Anecdote on a Poem, and Considerations Thereof

Anecdote On A Poem, and Considerations Thereof

by Jesse Bier

A pair of senior Montana parents, while in Portland, Oregon, happened to buy my first book of poetry, Don’t tell Me Trees Don’t Talk, which their adult son opened to a poem called, “Montana Young.” He read it and wept—not torrentially, they report, but noticeably. And unashamedly. Later on, after reading the book entire, he thought “Montana Young” held up as the best poem in the collection. Well, we all say, of course—after such initial and personal impact. It’s a good poem or it wouldn’t be in the book, but there are better ones (the longer title poem, for instance, and the short “Somebody’s Grandmother, Somebody’s Grandfather”) according to the now thoroughly objective and disinvolved author, who has his own emotional favorites but can rise to soften judgment when put to it. Still, tomfoolery aside (not his real name), there is something special in the instance of a grown man’s sudden and unabashed reaction to a poem of particular significance to him—and, I believe, to many other out-of-state Montanans.

            

It is a poem of dangerously hackneyed subject matter—leaving home—and indeed that cliché interrupted my writing of it a number of times. But the fact is, Montana leave-taking is especially poignant because of what the land and upbringing in it powerfully and uniquely mean to those young people who have to go elsewhere for a living, that leaving a kind of early death for them. It turns out that what was otherwise a general literary threat, treating such a usual subject, was a means to connect with the longer, emotionally fraught immigrant and emigrant American experience, one that Montana especially connects with, coming clear in the second half of the poem. As a matter of fact, while I was searching for a rhyme in the last lines, it was this developing theme of the poem itself that rendered “bereft” for the youngster, not their parents at the very end. For it is indeed the young, departing generations, leaving beloved land as well as family, who are double losers, not their Montana-rooted mother and father. The poem found itself, transcending the cliché of subject, growing organically and emotionally—not willfully or artfully for me. It came to its own governing conclusion, deserving its tears, literal or otherwise, from native readers who happen upon it. In which case, it is their poem, not mine anymore.