A few days ago, my friend Janet McAdams poked fun at me for referring to myself as a “Yooper.” I am accustomed to Janet’s teasing—we’ve been friends for over thirty years, and much of our conversation has focused on my unduly heavy Midwestern accent, my unfortunate childhood spent among Yankees, and my unfathomable fashion sense. Even her mother once scolded her for teasing me so much, but the thing is, her critiques are, well, pretty much accurate. I didn’t realize, though, that not everyone knew what a Yooper is, just as I didn’t appreciate until I left Michigan for Alabama thirty-some years ago, that not everyone holds up their right hand and points to a spot on their palm to designate where they’re from.
Now, after decades wandering around the eastern half of the United States, I’m back in Michigan, in the upper peninsula this time, in the city of Marquette, right on the glorious shore of Lake Superior. In Michigan, we don’t say “upper peninsula”; we say, “U.P.” A resident of the U.P. is a Yooper. (According to Yoopers, residents of the lower peninsula are trolls, because they live under the (Mackinaw) bridge.) And though I’ve lived in Marquette for only about fifteen months, I’m claiming the label proudly. I don’t speak like a real Yooper; that accent is an exceptionally melodious half-Canadian, half-Minnesotan. But I love the landscape, and the land, and the water—mostly the water. I can trek through the deepest snow, and I am unduly proud of the fact that we have a special snow shovel named for us, the Yooper scooper.
Several years ago, Martha Rhodes, a founding editor of Four Way Books, suggested I apply for writer’s residencies. I said that I never had trouble writing, that I could build writing into my schedule easily enough, whether I traveled away from home or not. She said that one of the advantages of getting away is that you observe different landscapes, and those images become available for your poems. I’d traveled a fair amount by then, but I didn’t really know what she meant. Then I moved from the metropolitan New York area to the western Catskills. Snow showed up more frequently in my poems, and mountains, and the footprints of deer and wild turkeys and coyotes. Eighteen years later, I moved to Marquette, and I find myself trying to describe Lake Superior’s multiple blues, its different character from one hour or day or week to the next. I’m noticing the iron in the rocks here, in contrast to the slate I often dug up in my backyard as I tried to garden in the Catskills. And thunder here booms like it did when I was a child, the ferocious quality of the storms something I hadn’t realized was missing out east, among the mountains.
As a reader, I’m often surprised at how a poet’s work shifts from one collection to the next. Last year, for instance, I read and reviewed Michelle Kwasny’s meditative and memorable collection of prose poems, Pictograph, which differed dramatically in mood and style from earlier work I’d read. Janet McAdams’ new chapbook, Seven Boxes for the Country After, also consists of a series of prose poems, and is stylistically very different from either her earlier Feral or The Island of Lost Luggage. Peggy Shumaker’s Toucan Nest takes it imagery from–and is able to explore its themes because of—her time in Costa Rica, whose landscape must have been stunning to a poet who’s lived a few decades now in Alaska. As a poet, I find that my own work shifts unexpectedly, sometimes simply because I’ve mined a particular vein of memory or obsession as deeply as I can, other times because I’ve shifted not only my attention but my physical space. If you look out at mountains every day, you notice how clouds stripe their ascent on foggy days, how maple leaves blaze during autumn, how pines stand out so darkly against snow. If you look at a lake every day, you notice how indistinct the boundary between water and sky can be, how a breeze can create a chevroned pattern on the surface, how a true wind shoves the water toward shore.
This week, I’ll be blogging about poetry and place—places I’ve found myself, places literature has taken me, places mythic and mystical and maybe even real. Places I’ve lived or traveled or escaped. Places I’ve written about and places I’ve banished from my poems. Places like Presque Isle and Black Rocks and the ore dock, all here in Marquette, in the U.P., where we fondly call ourselves Yoopers.