I recently finished reading Michael Perry’s memoir Population: 485, which meditates on his return to New Auburn, WI, his adventures as a volunteer firefighter and first responder. As a Midwestern writer, I am thrilled to have found Perry, whose next book, Truck: A Love Story, is already on my nightstand.
Perry’s voice is candid, at times colloquial and then brilliantly poetic, he is masterful at running his linguistic scales, moving fluidly back and forth between colloquialism and academic parlance, at ease not just within both registers but with mixing them as well. In addition, Perry seems keenly aware of manipulating variations in tone from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph, and from chapter to chapter; his writing is not only poetic but also poet-like, especially in this regard. Perry balances an awareness of his own sentimentality with unsentimental prose, neither idealizing the rural Midwest nor reflecting back on it from afar, as one-who-left (he is knee-deep in it, and soul-deep). The result is prose that I deeply admire.
The following lines come from the chapter titled “My People” and made such keen sense to me that I am thinking about hanging them above my own writing desk. I think reading this successfully quieted some of my own long-harbored anxieties about writing because Perry made so clear something that had nagged in the back of my mind for years:
“Rough hands are a comfort. Like jeans and old boots. I love to attend poetry readings, to skulk in the dark, skimming words from the smoke. (Riffing on a line by Jim Harrison, I find smoke-free poetry readings the moral equivalent of chamomile near beer.) …The whole scene makes me peaceful, although I throw a systolic spike whenever someone introduces a piece “given to me this afternoon.” As if poems drop from the sky pre-formed, like sparrow turds. In my experience, art is not to be awaited; it is to be chased down, cornered, and beaten into submission with a stick. This belief correlates to Tom McGuane’s and my worrying about our hands. Working-class prejudice never quite shakes the idea of art as frivolity, and frivolity has pink palms” (pp.118-119).
And then there are those moments that read like poetry disguised as prose:
“There are times late at night, when I’m one of two people on ambulance duty, that I am haunted by a vision of the thousands of hearts beating out there in our assigned patch of darkness. The county plat book hovers in my head, a tangled maze of dead-end roads and out-of-sequence fire numbers” (p. 145).
I am thinking I need to keep a shelf of Midwestern writers who inspire me to keep going, and more specifically, who keep me coming back to the project of my current manuscript. Many days pass when I wonder if I’m destined to be a regionalist.
For more on Michael Perry, visit http://www.sneezingcow.com
