There is a word out of fashion in this era of specialization, referring to a notable type of individual, the “polymath.” A polymath is a person of multifarious talents and expertise who walks in several intellectual or artistic worlds and blends them with imaginative results.
I envision two sets of circumstances that would generate the polymath. The first is a wonderfully rich and affluent intellectual environment, providing time and resources for leisurely tinkering. The other is an environment more spare as to formal and financial resources, but rich in social and sensual stimulation, where a single imagination has to do the work of many. You can guess which of these two situations has been common, historically, in North Dakota. Maybe still is.
Exhibit A: Clell Gannon, a painter, poet, and person of imagination who called Bismarck his home, by raising and by choice. And my text for today is the republication of Gannon’s 1924 book of poetry, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres, courtesy of the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.
I have spoken here of Clell Gannon before, and do so again in a new foreword, in which I encourage all of us to rediscover the work, and the sense of place, exhibited by this son of the land. The new entrance to Gannon’s work is a thing of beauty, cover art by another polymath, Max Patzner—visual artist, singer-songwriter, author of children’s books, and a lover of all things North Dakota. Gannon would love Patzner’s color-rich collage on his cover, and Patzner would love the contents behind it, including Gannon’s poetic manifesto, “The Law of Dakota.”
For the law holds each son of Dakota
Who wanders away from the sod
Though he be native-born or adopted
Disciple of Satan or God
Gannon as poet, as painter, as folk architect (witness his rocky home in Bismarck, the Cairn) was an exponent of the sense of place, whose role in our cultural lineage is situated by Molly Rozum’s landmark book, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies. Grasslands Grown is grasslands grown, authored by a girl from Mitchell, South Dakota, and I read it as a son of the plains, as Molly is a daughter; we both claim Gannon as brother, we understand what he is about.
Maybe another prairie brother, Aaron Barth, understands it better than anyone else, having devoted a chapter of his dissertation at NDSU to Gannon, and thus provided the perceptive introduction to Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. Bringing it to print was the work of another polymath, Bill Caraher. And all of us have the smell of paint on us.
Clell Gannon, you see, said the prairie after a refreshing rain is so “colored” that “it smells of paint.” I mean, Bill, you should have made the cover of this book a scratch-and-sniff item! This is the stuff of place that builds the larger, constructed and constructive, regional identity of the Great Plains.
You can get hard copy from Amazon, or download a free PDF from the website of the Digital Press of the University of North Dakota.
I leave you with a conundrum, from the book’s title: “bunch grass acres.” Bunch grass, that’s the prairie primeval. Acres, that’s a term of agricultural transformation. What is this land, anyway? And Clell, Molly, Max, Aaron, help me out here: Can we go home again? Is it still there?
