1201 When it all comes together at Lakeside

Poetry magazine doesn’t need my subscription dollars. In 2002 it received a $100 million grant from Ruth Lilly. Still, I enjoyed seeing the envelope fall out of the June 2005 issue that my friend Lynne sent me. So here’s a loosely woven group of threads about that particular gift.

1. The address on the envelope is

Poetry Foundation
PO Box 575
Mt Morris, IL 61054-9982

That’s my “home” town; I rode my tricycle on the sidewalks; graduated from the public schools; wandered the campus where my parents and grandparents had attended college; and was baptized and married there in the Church of the Brethren. It is a town that was birthed by education, built by the printing industry, crippled by a union strike, and kicked into the corner by a fire that virtually closed its schools. There is still a subscription agency there, but not a lot else.

2. The magazine, Poetry, was founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912. She nurtured a couple of generations of 20th century poets, maybe because she loved John Root, who didn’t marry her but married her sister. Poets were her legacy, not children. She is one of the sources used by Erik Larson in his book The Devil in the White City. John Root was a Chicago architect who helped plan the 1893 exposition, but died before it opened. Monroe wrote his biography, John Wellborn Root; a study of his life and work, 1896. I had never heard of Root or Monroe, but was reading the book when I opened the gift from Lynne from which the envelope fell.

3. Larson’s book may be only the second “true crime” book I’ve ever read (In Cold Blood was assigned in Library school), but I’m married to an architect and loved the architectural detail and how the author wove all the disparate pieces together. My grandmother attended the Exposition and I recall souvenirs of it in her home. And because Grandma was a thoroughly modern lady who began subscribing to Ladies Home Journal when she was 12, I’m betting I could find some of Monroe’s poems in her scrapbooks of clippings if I wanted to go back to Columbus and dig them out of storage.

4. I finished reading the book at Lakeside where I’m attending a lecture series on the Mind. The instructor had a model of the brain on the table, which she dismantled and described the details to us, including its weight. In the June 2005 issue of Poetry, there is a poem by Kathleen Halme III, “The Other Bank of the River.” The final thought is “Again I apologize for the three pound storm that is my brain and me.” Isn’t that a wonderful line?

5. Also in the June 2005 issue is an article by the poet Peter Campion (no, I’ve never heard of him either) complaining about poet bloggers--as one blogger called it, “an attack of the haves against the have nots.”

Isn’t it amazing how this all fits together?