poems dealing with city life. This was one of the reasons spokesmen like Grant Wood would say things like this. And they were listened to.

Grant wood wrote, "Occasionally, I have been accused of being a flag waver for my own part of the country. I do believe in the Middle West, in its people, and in its art, and in the future of both. And this with no derogation to other sections.

I believe in the Middle West in spite of abundant knowledge of its faults. Your true regionalist is not a mere eulogist. He may even be a severe critic. I believe in the regional movement, in art, in letters, comparatively new in the former, though old in the latter. But I wish to place no narrow interpretation on such regionalism.

There is, or at least there need be, no geography of the art mind or of artistic talent or appreciation. But the fact of the revolt against the city is undeniable. Perhaps but few would concur with Thomas Jefferson's characterization of cities as ulcers on the body politic.

But for the moment, at least, much of their lure is gone. Is this only a passing phase of abnormal times? Having at heart a deep desire for a widely diffused love of art among our whole people, I can only hope that the next few years may see a growth of nonurban and regional activity in the arts and letters."

Here's part of a city poem by a very brilliant young poet, Albert Goldbarth. I'll read only a part of a long poem. It goes, "The Midwest exists under too much pressure.

Tremors, by the time they rattle households here, exaggerate the trembling crib,

The huddling bed, the sharp and shivering kitchen knives.

All year, the coasts press Lake Michigan in.

And in winter, ice even under our nails.

The lake closes in upon itself.

We look to sparrows for how to survive.

If soot is their blanket, we look to soot.

Theirs is a stationary virtue.

But tropic birds, the flamboyant, the leaders of flocks

Tell time in their hollow bones.

What enables flight?

What tells them when the time is up?

And the clock hands open to let them rise.

How are things at the edge of the nation?

Give my regards.

Wish you were here."

And here is a poet, a Black poet from Chicago, who is also a Midwestern writer and knows he is and was very happy to contribute to Heartland II. And his poem-- by the way, his name is Walter Bradford. And his poem is called "TC." It's after the name Terry Callier, or true Christian.

"And the voices dropped from the ashy ceiling

Like pellets of rain foreshadowing his coming.

A Gemini son, they cried,

Born to trudge between the parallels of the heavenly twins.

And he does that with his guitar for a crucifix

And six thin palms for strings.

All of them mean actors.

While strolling down the Dan Ryan Expressway

With a 40-pound voodoo radiator on his back

And a red bandanna tied around his head,

Singing, 'I have seen all the light,'

While some stillborn monkey niggers with steel knuckles for asses

And chartreuse pants and fishtail shoes,

Swing ape style on the 51st Street overpass,

Screaming, 'Moses is you back again?'

And they streamed on behind him

Till the concreteness stopped at the base of Mecca's Hill,

Just to hear Terry Callier sing.

And young 63rd Street pharaohs cloaked in Black Stones label gave peace hosannas for disciples,

For creation was order.

It was peace.

So instead of some Bible fiction God rebuilding this world,

Let no more child Terry Callier sing the first seven days.

True Christian, please make your world."

Which is a Midwestern poem. And we mustn't forget it. That's part of it. That's part of our world. In such poems, there is considerable variety of style. But it is style. I repeat, it is style. In other words, individuality, distinction.

The matter of style becomes interesting in relation to Midwestern literature because for a long time, it was on the grounds that they lacked style, that writers from the area were thought inferior. And by the way, I speak again not only of poets. Think of Dreiser, a great Midwestern novelist who is often dismissed for his lack of style.

John T. Flanagan, a champion of Midwestern culture, wrote apologetically some years ago that Midwestern writers-- and I'm quoting-- "one distinction in spite of their style, rather than because of it. The work"-- he went on, "The work is rarely aesthetically pleasing."

Now, here's how Louis Untermeyer describes the response to the early work of Carl Sandburg, the writer Ernest Hemingway, a fellow Midwesterner, said should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature instead of himself. This is what Untermeyer said about the response to Sandburg when he began writing.

"When Chicago poems first appeared, it was received with a disfavor, ranging from hesitant patternization to the scornful jeers of the academicians. Sandburg was accused of verbal anarchy, of the failure to distinguish prose matter from poetic material, of uncouthness, vulgarity, assaults on the English language, and a score of other crimes."

Now, writers like Sandburg and, of course, Hemingway won a great victory through their experiments with language. For all writers, whose main purpose is to create work which reflects naturally the life around them, Sandburg and Hemingway, a very great debt of gratitude.

By the way, the battle isn't over. If I may, I'm going to tell you a very personal little story. My Selected Poems has just been reviewed in Poetry Magazine in a long review by a very academic lady. And by the way, it's reviewed very favorably. And I'm happy.

But in the course-- and I think you'll see why I'm telling you this. In the course of her review, she makes a distinction between early work, which was full of razzmatazz, a lot of metaphor, charged language. And all that she adores and says so.

She quotes the most satisfying metaphoric exercises, things that young poets do, because they feel they should, because they feel it's expected of young poets. And then she makes a distinction between my later work, which is very Midwestern, which is simple and very natural and which she does not like as much. And it's as if to tell me, why don't you return to your old ways and stop writing poems?

And she mentions them specifically about kids in Lemont, Illinois. And she prefers a little poem I wrote about Jean Cocteau, because it's set in Paris. Well, if you can get your hands on that, the new issue of Poetry may be very instructive to see that. And I suppose I should be grateful to her because she likes my book. But I am not grateful to her.

I think this is a battle that will go on forever. If a man wants to write about the things around him, if he wants to look at his neighbors-- and in my own book, I could point to poems about practically every house on my street, almost every tree, and certainly every neighbor. If he wants to do that, he's going to have to write naturally and simply and intimately. And he isn't going to come up with jazzy metaphors to please academic critics.

It might appear that I'm speaking with a kind of bitterness. I'm not. But what I'm trying to say is what Louis Untermeyer wrote about Carl Sandburg, the response to his work. This isn't an old story. It happens all the time. And that's why people will look at a book like Heartland II and, for the most part, pass it up for another one of those brightly wrapped anthologies with the same old poems and the same old poets.

Well, what about the life? What about the life in the Midwest? What for Midwestern poets is the life? When one has answered that question, one has defined the nature of Midwestern literature. For it is the nature of the life that conditions the art made in its name.