James Hearst: A Reading at Drake University

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This is Poet's Corner with Edward L. Mayo. Each Friday at this time, Mr. Mayo, associate professor of English at Drake University, presents this program of commentary and readings from the poetry of the past and present. And now here is Mr. Mayo. 

This is E.L. Mayo of Drake talking to you about poetry. In this instance, poetry in Iowa and particularly a poet of Iowa who has considerable stature both considerable stature both. His name is James Hearst and he teaches his topic is at Iowa State Teachers College and he's going to read you some of his poems. It may be that some of you have heard him read them before at least some of them and some of them it may be you have read because he has published quite widely at least locally and in periodicals nationally. I hope that he'll be bringing out a new book soon. Jim is a poet of the land and we don't have many of them. Most poets write about the city nowadays since TS Elliott set the fashion. But Jim is not only a teacher, as you may have gathered, as I already said, but a farmer too. He combines the two. When I try to call him a professor, he won't let me. He says, "No, Ed, I'm just a teacher, that's all." Uh, what makes it particularly remarkable about Jim is that as an undergraduate at college, he received a quite a serious injury. several of his bones were broken and uh when he isn't uh working um on the farm he uh is in a wheelchair most of the time.  He runs his own tractor and so on by strapping himself in. He took this misfortune as a challenge. Jim is a poet who by no means limits himself to farm poems any more than Robert Frost does of things besides the farm. But the soil is the back of it all. As a matter of fact, there is so far as subject matter is concerned quite a bit of resemblance between uh Jim Hearst and Robert Frost. And so it's interesting to know that Frost is a very close friend of James. Whenever Frost comes through this part of the country, he always stays at the Hearsts and they talk far far into the night about the nature of poetry and things that ports talk about. Usually what ports talk about a technical thing. The uh poems that Jim is reading to you today, he's divided into three groups. uh firm poems, just poems and love poems. You will notice that he doesn't go in for highutin language like Frost. He tries to keep the line the line of colloquial speech and the rhythms of speech in his poems so that when you read them in a magazine it it simply seems as though you're talking with a friend or a friend is talking to you.

These poems lend themselves to a rough classification and to help give them point and direction I am going to divide them into three groups. The first group I'll call farm poems and the first farm poem is called late meadowlark. We know the meaning when he read the signs in sumac leaves, but still abides the wish to halt leaf fall, to sweep the frost from grass, and beckon back the winging flocks that waver from sight. But look, look here. Here in the yard, alone, unafraid, in a stack of straw, a metallark crouches and tries its tune and tries its tune. Crouches and tries its tune. as if one voice whose truth is summer could strike its pitch and sing back days born of the sun. I smile, of course, for bird-like faith. But even I, calendar read and learned in texts, hearing this song, find my taste hungers on autumn's table for a peach out of season. Farm hand. A mule with fork and shovel breeds no honey for spring triggered girls to buzz around though he wear overalls and hate his muscles. Sweat marks name me not the moth that longs for perfume and white bells and dust love pollen after dark. The cracked and aching heart of my desire plain on my face the smear of fresh dug earth bleeds foolishly while slight of hand salesman's make me pay for what I see. So sober I tied to my stake chew the grass within my circle and shake my long ears at the moon. Moment toward spring. This is the day when on the hills of noon the winter's towers burn. The torchman's son makes virtue of destruction as he strikes flame to the drifts and melts them one by one. And everywhere the tyranny is broken. The shining fields appear. The poppplers stand ready to publish leaves. The messenger pigeons rise from the barn and circle over the land. I stare from my door, amazed at the resurrection, of rising life where the snowbank burned. I note a fire more fierce and strange than ever I set under a kettle.

The questioner when evening bows its head, so does the farmer. I have seen him do it, haggarded with sweat and fatigue as he limps his way home to the daily chores. I have been the man myself. I have come to the lane that lead man myself. I have come to the lane that leads off toward the barns and leaves the fields and the streams of growing. If one can think of earth as a moving tide, where the flow is vertical, I have stopped at the gates where maples lean on my shoulder, as confidential friends with nothing to say, staying to keep me company while the sunset squats on a burning hill. Is this really the way it looks? Or is it seeming a distortion of the eye to fool the heart? collector of imitations, but still believing it does not beat for nothing. This for nothing. This is what I ask myself. Is there a ledger that adds this work and sweat to my account? I knew I do not fill my barns with dreaming, but what's the accounting for?

