Hyper-Particular Investigation and Song in Garin Cycholl's Blue Mound to 161

Steve Halle

Garin Cycholl's long poem Blue Mound to 161 exemplifies contemporary relational investigative poetics, firmly rooted in Modernist and Postmodernist lineages while carving out a particular niche via poetics of place and an innate ability to sing. According to Ezra Pound's definition of epic poetry, "a poem including history," Cycholl's Blue Mound fits the bill by revealing particular histories of Central to Southern Illinois demarcated by words in the title. Blue Mound refers to Blue Mound, Illinois, just Southwest of Decatur or Southeast of state capital Springfield, Illinois on Highway 48. Highway 161 presents the other line of demarcation running west to east from near Cahokia or East Saint Louis to just past Centralia, not too far from Cycholl's boyhood home of Flora, Illinois. The title of the poem presents us with the Southwestern quadrant of the state, rooting us in a hyper-specific place over a loosely-defined period of time, 1860s-present, with allusions to the greater past, Mound-builders civilization, of the area.
Cycholl begins "into the south of it / (Illinois,"* to announce the locale of the poem and also allude to the open-parenthesis use of Charles Olson, which signals a rebirth for the stories and geographic particulars about to be unfolded in the poem. In the poem's opening section, Cycholl also announces the motif of choice and marginalization, foreshadowing notions of classicism and racism and further demarcation in this particular corner of Illinois as all of the poem's locales and people are "not the crux or / 'at the center' but // on this side / on that side," removing any notion of a comfortable middle ground between the poem's opposing forces and characters. Marginalization, both in terms of economy and place, remind one of James Wright's Ohio River-based, working-class populated poetry of "ruptured" faces, "slag heaps" and "blast furnaces," the lifestyle that took its toll on Wright's father. Wright's poems from The Branch Will Not Break, like "A Blessing," also are alluded to and echoed here when Cycholl introduces the three Jonesboro girls are introduced, a reoccurring lyric chorus of voices who help to paint the scene, "O gymnasium songs! / O songs in a girl's knee and wrist!" Cycholl waxes personal, as Wright did, in the ultimate section of the poem when he attempts to relate his great grandfather Karl's experience to the particular places. The final section asks many questions of person and place, both of which can no longer answer for themselves in any real way, which of course, leads to speculation, imagination and investigation:
Where then, Karl?

the Iron Cross for bravery
in combat (no one else would
go up, artillery-spotting in a balloon,
you said) some union business      you,
the radio, and Augusta, eating cherries
from a green plastic bowl something
about a lawyer

                       I'm tryin' to establish
a pattern of behavior here!

                                   The lawyer's
words or yours? Where, in or out of place?
the long kitchen reeking of half-cooked
onion and burned potatoes left by the men
last night     Chrysler Imperial backseat-
children asking, "what did you do in the
jazz age, Grandpa?"

place is nothing

This section of Blue Mound exemplifies Cycholl's work to expand personal space and history with the larger sphere of public, recorded history: what's here, what's there, which side has been chosen and which path taken and why.
In many respects, Cycholl makes Blue Mound paint contrasts by employing several motifs common to the small-town life of the United States and the particularity to the land itself. The poem is about comings and goings, arrivals and departures, and no person, place or thing is small enough to go unnoticed. In many ways the poem is an antithetical pastoral ("looking / at my own bad / attitude toward the / patoral"), Southern Illinois is swampy, and Cycholl's assertion "the world begins in a ditch" does not cast an image of nature's sublimity or beauty on the mind's eye-it's truth we're after here. In fact, when examining his own great-grandfather in the final section of the poem, Cycholl notices how the ditch's plants and soil get unnoticed-detritus to the eye, "You / not even noting the lace or weeds in road- / side ditches. junk collected by the eye while / driving [. . .] Onslaught of commonplace." The commonplace is the "crux" that is also not the crux. Many things in the poem work in this way, becoming paralyzed objects, the crux non-crux making this poem an epic of place: Union or Confederate, plants and soil as static/dynamic, reflective action of miners going "into the earth" as the poet is doing, coal strikers and strikebreakers and many others.
One of the most interesting techniques Cycholl uses to make this poem is to use the act of making or creating work like facing mirrors. In an interview on Chicagopostmodernpoetry.com, Cycholl notes the importance of jazz to his writing, "Poetry provided the kind of density of experience that made sense of life; it provided the vehicle for exploring two places at once. Like listening to Fred Anderson. Probably the reason that I can't write anymore without thinking about jazz." Blue Mound also mentions jazz as an aside in the second section:
(like jazz is made
out of what else
but other things in
the specificity of
place
So the idea of jazz, a creative endeavor being made in a particular place be it practice space, studio or smoky bar, mirrors the poetic act creating the poem of a particular place in that place or another, incorporating other things into that specificity, which mirrors the circular motions in the poem as the its particulars circulate around the specificity of locations and namings. It's an act of creative sleight of hand, being in the present moment but also in the there-ness of another time and/or place simultaneously.
With respect to jazz, Cycholl finds a way for his poem to sing, while presenting hard data and echoing the idea of dislocation running throughout. He creates a distinct effect comparable to the stretched-out experiments of contemporary improvised music, which often juxtaposes intensely lyrical or melodic musical phrase with dissonant or jarring turns. Cycholl merges clinical, scientific prose- writing borrowed from various sources-with beautiful song-like craftsmanship. For example, in the poem's fourth section, Cycholl uses an excerpt from the 1880 US Census, clinical, and butts intense lyricism against it two pages later in one of the most deliciously melopoeic parts of the poem:
sinkhole ponds    dissolved and
fallen cave roofs    ill-tempered
snakes seeking limestone
shortleaf pines    swamp loose-
strife and sourgums     in insolation
spring peepers and spotted
salamanders    "the historical
association of populations all
fucked up"    carex brachyglossa--
veins stalk inot dry spikes miles
from any coast

                    "Further study
of these ponds is needed."

The alliterative and consonant "s" sounds, of course, exhibit Cycholl's gift with jazzing language, even including scientific Latin and borrowed or synthetic language into the mix, adding a subtle and refreshing newness to this style of lyric-investigative blended poetry.
Blue Mound to 161 is a successful poem, filled with stories, voices, and layers of meaning that invite us back to read it over and over. The question arises, though, is a poem about dislocations in a particular quadrant of southern Illinois worth all our attention? The poem waxes self-critical, almost asking itself if it's worth it, to do this act of creation, as a voice close to the poet's speaks with a woman who says, "There / ain't fuck to do here if you / ain't geography." What's in motion then, is the land itself, while the people stagnate in a rural, small-town paralysis. The particularity in this poem presents a local history, people and geography, and in so doing, should spark many readers to get interested in the stories and songs of a particular, small-scale place, their place. This is the poem including history used in a refined way, presenting stories we cannot find in the according-to-hoyle history books. Reading Cycholl's Blue Mound asks readers to make a leap and believe that in reading about the history of his boyhood places, we'll really learn about ours too, shortening the gap between I and other. The margins and marginalized are often overlooked by people who are content with the status quo, in the middle of the road or simply running to keep up, but as Garin Cycholl makes us aware, echoing the sentiment of Neil Young when he felt he was getting too close to the artistic middle, it's much more interesting to look roadside, where eyes do not always fall, because "The world begins in a ditch."
*Reviewer's Note: Blue Mound to 161 lacks page numbers.
e-mail the poet at stevehalle77@gmail.com
info on the writer
to go back to the home page