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Director’s Spotlight: Poet Laureate Gives Iowa Its Voice
By Anita Walker, Director
Close
your eyes and create a picture of Iowa. Can you see it? Maybe it’s of a
summer field, corn high, rich and green, barn peaking over the tassels. Maybe
it’s winter white, crystalline sky, smoking chimneys, long coats and wool
mufflers and hurried steps. Your picture may see a high school football game or
a farmer’s market. It’s not hard to conjure a mental image.
Now listen to Iowa’s voice. Not just the sounds in your picture, the wind, the crackling steps in the snow, the cheers, the commotion. But the voice, the words. Where is Iowa’s voice.
It’s in the writing, the poetry and the prose of those special people who have connected with this place, and understand it in a unique way.
Such
is the case with Robert Dana, Iowa’s Poet Laureate. We invited Robert to
give voice to Iowa as our legislators sat down to tackle a week’s work.
As far as we know, this was the first time an Iowa Poet Laureate has presented
his work to the legislature. Iowa Poet Laureate is an honor bestowed
by the Governor, with the advice of the Iowa Arts Council and Humanities Iowa.
It is an honor well-earned, through years of honing a craft built on a talent
one must be born with.
And the voice? Robert Dana told us that Iowa had him years before he had her. And he does have Iowa. Listen to her voice. The poem is Victor, named for the Iowa town. It’s the poem he read to the Iowa Senate.
A farmhouse left to high grass.
Clapboard grey-white as wind-scoured bone.
The mouth of the doorway, the eye of one window battered shut.So many stories gibbering in and out of this empty head
like shadowy small birds.We see it at 186,000 miles a second, the speed
light travels from even a vanished star.Victor out back in his vegetable garden.
His raked and stained fedora.
Scrubbed knuckles of young potatoes
bubbling up under his hoe.His woman calls him into the fading house for supper,
the spider by her window riding out the wind in its
harness of silk, light in
the trees coming and going.But Victor stays, watching the bright air of evening
rain down, bloom, fill.
Now close your eyes and picture Iowa. I’ll bet you can hear her voice.
