It occurred to me a couple days ago that I have now lived in Chicago almost as long as I did not..that my life, by next year, will be roughly split down the middle. I am not sure how long one has to be transplanted in a given spot before one can rightly claim it as home, but I think a couple decades surely does it. I've seen many poets come and go for all sorts of reasons. In and out of the city, chasing degrees and teaching positions. Met many an awesome writer who is only here in a transitory state. But I am (despite my occasional desires to flee Chicago for NOLA) pretty much staying put, at least for the foreseeable future.
As an MFA student, I once took a class devoted to writing "Chicago Poems" and it involved both reading the work of others and writing our own. What's crazy is I do not remember much at all what we read that semester. Cannot remember if they were more place based projects or devoted specifically to THIS place. But I do remember what I wrote--the archer avenue poems--steeped in urban legend and Chicago history--and moreso how much I enjoyed that particular project. Granted it was only the fall of 2005, and I'd been in the city less than a decade at that point. But I was, as I mentioned a couple posts ago, a geek for Chicago history and PBS specials about neighborhoods and train lines. Resurrection Mary herself, I'd been onto since junior high when I was checking out all those ghost story books from the public library. It was natural that I would immediate gravitate to that subject matter when prompted to do a specifically Chicago project.
By then, the city was already filtering into my work in other ways. The third section of the fever almanac, which had just been picked up that fall, had decidedly more urban poems than the preceding two sections (and in fact, closes on a poem "predictions" inspired a bit by the 1992 flooding of loop basements and train tunnels I did not live in the city quite then, but we'd come in for a french class field trip that week and saw all the disarray.) I'd fallen in love with Cornell by then, right there in the old modern wing of the Art Institute and was writing poems about the boxes, which seem Chicago-ish by association. My second book would include the Resurrection Mary poems, and major characters in minor films would be the next book set mostly in an urban landscape--"coyotes of lake shore drive" being a good example. Then of course, there would be "shipwrecks of lake michigan"--the urban mermaid poems.
Much of my work has hovered in the semi-ruralness of my childhood. Though maybe semi-suburban describes it equally well--having came of age in the outer reaches of a mid-size city, which is a little different than small town-ness. I.e, my high school was huge, but there were no streetlights and the neighbors had horses. Deer ran through the yard on the regular, and it was a good 10 minute drive to the nearest outpost of civilization. There were other houses, but the street was bordered only by cornfields, river, woods, and a stretch of interstate separate by concrete wall. So, subsequently, you have things like girl show, almost entirely rural (Nebraska). Or the Wisconsin woods of beautiful sinister. Or taurus, which I imagined to be set in central Illinois.
But some of the poems based more in my own actual life are set in a more urban environment. Filled with trains and buses and apartment buildings ( no shit, I once wrote an homage to my apartment called "letter to my art deco lover.") Or, they are Chicago-based research oriented projects like the HH Holmes series, which allow me to learn more about this city where I have put down such deep roots.
