Dave Etter: Fishing for Our Lost American Souls

In critiquing the 1991 Heath Anthology of American Literature, Hershel Parker, himself an editor of the competing Norton Anthology of American Literature, suggested that many Heath contributors “seem to have gone hunting not to discover what good literature had been written in the United States but only to locate minority (including women) writers who had been absent from or poorly represented in previous anthologies.” In so doing, he observed, they neglected several significant genres, ethnicities, and geographies, particularly the South, but also the West and the Midwest. “The Heath advertising makes its highest claims for the diversity of the anthology,” Parker noted, “but diversity is just what I miss in it.”¹

The dissatisfaction of one version of the American canon with a succeeding version of that canon is an old story, but Parker is correct in saying that 1980s reconstructionists wrote off “vast numbers of American writers,” including many of those who in their own times had been the most popular or the most respected, “the ones who had seemed to speak with truly American voices.” In fixating on race, class, gender, and sexual preference—which have become significant literary considerations—most critics ignored or underplayed age, religion, ethnicity (too often conflated with race), and region (both geographical locality and significant urban/suburban/rural distinctions). Insofar as the reconstruction sought a fuller understanding of American Literature through heightened awareness of cultural determinants, its reassessment remains, for these reasons, incomplete. Harsher readings accuse reconstructionists of replacing an edifice of considerable grace and coherence with something of a shambles. An even harsher interpretation is that the reconstruction was driven less by a quest after Truth than by such late capitalist market considerations as publication, promotion, and book sales.²

In the junkbond market of literary, scholarly, and textbook publication, the South, the West, and the rural Midwest lag somewhat behind. Historically, they always have, and here is another old story: the neglect of regionalists (usually dismissed as “local color writers”) by the credentialed custodians of American literary culture. Polarities in this running debate are multiple and varied: native opposed to international or European traditions; philosopher-

academics opposed to journalists, gentleman farmers and steamboat captains; the New York cultural arbiters against the rest of the country. But if literature is culturally determined, and the proper work of literary scholars is to examine the full range of cultural determinants, then their province is indeed the full range of American culture, including the tradition of Midwest village writers, from Twain and Eggleston and Garland to Anderson and Lewis and Lindsay and Masters to Lockridge and Bissell.³ This tradition, relatively prominent in earlier versions of the canon, has largely disappeared from the national academic consciousness. One hears little these days about “the Chicago Renaissance” or “the Revolt from the Village.” Twain and Anderson remain, diminished, refocused, Anderson represented in the current one-volume Norton by two stories: “Mother” and “Queer.” Later rural Midwesterners, especially writers of the 1980s and 1990s, became virtually invisible, including such women as Sue Hubbell, Carol Bly, Kathleen Norris, Linda Hasselstrom, and Jane Smiley. One of the more marginalized voices in adademia today is that of living male poets from the rural Midwest, including Robert Bly, who is usually relegated to the men’s movement. Not a single Anglo male poet born after 1930 appeared in the first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Many names come to mind: William Kloefkorn, John Knoepfle, and Dave Etter, formerly of Elburn, now of Lanark, Illinois. In the 1970s and 1980s, Etter emerged as one of the Midwest’s premier poets. He won both Midland Authors and Carl Sandburg awards; his poems were reprinted in over one hundred anthologies and in eight foreign countries, including translations in German, Japanese, and Polish; his great work, Alliance, Illinois, endorsed by Raymond Carver as “hands down the most impressive long work of poetry I’ve read in years,” found its place among Winesburg, Main Street, Main-Travelled Roads, and Lake Wobegon Days in an essay on the literature of small town America written by an Austrian scholar and published...