What Is (If There Is) Midwest Poetry?

In QAE 16, John Bradley offered this piece of is-it-a-poem-or-is-it-literary-criticism, in which he asks “What is (if there is) Midwest poetry?” Whatever it is, it’s provocative and it’s beautiful. But QAE lives in the Midwest, so we may be biased.

“If I Say It Is”: An Unscientific Survey in Response to the Question “What Is (If There Is) Midwest Poetry?”

John Bradley

Carl Sandburg: “I asked the professors who teach the meaning of meaning and they told me about their lawns.”

Lorine Niedecker: “I was born where I was born water borne.”

Jeff Tweady: Who gave you my e-mail address?”

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan: “You won’t believe all the poems I’ve been writing since I got here.”

Lisel Mueller: “It must have a belly button and an anus.”

Arielle Greenberg: “Did you know that Kafka washed his hands before he went to the bathroom?”

Nin Andrews: “An orgasm knows no east or west.”

Vachel Lindsay: “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.”

Edgar Lee Masters: “They still read Spoon River? Really?”

James Tate: “I think it’s now made in China.”

Lucien Stryk (Or Possibly Shinkichi Takahashi): “Don’t wear argyle socks at a convention of arsonists.”

Lorine Niedecker: “In a spoon in a church in a janitor’s closet in a spool of thread on the edge of a hospital bed on the spine of a book of do-it-yourself plumbing repair.”

Robert Bly: “Wasn’t that you  in the hammock on Duffy’s farm?”

Meridel LeSeuer: “Ask the corn. Ask the milkweed. Ask the idiot who keeps asking the same thing over and over.”

Bob Dylan: “A democracy of the tired.”

Jim Harrison: “I dreamed that I dreamed I was giving birth to a crow who asked me what I was doing dreaming this dream.”

Ted Kooser: “You’re asking the wrong geranium.”

Oprah: “Who gave you my email address?”

Jesse Ventura: “You should ask the Dalai Lama.”

The Dalai Lama: “You ask funny questions.”

Vachel Lindsay: “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.”

Donald Hall: “I once put together an anthology of Midwest poetry. But no one wanted to publish it. Not even publishers in the Midwest.”

Gwendolyn Brooks: “Articulated, syncopated silence.”

Leon Kottke: “I never heard that played on a lead-pipe flute before.”

George Kalamaras: “Wash your Ganges every day.”

Laura Bush: “All poetry is American poetry.”

Bucky Halker: “It sounds so much better on steel guitar.”

Mary Bradley: “I don’t know anything about poetry, John. You know I prefer crossword puzzles.”

Lorine Niedecker: “In the tiny spider dangling from the tip of this pen.”

Kent Johnson: “Who can say what’s poetry and what’s not?”

Joan Cusack: “Who gave you my cell number?”

Billy Corgan: “Are you still trying to figure that out?”

Garrison Keillor: “There was a young poet from Winona, who was always composing a sestina, wherever he went, he added its scent, and now he delivers pizza.”

Liz Phair: “You never know what you’ll find in the dumpster.”

Catfish Keith: “The Washed Out, Blown Away, Dried Out, What’s That Smell Midwest Blues.”

Maria Sabina: “Place a pinch between your cheek and gum.”

John Prine: “Just cuz.”

Georgia O’Keeffe: “Watch your top knot.”

Ernest Hemingway: “And you yourn.”

Sandra Cisneros: “The Midwest is every place. There is no such place as the Midwest.”

Mavis Staple: “Honey, if I say it is, it is.”

Vachel Lindsay: “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.”

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