When will our poetry go with our flow?

Today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom. It comes right in the middle of Banned Books Week in the U.S. (We're sure you know that on our side of the pond, National Poetry Month comes in April.) The Academy of American Poets has assembled a list of 10 Deliciously Dangerous Poetry Books, including Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein. Those choices make sense, right? After all, Plato banned poets in his Republic, right?

fishing the Sunrise River, a St. Croix tributary

Photo by J. Harrington

We might almost think that Minnesota had banned all, or any, of its poets from writing about our major rivers, or their tributaries, that flow through and from this state. We've done some quick searches and were hard pressed to find much in the way of poems about the Red River, the Minnesota, Mississippi or St. Croix. Somewhere we have a copy of a few locally published poems about the St. Croix, and recently finished reading K.S. Lubinski's Things that Flow, which includes poems specific to almost any river like the Mississippi, but, all told, Minnesota (or other) poets writing about Minnesota rivers yield mighty shallow water, so to speak. [For now, let's hold aside Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, even though Lake Superior is one of Minnesota's major waters.]

"paddlewheeler" on the St. Croix

Photo by J. Harrington

English poets, especially one in particular, have written not just poems but entire volumes about single rivers. Alice Oswald's A Sleepwalk On The Severn as well as another of her volumes, Dart, each provide a model worth emulating. The former, "written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon rises over us -- its effect on water and its effect on voices." Dart "is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart.... into a sound-map of the river...."

To borrow briefly from my exposure to Aristotle's fundamentals of logic:

• Water Is Life.
• Rivers Are Water, therefore;
• Rivers are Life

If Minnesotans had more poems about our waters, especially our rivers, would we care more for and about them? How long will it be until it's possible to produce a volume of poetry about Minnesota's rivers? Finally, we'll be delighted rather than upset to be proven wrong and be flooded with names and links to poems about Minnesota's rivers. Fill the comments form with your suggestions, please.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln 
     went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy 
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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