levelheaded: No cracked earth

Klocksiem’s poem works closely with its epigraph, a line pulled from one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. In the chat, Roosevelt offers a compelling and expertly-orated argument for his government work program. While Klocksiem has selected one of the speech’s most persuasive and uplifting lines as her epigraph, in the poem that follows, her speaker pulls away the pretty language of political speech-making to express a direct experience of the situation Roosevelt can only describe. It is a “people’s history” à la Howard Zinn. When the speaker tells us, “they say the policy will save us,” she implies the policy will not save us and comes to that conclusion almost because “they” say it will. When she equates the forthcoming government report with the report of a pistol (“reporting for miles / like pistol shot”), the speaker implies a deep, mortal danger.

Klocksiem’s first lines, “Report forthcoming on how to break up / wind,” refer to a literal, if imagined, report on windbreaks, or “shelterbelts.” What did these windbreaks do? In the 1930’s Great Plains states, farmers hoped they would prevent the devastation that accompanied dust storms like this, thus holding off (or not) the migration of more than the “twenty thousand already caravanned west.” A part of Roosevelt’s wide-ranging domestic plan was to fund the planting of windbreaks in the region. But whether the government’s policies helped the farmers of the Dust Bowl is almost beside the point. The speaker’s real beef is with a bureaucracy that cannot react quickly enough to a dangerous situation.

What’s interesting is that Klocksiem all but ignores the situation itself. She makes fleeting reference to wind breaks and notes that “saplings” are being tested as a solution. She touches on the physicality of the problem when she says, “a decimal here or there or just eroding whole numerals.” But even at this moment, the erosion of soil is connected to the statistics that might appear in the forthcoming report. Also conspicuously absent from the poem is any direct identification of the speaker. “I” appears only twice in the poem—once in the phrase “I bet” and again as “I think.” Whoever she is, this speaker can only guess at what has happened “seasons ago.” Because the language is offered without a clearly identifiable speaker (and because it is presented with little punctuation and exaggerated spacing), it’s easy to hear a collection of voices. The first line of the poem sounds like the beginning of a telegram. Later we have a more colloquial, frustrated voice in the line, “but at least it pays […] even if damn […] policy fools.” Klocksiem attempts to capture a consciousness—a historical consciousness— one that might have implications today.

It is hard not to notice certain parallels between the frustrations of Klocksiem’s speaker and the today’s politically dissatisfied. Since we are more interested in poetry, we won’t go into the politics of the poem. We will make the proclamation that poetry can be a suitable venue for political ideating. In some cases, a politically-minded writer might be better served by writing an essay or an editorial, but nowhere can the complexities of a historical moment, can the language of history, can the subtle emotions that inform all sides of an argument be present as in a poem. In reality (as in poetry), political ideas are allowed to contradict themselves. This breadth makes it all the more heartbreaking when Klocksiem’s speaker grows venomous at the end of the poem. It is hard to doubt Roosevelt’s sincerity in the poem’s epigraph. One would like to believe their leader ultimately has their country’s best interests in mind. But, we can hear her drawing out her “s” sounds, hissing the insults, “Mister College Crest Mister Sportcoat.” We imagine the report she’d have Mister Sportcoat read—the one that begins with “exodus” and ends with “don’t count on rain”—would obliterate, for better or worse, all the false hope that the first lines of the poem and the epigraph introduce. But the speaker’s venom is fruitless. Her speaker has given up—and not for nothing. How does Mister Sportcoat respond to the poem’s final question? Of course, he responds with silence.

-The Editors