This summer Reger completed editing and publishing the Sangamon River Anthology of Champaign County Poetry. Here he shares the foreword from that volume to introduce the project and offer a glimpse into the collection’s themes.
Poetry in Champaign County has long been characterized by Urbana’s Red Herring Poetry group, which for nearly 40 years has organized and published local poetry through its journal, The Matrix. Since those halcyon days, we have not seen such focused efforts from poets setting a standard for literary efforts in our area.
It has long been an objective of mine to bring local poets together and forge some semblance of unity among them. In our community, poetry groups abound, but I have not witnessed much individual crossover and mingling of muses. This anthology is an effort to do just that by publishing the poetry of several members of groups together in a single volume that purports to be a representation of the very best work done by a wide variety of current local poets, ranging in age from 18 to 80.
Poets from the CU Poetry group, the Glassroom Poets, and the Quints, and faculty from the UIUC English Department and local high schools, as well as several “free agents” who are not in a group at present, are found here. Even though the book is incomplete because many who should be in it are not, I am confident the collection does capture a nice representative slice of what the best local poets themselves consider examples of their best work.
Like hundreds of thousands of poets in all countries, times, and traditions, the poets have committed something to paper that represents their private battles with the world, their individual struggle to establish for themselves a sense of “what it feels like to be a self in the world” (Gregory Orr). The “self” is defined in relation to the “present moment.” The “Vanished Past,” the “Unknowable Next,” or the “Buried Self” are all components or points on an inner compass rose that allows some order in the chaos in the self.
That undefined inner chaos is one reason why these poets did not receive an assigned topic for this book, but were counted on to define and share what they felt was their best unpublished work; because “to be human is to have a deep craving for order.” Our awareness of disorder inspires in poets at least an “ordering response” or imagination, or a “muse” that invites us to write poetry (Orr, again). This is one explanation for the existence of survival poetry, or poetry as “therapy,” which can often be heard at readings featuring traumatized poets seeking to restore some kind of order in their lives.
All of that is less interesting to me, I confess, than what draws their attention as subject matter. Yes, poets seek order in their chaotic experiences, but it is much more telling what these local poets find a useful order to seek out, to bring forth in beauty, in language. In specific terms, our poets seek to understand relationships, especially family relations; nature; some sense of place; a sense of spaciousness or the scope of the land; and emotional stability. There is also a significant thread of comment on social and political matters in which poetry plays a role in the demand for justice or equity.
Some poets seek to grasp at the relations of “chance encounters.” They write of the tenuousness of these, but over time tend to recognize a history of these sporadic episodes: “Please know that I loved to when I did.” Often the emotional encounters are important and enshrined in poetry because they “train me to be tougher,” and are therefore teaching moments, adding life to the poet and then also to the poetry reader. Interestingly, nature plays a role as a resting place in the turmoil, where the poet can “let the world spin without my hands upon it.”
Family connections are also examined through the poet’s written efforts to achieve balance and understanding. Family is deeply explored in “Stations of the Crossroads,” which depicts a family of Italian, Catholic extraction, in the context of numerous incursions: a brother who can’t speak, the children’s experiences at school, including sexual experiences; pervasive Catholic rituals; and family traditions, all characterized as stations of the cross and steps of a sort toward salvation—extended family relations.
The poetry in this anthology also touches on nature and humans’ fulfillment of a stewardship toward it, that “all that crawl, and all that fly, that root and snuffle, dive and glide, on wings, trotters, fins or feet” should be allowed to live. This simple manifesto is twisted in “The Dead Chickadee,” in which the voice urges that the dead bird is not buried, but fed to the cats, to boost the food chain. In return, the poets here tend to put nature into a healing role: “I know there is a forest out there, with a creek, calm and cool.”
The poetry in this collection sometimes considers objects as the means of assessing something about the quality of life. Grandpa’s glasses, an old purse, old sneakers, or a blue piano create connections with people or places that bear meaning for the poet in the world. Sometimes the connection is established through an action, such as peeling grapefruit, more than an objective; and sometimes the connection is meant to communicate through the ages something about our time to their time, such as beauty.
Often the poets use walking as a mode through which they order the world around them to make observations about nature, the sky, or life generally: “A joyous walk every day, sniffing, pawing, hunting, hurrying ahead.” The relationship with nature can also be a statement about personal health or wellness. Why does the squirrel rush away, and why are the bees so industrious among the flowers? The complexity of the natural world may lead the poet to simply “call every bird a finch” and be done with it. The variations in cloud formations or the happenstance of a dragonfly alighting on a reed during a human stroll are both the sort of wonder that will be gained and expressed poetically. A summer storm, with the rushing of wind in the trees and the smell of rain, makes a spectacle that the poet observes as entertainment. This action of wind and trees can also express the sense of connection, joy, dance, and “the rhythm of push and pull” found in a human relationship and identity:
Then I understand
how she grows between rock and sky:
by being fully, freely herself,
asking nothing of the light
but to shine where it will shine.
The poet ceases his own locomotion and becomes part of nature’s movements: “part of this ceaseless river.” These “fields are not dead.” Through poetry and its power we hear:
If you lose hope,
find it in nature and the
quiet of your soul
Unfolding like life’s kaleidoscope.
(the two stanzas are from Gregory Orr, “Poetry as Survival,” 2002)
William Reger was poet laureate of Urbana from 2019 to 2020.
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