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| Photo by Jim Barton |
"Hometown” is a word filled
with emotional meaning, negative, positive or both, depending on one’s
experience. It may be used to refer to the town in which we grew up, in which
case it may bring to mind the cliché, “You can’t go home again.” “You Can’t Go
Home Again” was the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe, and later, of an episode
of Battlestar Galactica, a Chet Baker album, and a variety of songs (including
those performed by D. J. Shadow or Lari White, Nanci Griffith, Rita McNeil, to
name a few). How we remember our hometowns is impacted by family life as we
grew up, and by neighbors, friends, teachers and others. A happy childhood can
cause memories of that hometown to shine, whereas a miserable childhood can
make the best of towns or cities seem like sad places where no one would want
to live.
Your “hometown” can also be
the city or town where you live now, at least if you have lived there long
enough to begin to feel that it is “home.” The longer you have lived there, the
deeper the emotional resonance of the place is likely to be.
The title poem in Jim Barton’s
chapbook, Dirty Little Town, is his
description of or tribute to Huttig, Arkansas (pictured above), where he has
lived for 22 years. “It is,” he told me, “a
sawmill town founded just after the turn of the 20th century by a German mill
owner, Charles Huttig, of Chicago, to capitalize on the old-growth forests of
the Ouachita River bottoms in South Arkansas. It is still kept alive by the
mill, with its jobs and replanting of pine, and the streets are kept dirty by
the many log trucks coming in and out.” Here is Barton’s poetic portrait of
Huttig:
Dirty Little Town
It’s
a dirty little town,
from
the mill pond in the curve,
to
the STOP sign by the shuttered bank—
clods
of mud in winter,
dust
and clay in summer’s heat.
It’s
a dirty little town,
from
the gas pumps by the car wash
to
Toby’s Auto Parts and Hardware—
pine
bark, always pine bark,
the
occasional clump of green.
This
dirty little town runs on dirty trucks
hauling
logs from woodlands
to
be sawed and shipped as lumber.
From
the scales beside the giant cranes
to
the lumber yard and docks.
Boys
walk in the front gate,
work
with the logs and saws and chains,
planing
and stacking and loading,
turning
tree to board, youth to retirement,
trudge
out again as old men.
It’s
a dirty little town,
but
it’s my dirty little town.
Long
may it stay that way.
Diana
Anhalt’s childhood hometowns were very different than Barton’s. Her parents were expatriates who left the
Bronx during the McCarthy era and moved to Mexico City when Anhalt was a child.
She lived in Mexico for 60 years. In “Nostalgia’s Map,” she thinks about the Mexican
hometown of her childhood.
Nostalgia’s Map
Añoro esas calles, I yearn for
those streets which snake
through
Mexico City like the lines on my hand, the ones I
skated,
walked and drove on and the ones I didn’t,
those
I knew only by name but never found: Tulancingo,
Cañada and those I found but couldn’t
pronounce
Quetzalcohuatl, Itztapalapa, Ahuehuetes.
Come, sigame.
Follow me down streets named
for mountains:
Aconcagua, Monte Libano, Ararat. They knew my
feet well.
I
skirted their puddles and potholes, felt their gravel crunch
beneath
my sandals as I avoided sidewalks buckling around tree
roots,
dislodged by earthquakes––kicked up dust in their gutters,
inhaled
their newly spread tar.
Te llevaré, I will take you
to the cobblestoned streets of San Angel,
to
its Little Street of Bitterness, Callejón de la Amargura— which
opens
onto a large stone cross, a hitching post without a horse--
and
to the Calle de Almas Perdidas, Lane of
Lost Souls, flanked
by
funeral parlors and Bleeding Judas trees, narrowing into
a
footpath, ending in a ravine.
Recorro. I pass over traffic clogged
arteries and the lost streets,
too
narrow to name, scribbled across the city’s face—or limping
their
way from corner to corner, going nowhere—and the drunken
alleyways,
unknown to maps, to finally reach the road out of town,
my
dead-end street.
