Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes by Bill Conlogue (review)

Bill Conlogue’s book is roughly equal parts autobiography, interpretation of literary texts, and local history of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and its environs. These disparate components are united around the theme of “reading” landscape, a technique introduced by W. G. Hoskins in England. The author’s introduction explains his approach to the landscapes of work—work here being anthracite coal mining and dairy farming—as seen by a college professor of English. In each chapter a place or structure in or near Scranton introduces a theme that the author then explores through works of poetry and prose that usually shift the discussion to places elsewhere, enlarge the interpretation, and eventually bring the narrative back to home ground. The technique illuminates Conlogue’s theme that “looking around us” helps us see “what’s beyond us.” His primary concern is abuse of the land but he also worries about the valuation of literary scholarship and liberal education today.

The first chapter introduces water issues, beginning with drainage of contaminated runoff from flooded anthracite mines. They lead him to Robert Frost’s poem “A Brook in the City,” and the assertion that a farmer adapts to what the land offers while a city alters the land to suit its needs, here the creation of a watershed to supply its water demand. Next he moves to place-based poems. Can we fully appreciate W. S. Merwin’s poem about the massive Lackawanna furnaces without actually reading it on site? Or, in an account of underground mine fires, do we need to smell the sulfurous odor, feel the scorched earth, and see the abandoned homes to fully appreciate the poem?

In the third chapter Conlogue turns to the division of the land by Early Republic surveyors and its subsequent settlement by migrants from Philadelphia competing with incomers from Connecticut who were following King Charles’s grant that set their state’s western boundary at the Pacific Ocean. This leads him to a discussion of Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Next, razing the cattle barn on the Conlogue family farm takes us to the decline of dairy farming, to Thoreau, and to a Wordsworth poem.

The last two chapters turn to liberal arts in college education via the International Correspondence School, which happens to be located in Scranton, and was probably the first learning-at-a-distance educational institution. The final chapter examines waste, specifically mine waste (culm) and more generally garbage such as that shipped from New York to Pennsylvania to fill worked-out open-pit mines. The coda revisits natural gas extraction first mentioned in the Introduction.

The “Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes” of the subtitle are actually just one landscape, the northern anthracite coalfield. It is an early, domestic example of a global issue that Conlogue touches on but doesn’t explore extensively. Anthracite, a clean-burning fuel, gave residents of New England and the mid-Atlantic states heat in winter without the foul air that residents of London or Pittsburgh endured from burning soft coal. Delivered to seaports such as New Bedford and Fall River in Massachusetts, it freed manufacturers from dependence on waterpower, and allowed the production of textiles and machinery at lower cost to consumers than would otherwise have been possible. These were positive benefits that left the consequences of coal extraction in the mining region. The issue remains with us, now on a global scale. We export the environmental and social costs of supplying metals and minerals for the consumer-driven, throw-away society to miners and mining communities in Africa and South America. The worked-out open-pit anthracite mines Conlogue describes in Pennsylvania now can no longer contain all of New York’s waste. Workers in China and India deal with the hazardous materials in our discarded electronic devices. Would that Conlogue had explored these issues further.

A few questions arise. Why the assault on the International Correspondence School for failing to provide liberal arts education...