See how the wind See how the wind repeats itself and beats upon my door. Another gray November come to remind me how the shrunken days mumble and fret and shawl themselves from light. Ducks drift down the sky like harried kites. Leaves scuttle into the oaks. Apples lie still. A crow talks to himself in an empty tree. I stand my ground and warm the air with a man's presence and let the caging wind back from the alleys of the world. Whine on my steps. I am no humble thy furrows against the snow. I have looked at the hollow eyes of hunger and faced them down. And before dust sets the hinges of my door, I'll see again the falcon son. poise and strike his golden spurs into the green flanks of my green flanks of my land.

Truth. How the devil do I know there are rocks in your field? Plow it and find out. If the plow strikes something harder than earth, if the point shatters at a sudden blow and the tractor jerks sidewise and dumps you off the seat because the spring hitch isn't set too quickly enough, and it never is. Probably you hit a rock. That means the glacier emptied his pocket in your field as well as in mine. But the connection with the thing is the only truth I know of. So plow it.

Quiet Sunday. The old dog sleeps on the porch. The farm dreams a summer Sunday morning, spreading its benediction of shade for dozing hens and peaceful cows. My serenity rises from pious knees to bagged feet on the gravel path of chores. While my hushed vision rocks the bees to sleep in tulip bells and ties a spider's web across the furrows. Vigilance

rocks grow expensive when they squat on good Iowa land and furnish their corners with blackberry vines, sumac, and even a few crab apple trees. What's more, the woodchucks dig under them, and the whole bull bramly shambles makes a mess in a clean, neat field. Wilderness won't pay taxes. It costs money to run a farm. And I can't afford the luxury of wild flowers where corn ought to grow. So, let's dig this stuff out and level the ground. Damn it. Watch out for wildies. Keep nature tame and inner place. I don't know how this patch got started. You have to keep a lookout all the time. Success. When I come home from work at close of day, blind with the sunset, faced with evening chores, the hungry pigs, the unmilked cows, the hens, restless for my attention, with feed and hay to measure and lift. It seems the whole outdoors would let its need for order rest on me. I hear the windmill's voice as I clean pens, but never the meadowlarks. A warning sign I've meant to heed someday, but never do. Now I am old and stooped. I have come to see that life's a mortgage no one can renew. That each year charges interest for its use. I found I traded even farm use. I found I traded even farm for a sweat to justify the boast I am master yet. Shaky and cold under the winds abuse I read on the tax receipts that the land is mine. The next group I've called just poems. And the first one of these just poems is called animal tracks.

There is a tiger hid in each seed's growth and in its flower a lamb. I see them both frolic on lawns of love and I feel bound to learn how they contend in found to learn how they contend in flesh as ground. I find a jungle still unmapped in the blood or outside the stockade wall. My heel prints stamp the mud praise. When I forced the fat land with my seed, I hovered motherlike over the green uprising, routed the smartweed, thwarted the nettles, mounded each folded chute with earth, nursed anxiety at my muscled breast. When the harvest tide arose, I rode the waves of the ripe grain and filled my granaries. Now I can let the fields go. Now I am free to close the gate and turn and embrace my wayward acre. Where will wet their feet in a pool at the tile's mouth and flourish their cattails gention and elderberries where the fence upholds the golden rod and black-eyed Susans. The rank bullfist brooms his purple across the air. Michael must daisies and golden aers and blue verane t with color. The few wild moments of life to stand dumb before then praise with naming the shadow. I have seen the butcher's shadow point like a finger where I live unguarded in my house of peace and I wept in fear. I would rather sleep in desert places, grow thin, unwanted, scorn, denied, bearded, strange, too dry for friendship. Brother of bees and locusts. Then be a sacrifice upon the altar built by the lust for sust for self-destruction. Where the smoke corrupts our breath and prayers drip fat as the fire ascends. Let me stand free, not chained by hate. No bullock crowned with thorny flowers, brushed and sleek, no bullock crowned with thorny flowers, brushed and sleek by adoring eyes, led by the doomsday priest to a darkened room. Or the shaggy air ranked with death hooks at my heart with an old dilemma.

the waster. The stalks still stand erect and the tassels wave, but the milky ears are ripped and foul. I am able to guess a masked raccoon as a night marauder who makes my sweet corn patch his private table. All crops approved by a farm, and this is the truth, have an enemy with a prosperous eye to catch catch the auspicious moment, when time is ripe, to dishonor whatever eggs have been put in the nest to hatch. When foggy weeks rot corn, or the scorching sun with the heavens rebuke, the hurt wills no deliberate malice. But this is a waster who tramples my sweet corn with animal feet in the dirt. Weed solitude. Machines worn out, embalmed in rust, lie here, abandoned to the weeds, as will beneath time's acid dust, the farmer and the farmer's needs. A binder flakes to ash. A Moore sinks by the tree. The wild bee hums and tastes the nettle's bitter flower. For nothing goes and no one comes. And the first of the love poems is called the old admonitions.

