5.28.13. From the Whiskey Tub #1: Robert Wrigley, Kevin McIlvoy, and Garin Cycholl

Whiskey Tub begins with a couple of American Bottom books and somehow ends up talking about the birth of Nora Q.
Tonight’s Whiskey Tub, obscured by Painter’s Ladder (constant companion), rereads two first books by native-born American Bottom writers, both of whom are seldom associated with the region. To be fair, Eugene B. Redmond, Poet Laureate of East St. Louis (St. Clair County) and Emeritus Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (Madison County), is surely the writer most associated with American Bottom today and will get his own Whiskey Tub reading in time.
The most famous native-born writer the Bottom has produced was the innovative and world-famous jazz musician/composer Miles Davis. Born in Alton, a Madison County river town that marks the northern boundary of the Bottom, the young Davis was raised in East St. Louis after his father, a dental surgeon, moved his practice there when Miles was a year old. A couple of decades before Mr. Redmond arrived in East St. Louis, a young Miles Dewey Davis took the more traveled route, the one out of town and off the Bottom. Upon graduation from Lincoln High School, Miles Davis headed for New York City’s Juilliard School and began writing his name into history all over the globe.
Poet Robert Wrigley and novelist/short story writer Kevin McIlvoy, both born on the Bottom in the early 1950s and raised there, also left the region to make their names, in their cases out west, as writers of the first order. They don’t need me to run their ribbons and colors up the American Bottom flag pole. Still, tonight’s Whiskey Tub will reread their first books, The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon 1979) and The Fifth Station (Collier-Macmillan 1989), because they’re excellent writers and because these works seem to me, in their separate ways, to be books of departure that address the region we share and the industries of the towns they grew up in. I also love my paperback copies, the way they feel in my hands and carry the history of my readings with inky underlinings and marginalia.
After earning his undergraduate degree in English at SIUE about the time I was starting classes there (almost two decades before the department would hire Mr. Redmond), Robert Wrigley left Madison County, his home town Collinsville, and a family history of coal mining for the considerable delights of the Northwest. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Montana, studying with, among others, Richard Hugo, and has lived and worked in Idaho ever since. It’s telling that the first two poems in The Sinking of Clay City, “Migratory Habits” (dedicated to his father) and “Moving Away,” start the long wave good-bye. At the same time, many of the poems in that first book (my copy a beautiful thing, illustration by Tree Swenson, and the only mark on the back cover the price, $4.00) take as their subject coal mining in Collinsville and nearby points, including Herrin, site of the infamous 1922 massacre. Though he will revisit the Bottom in later work (see, for instance, “Those Riches”), his markings, if he is marked regionally as a poet, are Northwest. The Sinking of Clay City compels our attention both as the first book in an important contemporary poet’s career and as a snapshot of poetry in the USA in the 1970s. It also carries local history and geography for readers interested in American Bottom (or American Bottoms as it’s often called, as Wrigley himself calls it in a poem from The Sinking of Clay City, “December: American Bottoms Farm”). Two months ago, Penguin released the author’s most recent book, Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems. If you don’t know Robert Wrigley’s work, you have some catching up to do. You might start at any point in any of the books, or you might do a little homework first at Poem of the Week, where Andrew McFadyen Ketchum features Wrigley four times.
Kevin McIlvoy, two years younger than Robert Wrigley and Granite City-born (also Madison County), is not an easy writer to track on-line. He keeps a website, which includes, among other things, a short bio and a list of recent publications. In some ways, his story is similar to Wrigley’s. McIlvoy left the Bottom to make his career writing and teaching out west. He earned his MFA at the University of Arizona and, like Wrigley, immediately moved to an adjacent state to teach, in McIlvoy’s case New Mexico. His first book, The Fifth Station, renames Granite City Meltenville and features the industry Granite City is still best known for, steel, as it tells a story with one leg on the Bottom in Meltenville and the other in New Mexico. Published a decade after The Sinking of Clay City, The Fifth Station’s depiction of Granite City and its geographical position in the shadow of St. Louis, with various landmarks on both sides of the river, is spot-on for anyone looking for a novelistic treatment of the area. Regional and state high schools and colleges would do well to include The Fifth Station in their libraries and curricula. Pairing it with all or many of the poems in The Sinking of Clay City, as well as select poems from others of Wrigley’s many books, not only would allow the study of superior writing in two primary genres (fiction and poetry), but would also illustrate how local history, geography, and industry might be used to create art that expresses region even as it transcends the region’s boundaries.
