Valparaiso Poetry Review: Thoughts on Jared Carter's "Prophet Township"

Jimmy Lewis
550 Seminar
G.Keeler
Sunday, February 10, 2007

Valparaiso Poetry Review: Comments on Prophet Township, by Jared Carter

I connected to Carter’s poem because it evoked memories of personal experiences I’ve had with such deserted farmsteads across the Montana prairie. I have walked up to many such places; they are usually in the heart of unimaginable bird country in which one can pursue the best of sport. Young, naive, and sheltered from the struggle to survive, I experienced these abandoned homes in the most callous fashion, somewhat romanticizing the whole experience of being their with my birddogs as an experience parallel to that which I had come to know through the photo essays in certain sporting publications: Gray’s Sporting Journal, Big Sky Journal, Pointing Dog Journal.... Look at me! That’s my birddog running through the C.R.P. now surrounding the dilapidated house. That’s my hunting partner holding a rooster pheasant in the photo. Been there. Done that! Thank God their efforts failed. What glorious bird habitat C.R.P. makes and the fact that this is public land where I can play....
My father-in-law, pensive, erudite, reflexive with a tendency towards melancholia saw things differently. Now deceased nearly three years, he would walk around talking mostly to himself. “What happened to them,” with no question in his tonality. “Didn’t make it,” his gun broken open, walking around the debris beside the home, gamebirds flushing about, himself the progeny of a pig farmer. What is it about those of us with farming histories?
It wasn’t until later, after my childish sensibilities began to wear out or otherwise no longer suffice that I too began to feel. I too, carefully, ventured through some of these unhinged doors, nervous that my birddog might follow me and be killed by a rattlesnake seeking refuge from whatever inhospitable form of weather the prairie may have been spitting out. The flue, the old mattresses, the plank walls, the wind, wondering how.... Myself now a father, a family, wondering how and wandering to survive.
Carter’s physical and psychic illustration allows me to connect with this place and, by proxy, a deep empathy and respect for our struggle, for those who may have not “succeeded” but lived and tried. How do we define “success” anyway? When the wood ran out, when there was no hay for stock, when there was nothing for the children to eat, did what they had to do and left, abandoning the homestead, abandoning the dream, courageously going forward into whatever life awaited them. It is in this manner that Carter’s poem connects us with the presence of our ancestors, our recognition of their struggle and their acknowledgement of this recognition and empathy for them. I am left with a feeling of connection to people and to life.
On a more technical level, the above essay being more poetic in style and substance, I enjoy how Carter develops his impact verse by verse. At first, we come to understand what is done with the dead during the winter, the young and the old, the sick and the vulnerable, “a custom learned from their grandparents¬–how to make it through till spring, how to handle hardship on their own.” Then, we come to understand how fortunate one is to simply have to carry over the dead, that winter can be much worse than that. This process of placing children and the old in coffins filled with rock salt, seemingly heart-wrenching to the sensibilities of the contemporary reader, is clearly part and parcel of life for the residents of Prophet Township. The real disaster for such people materializes in the next stanza:

But there were times when no one lasted,
fierce winters when the wood gave out,
when there was nothing left to eat,
no hay to pitch out for the stock,
no way to break down through the ice
on the horse trough, or get the pump
working again.

Reality inserting itself forcefully and pitilessly upon a hopeful, struggling community, leaving for the reader in its wake no illusions of security and a final understanding of how, conscious of it or not, we are all struggling to survive and, unlike the people of Prophet Township, not one amongst us would know what to do with the bodies of the sickly, the old, the young should they fall ill and die in the cold of winter. What are our traditions passed down by our grandfathers, our grandmothers to cope with life? What will we do “with no heat, no money for seed”? Go shopping? Recycle? Using the medium of poetry Carter adroitly gets at this question for the contemporary reader, thus, making his poem unquestionably “contemporary,” and, by nature of the content of his work, perhaps redefining how we should determine what constitutes “contemporary American poetry. “Prophet Township” illustrates this constitution as a synthesis of form with content that bespeaks our historical moment and concomitant sensibilities.