When covering farm news, it’s good to have some jeans and a
pair of boots in the trunk of your car, because you never know what you might
end up walking in.
I learned this from my agricultural beat predecessor, a
woman raised in rural Ohio, and someone who knew the ins and outs of a working
farm. While my own upbringing was also rural, my family lived in the woods and
did not farm, aside from a rather mean goat and a copperhead-filled chicken
house we maintained for a few years when I was growing up.
On the farm beat, one day you might cover a tragedy in a
silo or a gravity wagon—both of which can pull a person’s body under the grain
and smother him or her as rescuers make a futile attempt to fight the pull. On
a brighter note, you might cover a new crop—my colleague knew of a secret field
of peppermint, the location a closely kept secret because of the value of the harvest
in an area mostly dedicated to corn, wheat, and soy.
The constant friction between family farms and large-scale
egg or pork production facilities is another part of the farm reporter’s beat,
and there is also the highlight of the year—the county fair and the winning
entries in livestock, small animal, and even baking categories.
My time as a reporter spanned the
decade of the 1990s in the small town—practically a village—of Kenton, Ohio. I
was also a poet, which at the time didn’t amount to much more than writing
words in a notebook and trying to shuffle them around until they lined up as
they should.
Being a poet also involved reading.
Every trip to the state capital, Columbus, I would buy journals, anthologies,
whatever I could get my hands on that had poetry inside.
My favorite book was by a poet named
William Matthews, who was quite a famous poet, although that fact means very
little in the broader, non-poetry world. Matthews wrote a book called Flood that really spoke to me as it
chronicled what floodwaters did to a landscape. These flood poems felt relevant
to what I was doing at the time as I covered the stories that seemed to alter
the landscape of my community. I wrote about farm news, of course, but I also
covered county government, heartbreaking court cases, and features about extraordinary
people—because even in rural America, brutal monsters and awe-inspiring heroes
walk among us.
Matthews’ poetry moved me so much
that I decided to track him down and write him a letter. Poets don’t get a lot
of fan letters, although these days the big ones are probably drowning in
unsolicited e-mails and Facebook friend requests.
I don’t remember exactly what I
wrote. It would not have been unlike me to use the word “love.” I know I told
him what I did day in and day out, and also what I wanted to do—make poetry of
my own. I closed by thanking him for inspiring me.
Some weeks later, I checked my mail
and found an unexpected postcard, its message handwritten in small, tidy black
print. Yes—it was from Matthews.
He had filled the blank side of the
picture postcard with kind and gracious words. Although I’ve moved a few times
since then and lost the postcard in the shuffle, I remember one sentence
distinctly:
A reporter is to a
small town what a poet is to the language.
The
words may as well have been strung up before me in neon. Even now, they are
seared on the back of my eyes.
While Matthews praised the part of
me that was stuck as a small-town reporter, I also saw in his analogy a glimpse
of myself as a poet. Already, I knew that my feature stories had the power to
move people like poetry could. Matthews’ postcard made me realize that what I had
viewed as a deviation from my path as a poet was actually another step along it.
I have no doubt that in that line of text, Matthews was
referencing the Modern poet William Carlos Williams, who famously said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” I was well
acquainted with the intersection of difficulty and news. I had once covered the
murder trial of a young man, small in stature, who had been beaten to death at
a quarry. They pulled his body from the water and matched a boot print on his
child-sized chest to the foot of one of his killers.
I knew another kind of difficulty,
too—the challenges posed by spreadsheets. Obfuscation surrounding a polluted
landfill. The science in agricultural reporting. Journalism was nothing if not
practice in sorting out complex things, in making sense of the world.
Matthews’ little aphorism suggested
something new to me—that I had in me the potential to offer readers a different
kind of news in my poems. Maybe I was too busy being a watchdog of local
government, and not busy enough being a watchdog of the spirit.
Over the next few months, I applied
to the two nearest creative writing graduate programs and was waitlisted by one
(Ohio State University) and admitted into the other (Bowling Green State
University). I began working evenings at a chicken restaurant to make some
extra money, since I would be leaving a full-time job to pursue my new course
of action.
I also continued to report the news,
but with a renewed sense of its possibilities. On one assignment, I remember
approaching a large group of sandhill cranes (a “sedge” of cranes—that’s the
collective term, the precise word for such a gathering). I snapped pictures and
edged closer and closer, until some signal passed silently among the birds and
they took flight together, right over my head, so close I could have reached up
and touched a trailing leg.
I also remember my very first
feature story for the newspaper, about a woman who, though dying of cancer, set
up what she called a love garden, where anyone could come and gather enough to
eat. Evenings, she would sit up in bed, sunlight through the window turning
everything golden, and she would look at her neat rows of beans and lettuce,
and sow compassion until her very last day.
Sometimes when the sports desk was
short-handed, I would pitch in there and help out as best I could. On a few
occasions, my job was to photograph a college basketball game, and this
entailed sitting behind the net and pointing my camera at lanky athletes as
they leaped toward the basket with the ball, just above me—sort of like those
cranes taking flight.
And some days, I would just
photograph a farmer in his or her field to track the progress of the corn.
“Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is the old saying; in practice, though, July
corn can be eight to ten feet tall.
My nights at the restaurant, I wore
a different hat, or, more specifically, an apron. My usual role was to seat
people and bring their drinks, and to bus their tables when they left. On
Tuesdays and Saturdays, all-you-can-eat chicken nights, I had another
responsibility: the chicken pass.
My job these nights was to take a
platter of broasted chicken throughout the dining room and distribute extra
pieces. It was disconcerting at first as a young woman to be summoned to a
table by a barked-out command, “Breast!” or “Thigh!” I got used to it, though.
That didn’t mean it grew any less strange, or that I wouldn’t eventually write
about it.
One night a person I know came in—an
affable fellow, someone I’d once interviewed for a story. He wasn’t
particularly a friend—you don’t always make a lot of friends as a reporter,
although in a small town, most people know your name.
“I hear you’re heading off to
college to study poultry,” the man said politely as he picked out a wing and a
thigh.
It struck me that this was farm
country. Food, something so basic to human existence, was foremost in
everyone’s mind in this place. From daily fluctuations in the price of a bushel
of soy to the land application of waste from a massive chicken farm, this was
the news. It was also, I had had come to understand, the poetry.
I let the misunderstanding pass.
“Yes, sir, I am,” I replied.
“You’ll do fine,” he assured me.
His words had the ring of a
blessing, so I tucked them away exactly like an extravagant tip to spend later
on something nice, just for me.
