In 1918 a farm boy from McLean County, Clell Gannon, entered the Art Institute of Chicago, full of hope. Two or three years later, disillusioned and debilitated by diphtheria and influenza, he was back in Bismarck. In 1924 he published (with a pay-to-play publisher, Gotham Press of Boston) his book of poems, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. Wherein he declares,
The city has its features but I like the prairie best
They’re wanting me to listen to them now.
As Gannon listened to the prairie, the cries of the coyote and curlew, I think we should listen to Gannon now, a century later. We will have ready opportunity to do so, for the digital press at UND is preparing a centennial reprint of his book. I have been asked to provide an appreciative foreword, and here are my initial thoughts.
There are two good reasons we should listen to Clell Gannon. First, because he is significant. Second, because he is delightful.
The significant part first, take your medicine. Gannon is an exemplar of his generation of Great Plains regionalists, the people who brought the Great Plains, as an intellectual construct and cultural commonplace, into existence. In her fine book, Grasslands Grown, the historian Molly Rozum describes the process by which boys and girls from the prairies absorbed their sense of place from the very soil. In Bunch Grass Acres Gannon writes,
For my callused feet have known the tread
Of the trails the bison trod.
Such boys and girls went out into the larger world — as Gannon went to Chicago — saw things, and also connected with other prairie boys and girls, and got to talking about what they had in common. From this emerged, says another historian, Richard Dorman, a larger “regionalist sensibility” in the arts and sciences and letters — what I have been calling lately “the regional project.”
So Gannon, back home in Bismarck, commenced writing about the opportunity for an architectural renaissance on the Great Plains, to make use of the rock carried here as glacial till and lay up permanent walls under sweeping rooflines, with grand windows to let in the sunlight. This rustic ideal he built into his own Bismarck residence, The Cairn. He float-tripped the Missouri River with his kindred regionalists, Russell Reid and George F. Will, to get grounded in flora and fauna and indigenous cultures. And he painted — including his murals in the Burleigh County courthouse, a commission secured for him by Reid.
But the poetry, back to the poetry in Bunch Grass Acres. The better-known North Dakota poet of Gannon’s generation was James W. Foley, who was both more sophisticated and more hokey (deployment of dialect, that sort of thing) than was Gannon, but Gannon just has more to say, and he says it with heart. Many of his poems treat iconic features — the pasque flower, the prairie rose, the magpie, the upland plover — but most touching, I think, is “To a Captive Coyote.” (And Gannon insists that in this part of the plains, we must say it ki’-ot, two syllables, not ki-o’-te.) Here Gannon reflects metaphorically on the future of a Great Plains fenced and confined, “gazing with a sad and empty longing to the level prairies where the west wind plays.”
More on Gannon’s sublime and heartfelt verse later this year, I promise, when the book comes out.
