Common Wealth

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Preface

Pennsylvanians have a right to be proud. This state has birthed or inspired powerful wordsmiths: poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists, biographers, children’s authors, short story writers. Mention Shillington, and someone will echo “John Updike”; utter “Pottsville,” “Reading,” and “Chaneysville,” and hear the names John O’Hara, Wallace Stevens, and David Bradley; Pittsburgh, and listen for a long chorus that includes Annie Dillard, August Wilson, Gladys Schmitt, Gerald Stern, Robinson Jeffers, Diane Ackerman, and Samuel Hazo. What Philadelphian will not claim as literary neighbors William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, Pearl Buck, and Sonia Sanchez? As Rudyard Kipling argued nearly a century ago in his poem “Philadelphia,” “The things that truly last when men and times have passed, / They are all in Pennsylvania this morning!”

Whether arriving in or launching from Pennsylvania, this state’s authors find what matters: heritage, pride, work, inventiveness, struggle, faith, beauty, hope. From the inner cities to the rolling hills and forested mountains, Pennsylvania speaks through its land and its peoples. Past and present converge. Family narratives intertwine tales of agriculture and industry. Everywhere is the accent of ancestry.

Both detailed and panoramic, the view spans generations. Marianne Moore gives us the moon over the Susquehanna; Stephen Vincent Benét, the body of John Brown; Francis Bret Harte, the battle of Gettysburg; W. D. Snodgrass, the claustrophobia and allure of home towns; Janet Kauffman, the farm life of Mennonite communities; Harry Humes, the dust of coal towns; Lee Gutkind, the folklore of Penn’s Woods; John Edgar Wideman, the streets of Homewood. What brings together better such distinct authors as Gertrude Stein, W. S. Merwin, Malcolm Cowley, Willa Cather, Chaim Potok, Maxine Kumin, and John Barth? What connects more closely Philip Roth, Marguerite diAngeli, Ezra Pound, Conrad Richter, James Michener, H.D., and Thomas Paine? All share by birthright or exploration the bond of landscape and literature— Pennsylvania flowing through the pen.

In part, this anthology stems from “Our Own: Pennsylvania Authors,” a course taught at Lock Haven University, and from its companion, The Pennsylvania Authors’ Reading Series, as well as from focused studies of Pennsylvania writers in several courses at Bloomsburg University. Through these forums, students study and discuss their diverse literary forbearers. “Who writes about us?” they want to know. “Who writes about our home towns?” While this question could be answered from the larger canon, the more life-affecting response for these young adults is “Len Roberts, Sherry Fairchok, Gary Fincke, Betsy Sholl, Jim Daniels, Karen Blomain, Philip Terman. . . .”

Pennsylvania overflows with those who continue the story and, as in the case of the writers represented in this anthology, through the medium of poetry. Most of the authors with whom we spoke gave us the gift of more poets. After much reading, we decided to focus on contemporary narratives of place, written by those still living in the Keystone, as well as by those now residing elsewhere but strongly connected to Pennsylvania through memory and experience. To ensure a wider expression of voices, we limited our selection to three or fewer by each author. At the same time, we wanted a collection that celebrated the geographical diversity of the state, as well as one that spoke to and for the citizens of Pennsylvania.

Foremost, then, this collection is about place. Specifically, it is about the places in Pennsylvania that we hold sacred. It is about the places we revere: the places that have been with many of us since childhood in every journey near and far, and those places that many of us encounter every day, but still, from time to time, can gaze upon with wonder.

For many of us, the term “sacred place” summons images of an ancient city in the Middle East, the Ganges in India, perhaps a temple somewhere in Southeast Asia. For the poets in this anthology, Pennsylvania offers numerous places to revere. For Charles J. Rice, that holy place of childhood was the confluence of the west and north branches of the Susquehanna, the lure of the river’s “secrets concealed in murky depths.” Though he’s traveled around the world, David Staudt kept images of a Carbon County boyhood with him, of a place where peewee football “lights forge / a bracelet of bright stones.” For Philly native Robin Becker, the idea of sacred space is clear, when in the midst of describing a trip to Fels Planetarium, she compares the star show’s narrator to “my rabbi appearing suddenly in the dome / to discuss Moses.”

But it is not only the places of our youth that become meaningful to us. In Julia Kasdorf’s “Nights Like This,” an adult narrator walks the darkened neighborhoods of Camp Hill, wondering about the symmetry of the moon, “pale blue TV glow / of family rooms” and a trucker crooning the old tune “Blue Moon.” Likewise, an adult perspective gives us Philip Terman’s “The Auctioneer,” a poem that senses we must all earn our place in this world. In “Second Coming in Northern Pennsylvania,” Steven Huff gives us a wonderful image of “driving back into woods, deep into the mountains” to a small town, wondering what the reception would be for Jesus, and the narrator, years gone, who feels like an interloper among kin. Still, as the title of Jason Moser’s poem states: “We Never Leave.” Perhaps it is that there is something about Pennsylvania that never leaves us. Throughout our lives, we keep traveling this Commonwealth’s highways and country roads, surprised by its many and often circuitous routes leading us toward “home.”

Native Pennsylvanians, students, factory workers, coal miners, teachers, writers, fellow travelers passing through, we welcome you. We invite you to read more by authors who write about where you live, then journey around the state via the other poems collected here. Experience again the festivals, the natural and man-made disasters, the farm lands, the religious communities, the mountains, the railroads, the forests, the mines, the inner cities, and the small towns of the Keystone. With good wishes, we give you this map and send you on your way, trusting that from these poems you learn something about the lasting influence of the Commonwealth, and something about the power of poetry that allows us to share our similar and dissimilar experiences, yet somehow connect us through the energy of our sacred places. Join this gathering of contemporary voices and journey with us. Come, celebrate our Common Wealth.

Marjorie Maddox, Williamsport

Jerry Wemple, Bloomsburg

© 2005 The Penn State University

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