The friend that I had marched away to the war. And the girl that I love turned me out of her door and door and the taste of my life without friend without wife went sour at the core. The minister mutters, "Man reaps what he sowed." But the old admonitions are dust in the road, are as useless to me as the wind in the tree, as the big bellied, arrogant wind in the tree. surprise.

You seemed brave but lost in the ambush of clover. The clover thick valley spread out to the south of the wide summer meadow forlorn in the sunlight big eyed and solemn with a sob in your mouth. Perhaps you'd been sick with a fever of dreaming and awakened alone. You pretended to be when I called an innocent, terrified youngster who had smelled of the flower. Well, I came and I found you and pleased myself when you seemed touched by my word that the truth was what stung wherever you found it. Then I felt the dagger. You were old as deceit, and I thought you were young.

Homecoming. So, let's knock off for the day, I said. The sun already had left the sky. I picked up the last few bales of hay and cooled my face till the sweat was dry. We started the tractor and wheeled around with a homeward pull in face and thought. Two fields in a lane, and at last the barn. Someone Someone was doing the chores. I caught the sound of milking. I walked to the house with the nighthawks whistling above my head, the door opened to greet my step, and someone behind it as still as a then lips saying all that a heart could say to the farmer home at the close of day.

Autumn love. When you stood smiling under the roof of leaves, stained by the frost, a huntress eager to start her quarry. I froze transfixed and heard the forest sing with an arrow softly claimed by my heart. Other folks passed and spoke as if they saw only an everyday street post the notice of autumn again. But I was mortally struck and even the shadows seem burn seem burning and flowers grew from my wound and pain.

Beggar, the quietness with which I watch you go deceives myself. The fact is past belief that I cannot by calling on your name hear your light step and feel your hand touch mine. But you move towards a valley where the wind no longer stirs the waters. You inherit green pastures tonged with springs and antipies. Far from my barren field, the dust describes. Sunflowers touched by frost shake out their seeds and wither in dry creeks the wild blue flags and I spend thrift of love beyond my means find myself beggar in an empty house in an empty house I do not know the man who prospered here the red flower the day sagged Under a heavy wind, pile sagged under a heavy wind, piling up drifts on lawn and street. Colder than iron, the breath, the air complained in clouds of breath. Beneath my feet, the path toward home renewed itself, and fired with hope, I pushed my way into your arms. The icebound door closed on the dusk of a winter day. Then in your face I saw the light, the deep June hour when nothing said among wild strawberries searching hands touched and clung while the berries bled. Thus summer love melts winter fear because your kiss has made it so. As if inside our window bloom some great red flower again. Scatter the petals. She sleeps as if the mouths of buds about to utter their gentle bloom suspended breath as an echo darken the silence where she keeps her room and sleeps. The warm October sunlight holds in its hand the troubled years moments of grace before they wither. The aers and leaves rain down like tears. She seems to dream in the early shadow or a fountain trembles. She does not start at the blackbirds whistle above the cedars, nor the tiptoe steps of my anxious heart. I bow my head as the prayers attender, but heart poor innocence swells to make a sudden gesture of warning to tell me at the last farewell she will not wait. And the last poem is simply called love. Last poem is simply called love. Love hungers a cruel eye stalking from the cliffs so cloud the trembling side. Meadow heart is pinned beneath its plunging shadow goes with a rush of wings into thick cedars at dusk fiercely and no cry has lent the wind where talons struck.

You'll notice that these poems that Jim has just read to you are really about Iowa and about Iowa as it is today. Uh you notice for example that uh in the farm poems they're attractors too. Well, now they're attracted in New England, but somehow or other Frost never mentions them. I mean there is a real I mean there is a realism about these poems that makes it Iowa truly come to life in poetry uh in a way that I think we all should. You will notice too that hur poetry is a poetry of content. He isn't simply interested in doing something with words. He's interested in an idea uh very often an idea that has ethical and social overtones and that's unusual nowadays in these days of pure form. I've had poetry of Hurst on every single spring poetry reading. Uh we're starting the seventh year this year at Drake and I expect I shall have it for many years to come. Next week I'm going to talk to you about a poet exciting a poet who is discovered and rediscovered and forgotten and rediscovered again. When I was in my back in 1920 he was rediscovered all got excited about him and some of her uh protes wrote books about him. That was when I heard of him and I got excited about him then and I kept on being excited. Just now some of the West Coast poets, beatnik so-called, have gotten excited about Blake. Again, I hope to at least give you some pointers on Blake, his way of thinking, and to read you some of his poems. Uh-huh.