English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Mapping the Midwest

Garin Cycholl.  Blue Mound to 161.  Columbus, OH: Pavement Saw Press, 2004.  www.pavementsaw.org.

By Stacey Levine

This book-length poem is an unconventional paean to rural Illinois and other points in the American midwest from the early 20^th Century up to the present.  Alternating verse, prose, and news and dialogue snippets, this poet has designed a quietly fragmented work with a wonderfully strange sense of time-place that’s simultaneously constant and disjointed.

Recalling Giscome Road by C.S. Giscombe, Cycholl’s work inimately maps the sorts of places and geographic points and that are well known to locals in rural areas, but are essentially invisible to the larger culture.  “The world begins in a ditch,” as Cycholl writes, establishing his theme about class division, hidden people, and little-seen locales.   Blue Mound to 161 tunnels intimately around rural routes, fields, riverbanks and empty streets that lend the poem its eerie aesthetic and also its dominant metaphor.  The poem’s place-names and geographic features (Jackson County, Post Creek, Archidemes Cave) are offered up so repeatedly that the reader begins to have a sense of relishing, grabbing the land, a digging in response to the alternative, displacement.

There’s a Whitmanesque passion in the lines as the author evokes coal union struggles of the early 1920s, poverty, and other social issues (an English instructor and pastor, Cycholl told me in that era, Illinois locals resented Italians, who were shipped in to small industrial towns to do mining work).   At some moments, the dialogue reeks of space and twilight: “We moor again along the shallows.  Porter plays his fiddle and we chase the Missouri girls back up into the woods…Mother, how large is Missouri?”

 Sections of Blue Mound offer nicely satisfying vowels that jump out: “…light, air, aluminum, water--/no quack grasses, these/yellowfruit sedge, cuplike and sick-brown, blooms/hidden, nerves running the convex face.”   The poem tends to disrupt itself, too, as stiff, textbook-style prose ricochets back to rolling lyrical segments.  A section titled “Song of Three Jonesboro Girls in a Field” proceeds: “O gymnasiaum songs!/O songs in a girl’s knee and wrist!/O handheld blue plastic songs!/’Blessed is my maker!....Blessed’s not your maker/…’Face it girls.  Blessed is one long/gone motherfucker.  He’s gone walking down Route 13.”  

            Read this work for its interesting patterning of lyric against prosaic, and for its quirky, bluesy evocation of the rural midwest.