Mapping Great Plains Poetry: Nebraska and Beyond

Poets as Cartographers

Poets and writers map the physical, temporal, emotional, and spiritual geographies of the Great Plains. When I think of that rolling inland sea, however, I first think of Elizabeth Bishop's remarkable coastal poem "The Map," which concludes "Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. / More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." Bishop positions "The Map" as the first poem in her Complete Poems (1969), providing a compass point or signpost to navigating the book that follows. As a key to understanding the ensuing poetry, "The Map" presumes familiarity with the hemispheric, regional (Nova Scotia, New England, Brazil), and local (Boston, Key West) scales in which her work is situated. Understanding Great Plains poetry requires a similar range of geographical coordinates: poems, like maps, translate three-dimensional topographies into two-dimensional word-pictures of reality, which then regain three- and four-dimensionality when enacted by readers. Poets, like mapmakers, use their "strong imaginations" to give "a local habitation and a name" to the landscapes they represent.

My own literary maps date from the summer of 1976 when I took on the "Modern American Explorer" reading challenge at the Louisville, Nebraska, public library (Fig. 1). The librarian gave me a colorful state sticker as I finished reading each book, which I then dutifully placed on the blue-and-white outline map of the United States. The map's legend reads: "Books are Magic Carpets, / Which can speed you through the skies. / And the wonders of our land / Will be revealed before your eyes." On the verge of entering fourth grade, I read thirty-one titles that summer—stories of Robin Hood, Sinbad, and Paul Bunyan; Snoopy and Marmaduke; and a chapter book called Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle—but not a single book about Nebraska. On the map, the "wonders of our land" that make up the Great Plains are reduced to icons or caricatures of agriculture and pioneer history: vanishing Indians, covered wagons, pork production, waving wheat, and oil derricks. In that bicentennial year, the national metanarrative glossed over Nebraska's central place as "the heart of the continent, the pathway of Empire."¹

Fig. 1.

Author's collection,

courtesy of the Louisville (Nebraska) Public Library. Drawn by Michael M. Murphy, St. Cloud, Minnesota, ca. 1956. The bar for nine-year-olds was set relatively low—I only needed to read twenty-five books to get stickers for the entire map.

Nine years prior to the national bicentennial, the Nebraska Centennial Commission, in cooperation with the Nebraska Arts Council, created the Nebraska Centennial Literary Map and Guide to Nebraska Authors (1967), compiled by Bernice Kauffman and illustrated by Jack Brodie.² Once again, the vernacular iconography used by Brodie to represent the state is mostly vintage nineteenth century. Fifty years later, many of the authors featured on the map have become historical footnotes. Of the more than 300 writers featured in the guide, only eleven truly deserve to be remembered for their poetry: Orasmus Charles Dake, Edwin Ford Piper, Hartley Burr Alexander, Willa Cather, John Neihardt, Helene Magaret, Loren Eiseley, Tillie Olsen, Karl Shapiro, Bernice Slote, and Weldon Kees. All eleven are featured in the new Nebraska Poetry anthology (2017), published on the occasion of the state's sesquicentennial. In my introduction, I wrote about four key features of the state's poetry: first, its rootedness in the land, which is reflected in the ways writers deeply inhabit the place we call Nebraska; second, its remarkable ability to mark the passing of time and connect us to our history; third, its ability to give voice to the everyday colloquial languages we use to communicate with each other; and fourth, its reflection of Nebraska's communities and the myriad ways we relate to one another.³ I would argue that creative writers can teach us as much about the deep identity of the Plains as any physical map or history book. Two writers in particular, Loren Eiseley and Kathleene West...