5.4.13. On Faulkner, Garin Cycholl, and Place
Gasoline Lake, depicted in this old National Enquirer piece, is my Jefferson, and American Bottom my Yoknapatawpha. Those in the know recognize in these references William Faulkner, who signed the hand-drawn map that he included in Absalom, Absalom! (my favorite novel) “Sole Owner & Proprieter,” which you’ll see me using on the home page of this, my Collected Works. A tip of my refinery hard hat to Faulkner for teaching me the power of interconnected fictions and how they might re-imagine place, which includes always its complicated and interconnected (therefore, conflicted) histories.
As his Jefferson reinvents Oxford, Mississippi, so my Gasoline Lake reimagines Hartford, Illinois, which means they’re also not Oxford and Hartford. In other words, Gasoline Lake is the name I give to one neighborhood, now fictionalized by memory and emotion, in the small town I make of the very real town of my birth, a town that will survive a very specific damage done to it. Here’s what Faulkner had to say when he accepted his Nobel Prize. I’ll go with what he said.
Although my first book includes a poem called “Hartford, Illinois,” Uncontainable Noise isn’t particularly invested in place. It wasn’t until I stumbled across reports of the environmental damage done to Hartford by refineries like the one my father worked for that I started to think about American Bottom as my “place.” I began then to create my Gasoline Lake in essay and poetic form and invest it and the Bottom on which it rests (or floats) with emotional residue born in childhood and reified in words.
I would be remiss, though, if I didn’t tip my American Bottom cap to another Illinois writer, my favorite living poet, the one who taught me to look for truth in a ditch, to find messy histories under my feet, the one whose Blue Mound to 161, a collection of poems that won the Transcontinental Poetry Prize the year before Uncontainable Noise did, taught me the mantra I chanted to my students in the only poetry writing workshop I’ve ever led. Onslaught of commonplace. Onslaught of commonplace.
Garin Cycholl tattooed those words on me. For that, and for what he has done for these Collected Works, I also dedicate this website to him and his evocations and iterations of place. Support his work by reading it, by buying it, by sharing it. Start here.