As part of the Voices from the Heartland series, Minnesota poet Diane Glancy reads her poem "The Back Porch of the Country."

This file was digitized with the help of a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Transcript:

(00:00:00) I think I'm always trying to break through the Prairie into pockets of the world around me. It's because even as I write I still hear my mother's voice. Don't leave the yard. I searched for diversity on the flat space of prairie where I feel enclosed. I make rigid blocks of imagery, which I try to transcend ordinary life and Imagination are the tools. I was born in the middle of America some of my ancestors migrated by choice some Came during the forced March of the Cherokee to Indian Territory two generations later. My mother left the farm in Kansas and my father left Arkansas these two different people met became my parents and stuck it out later. I married and didn't what could there be in our lives to provoke words, especially the words of poetry bearer of our culture mirror roadmap and releaser of emotions. I raised two children. Children finished an education divorced. I am burdened with rent and groceries all the things my parents were burdened with I grown as they groaned but I Will Survive it's the Swale that runs through the land depressions from Wagon Wheels moving West on the dining floor of the Prairie. There's a memory of the trail and its hardships not a place for Comfort. My mother said of the farm long after the dust of those Trails settled my They never spoke of his upbringing except to say that no one gave him anything and it's true except maybe the Lord who blessed his path and he never knew it in the mornings. I sit on the back steps of my beige Bungalow. I can tell by the chip paint the house used to be see green somewhere in memory almost 2,000 miles from either Coast boats float over the water like quilting needles on the farm. It's much like the house where I grew up which might Parents owned. I rent a backward step a not doing as well a letting myself over the seawall. I hear rain on the leaves of the large old trees in the neighborhood not yet soaked through I think of writing from the Prairie as being in a colander and I am aligned with the holes. I see the different views through minuscule openings never the whole scene the death of both parents the refining aspects of daily life. The empty bookcases in the house where I grew up the impressions of experience the feeling that far away something is happening the hurt of lives that fall apart love that doesn't hold the voice of the great spirit the fretwork of the mind on the rural concept of Stay by the wagon and plow your own field the ordinary life. I write from the harshness the fullness of this land.