~ Diana Anhalt
Previously
published in: Border Senses, Summer
2012; Diana Anhalt, Second Skin,
(Chapbook), Future Cycle Press, Mineral Bluff, GA, 2012; Second Prize 21st
Annual Artists Embassy International’s Dancing Poetry Contest, September, 2014
and Diana Anhalt, Because There Is No
Return, Passager Books, 2015
Minnesota
poet, LeRoy N. Sorenson, in contrast, grew up in a Midwestern blue-collar town
where
The exhaust from the hog plant
soured lawns.
A
town
. . . where the jail
filled each night with volunteers. .
. .
he says
in “Pastoral.” In his bed at night, he says in “Forecast,”
. . . I could hear the failed cry
Of a locomotive replay the last
train
A
different kind of hometown, leaving different memories. (Excerpts are from Forty Miles North of Nowhere (Mainstreet Rag Publishing Company,
2016). At http://www.leroysorensonauthor.com/
you can find a link to three poems from the book, another link from which you
can purchase it, and a bio of the poet.
September Poetry Challenge:
A Poem about Your Hometown
The September
Poetry Challenge is to write a poem about your hometown – the town you grew up
in or the town you live in now.
Title
your poem. It may be free or formal verse. If you use a form, please identify
the form when you submit your poem. Please single-space, and don’t use lines
that are overly long (because the blog format doesn’t accommodate long lines).
You
may submit a published if you retain
copyright, but please include publication data. This applies to poems
published in books, journals, newspapers, or on the Internet. Note that this is
a recent change in the rules.
The
deadline is September 15. Poems submitted after the deadline will not be
considered. There is no charge to enter, so there are no monetary rewards;
however winners are published on this blog. Please don’t stray too far from
“family-friendly” language. No simultaneous submissions, please. You should
know by the end of the month whether or not your poem will be published on this
blog. Decision of the judge or judges is final.
Copyright
on each poem is retained by the poet. If a winning poem is published elsewhere
later, please give credit to this blog.
How to Submit Your Poem:
Send one poem only to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net
(substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”) . Include a brief bio which can be printed with your poem, if you are
a winner this month.
Submission
of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a
winner, so be sure that you put your name (exactly as you would like it to
appear if you do win) at the end of the poem. Poems may be pasted into an email
or sent as an attachment (no pdf files, please). Please do not indent the poem or center it on the page. It helps if
you submit the poem in the format used on the blog (Title and poem
left-justified; title in bold (not all in capital letters); your name at the
bottom of the poem). Also, please do not use spaces instead of commas in the
middle of lines. I have no problem with poets using that technique (I sometimes
do it myself). However I have difficulty getting the blog to accept and
maintain extra spaces. Poems with long lines have to be published in smaller print, due to the format of this blog.
Poems
shorter than 40 lines are generally preferred but longer poems will be
considered.
Bios:
Diana
Anhalt, a former resident of Mexico City, Mexico—her parents moved there in
1950 in order to escape the McCarthy era—made that country her home for sixty
years. She married a Mexican, had two
children, taught and served on the board of the American School Foundation, and
subsequently edited their newsletter, “Focus,”for eight years. She resided in
Mexico City until 2010. During that time, her work, which has included essays,
book reviews, poetry and a book, A
Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965
(Archer Books) has appeared in both English and Spanish. She subsequently moved
to Atlanta, GA with her late husband, Mauricio, in order to be closer to
family.
Jim
Barton’s poetry has won nearly 400 awards since 2006, including two Sybil Nash
Abrams Awards and the Langston Hughes Award. He is author of one full-length
collection, For the Animals Who Missed
the Ark (Plain View Press, 2008), and three chapbooks. His chapbook, At the
Bird Museum (New Dawn Unlimited, 2009) won the Morris Memorial Award. Barton is
a member of Poets Roundtable of Arkansas and the Poets of the Pines. He was
recently elected President of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
©
Wilda Morris