In my own case as a writer who left the Bottom and SIUE to study for a PhD in American literature and later work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and before I’d found either of these two books (I knew each writer’s later work), I found my way back home when I wrote the essay “Murder on Gasoline Lake,” which Black Warrior Review originally published. Its second life as a New American Press chapbook, as well as its listing in the back of Best American Essays 2007, taught me that my gasoline-soaked postage stamp of a canal town might be worthy of another look. The poems in my first book, Uncontainable Noise, might have taken place anywhere in the Midwest. Not so the poems I would begin to write after that essay, the ones that make up Overpass. Wrigley’s coal mines in and around Collinsville and McIlvoy’s steel mill in Granite City are the oil refineries across the street from my old neighborhood in Hartford. McIlvoy’s Meltenville is my Gasoline Lake, a site of information, activity, memory, and emotion that allows for a heady mixture, more than enough for a writer who wants to create a new space that’s both less and more than what it was and is. Had I read The Sinking of Clay City and The Fifth Station before I started writing my first poems in 1995, I might not have had to wait for the lesson I learned about Place a decade later reading Garin Cycholl’s Blue Mound to 161 as our fourth daughter, Nora Q, was being born. November 22, 2005, to be exact. To be more dramatically exact, I was two poems from the end of that book when the nurse or the doctor, someone, said, “It’s time. Baby’s coming. Push.”
A veteran of three previous daughter-births, I knew better. Such things take time. Lynn and I had already snapped pictures of each other reading Garin’s book. As medical folks were moving into position, including the same relaxed, funny OB/GYN, Dr. Mildred Nelson, who had birthed our first three daughters, I underlined the italicized (borrowed) “Onslaught of commonplace” twice. And then, knowing I would rise in time to witness the birth and do my small bit of helping, I read the last (untitled) poem.
Displacements occur? Enact? Introduced
to his executioner, Charlie Birger said,
“It is a beautiful world.” Certain names,
waters charted or mapped. The derailed coal
train. The utter chaos of the scene. Weeds
against sky. Earl Shelton dead in his sleep.
Something about a lawyer. Some other spring.
Or questions. These grasses are moving. Who
started these rumors of history? Do you find
the violences redemptive? Is a single channel
evident? Then propositions. If a man has
property, he must be sane. Sassafras roots
will not hold the subsoil. A road south.
Destination’s important to me. But place?
The world begins in a ditch.
I underlined every word in that final poem, rose dramatically (if only in my mind), stepped to the table, and watched Nora Q be pushed into the world by her glorious mother, my wife, Lynn, who knows more than I will ever know about where and how the world begins even if I’m the one who gets to write about it here in the Collected Works.
Had I read Wrigley’s and McIlvoy’s first books as they were released into the world, I might have gotten home to the Bottom, to Hartford, to Gasoline Lake sooner than I did and found or re-found the dirt that matters most to me. But it was the lesson I learned, those last two lines of Garin’s that I reread as I was underlining them, that stuck, that woke me to the reality that where the world begins, that Place, whatever and wherever its location, is the most important spot, is pregnant, is teeming, is beginning with life. As I stood from the couch not three feet from the birthing table, I scribbled under that last poem the following: “11.22. 4:09 P.M. Covenant Hospital.” Six minutes later, the world began (again) right there, on that table, between my wife’s legs, the richest earth I know, and Place, my valuing of it not three feet from Garin Cycholl’s Blue Mound to 161, another first book you ought to read, and that last poem, that last line, my understanding of it leapt like our hearts when Nora Q entered the world.
November 22, 2005. 4:15 P.M. Provena Covenant Hopital. Urbana, Illinois.
American Bottom is as good a place as any other for poems and essays and stories. Robert Wrigley’s The Sinking of Clay City and Kevin McIlvoy’s The Fifth Station re-affirm that lesson. Add them to your stack of books to read this summer.