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  • Memory and Imagination in the Poetry of B. H. Fairchild
  • David Mason (bio)

Let me begin with two errors. The first is my own in the title, which suggests that memory and imagination are separable. In fact the underlying supposition of this essay will be closer to the meaning Thomas Hobbes gave these terms in Leviathan: "This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself . . . we call imagination . . . ; but when we would express the decay and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations has divers names." Maybe in English we need a new word—mémagination. Just as the Greek word for a novel, mythistorema, combines both myth and history, our word would mix memory and imagination.

I raise this issue at the outset because of the second error, sometimes made by critics reading the poems of B. H. Fairchild, who simplistically call him a poet of memory. The poet is either virtuous or not (depending on what sort of ax the critic grinds), precisely because his poems enact memories of his working-class youth. Never mind that Fairchild's family aspired to the middle-class: the fact of a blue-collar environment confuses matters of money and social situation. Work is virtue; wealth is criminal. Fairchild gets lumped with Philip Levine (also piously misread) as a poet of the underclass, sometimes accused of sentimentality for giving us images like old wpa photographs depicting noble poverty. My contention here is simply that Fairchild is a far more thoughtful, far more complicated writer than many critics have yet understood. He is a philosophical poet whose ideas are embodied in narratives about a variety of people, often skilled laborers whose work parallels the achievements of artists and athletes. These poems are imagined as much as remembered; they are shaped not only as lyric performances but also as sketches and full-fledged stories or meditations. Narratives, I should add, are every bit as formal as sonnets or villanelles. Even before they are written they [End Page 251] have a shape, like some small, wholly formed object you can put in your pocket or turn in the palm of your hand. Narrative is too often perceived as the property of prose writers, when in many ways poets are the ideal storytellers because they work close to the bones and sinews of language. Fairchild has thought long and hard about storytelling in verse, and this narrative impulse is part of the vitality of his poems.

Some of our best poets are misread as untutored country bumpkins—I think of Robert Frost and Ted Kooser. A certain kind of critic looks for obvious signs of erudition, approving especially of formal difficulty or theoretical arcana. Fairchild seems easy to lump in with other Midwestern regionalists. This perception of the cultural periphery, sustained by perceived cultural centers, conflates manual labor and simplemindedness. A second glance, however, will show even the most thickheaded critic that Fairchild rarely writes poems about blue-collar people alone. Almost everything he has published is self-consciously artful or about art or about people for whom art plays some important role.

His first book of poems, The Arrival of the Future (published in 1985 and reprinted in 2000), is utterly deliberate in its organization. The opening poem, "Machine Shop with Wheat Field," is a painterly depiction of a workspace within a wide-open landscape—almost a Renaissance painter's sense of shapes and spatial relationships. This is followed by a poem called "The Men"—aspects of masculinity and of male grief will be important themes throughout his career. But Fairchild follows "The Men" with "Angels," and the implications of this juxtaposition deepen when we turn to the poem itself:

Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college one winter, hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke's Duineser Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end of his semi gliding around in the side mirror as he hit ice and knew he would never live to see graduation or the castle...

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