Football, Farming, and Poetry (aka In Praise of Molly Bashaw)
This essay is an explainer: why we named the Crosshatch newsletter “The Whole Field,” with diversions on advertising, propaganda, and romancing the rural.
I like to have conversations, out loud, with commercials. TV ads love your half-attention, all the better to infiltrate the subconscious. Steel your gaze and start talking back, and the illusion falters, revealing the ticky-tacky beneath, caulked and painted.
So it goes with televised images of modern farming, broadcast on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. Just as modern basketball finds its roots in urban neighborhood courts, football shouts “rural south.” When we turn on the game, we find ourselves in small-town farm communities, places outside time, with outsized pigskin talent and shared identity around Friday night lights. Advertisers have long recognized that football, the most uniquely American sport, attracts an audience primed for country messages: nostalgia, male potency, and the locker room simplicity of the coach/player (father/son) bond.
The ads follow suit, leaning mostly on four images: oversized farm machinery, especially pickup trucks; stoic multi-generational men in flannels, barn coats, and work gloves; the sun rising or setting over a golden windswept monoculture grain field; physical labor limited to either the slow-motion heave of a hay bale into a truck bed (dust glittering in the sun) or the firm but tender care of large mammals. If we include the imagery of Western ranching, add a few more: handsome and disarmingly charming cowboys, sturdy horses, and wide open land beneath a wide open sky. And, again: trucks. Lots of trucks.
These images aren’t hard to decipher, which is the point. This romancing of the rural is hugely appealing to our middle income middle manager stuck in a veneered and vinyl-ed suburb, longing for “simple living” and some ineffable “authenticity” instead of all the troublesome complexity of the HOA, PTA, and IRS. In other words, rural imagery sells — trucks, beer, insurance, beef sticks, whatever.
These images matter, and not just for sales. It’s not the longest leap, in terms of technique, between the ads for breakfast cereal (the promise: reconnecting with your wayward children) and the American fascists who, lambasting abstract art and avant-garde music, promise a return to older, euro-centric art styles (including lots of images of conspicuously not-so-wayward children). Both lean on a subconscious fear of the world: that we are no longer able to make sense of the modern condition. Both want us to believe in a pause or rewind button on life.
On the other hand are artists, some of whom seem to be on fast forward, and who configure words and images in order to upset the apple cart of nostalgia. Good art of this kind demands to be encountered on shifting, uncertain terms, sometimes causing us bewilderment or discomfort. Good art of this kind rewards us with a glimpse into the invisible realm where our unquestioned assumptions live. This process can vex us, but it doesn’t lie.
(Forgive the abstractions here — lots of particulars are just around the curve.)
We, country people, need this kind of art. For those of us actually out here, living lives of weird and wonderful divergence from nostalgic normalcy, those gimcrack images of American agriculture are, at best, insufficient. At worst they’re damn propaganda, reinforcing a norm that claims to be universal while ignoring (read: silencing) the complex conversations most of us are having with our rural places and the communities inhabiting them.
All of which is to say: bless Molly Bashaw.
I confess:
I have drunk ice-cold water from a trough.
I have taken a cow’s teat into my mouth, the cowbell so silent
it rang through the body into the milk.
Bless the way she holds the particulars of a place on the page:
Pasture, root sap, vole love.
An ebb of bees nicks the skins:
some moss, some blossom.
We weed the dewed weeds,
And how she testifies to their agency:
The last carrot stays
in the dirt, a comma in the furrow:
Wait for the red fox, the earwig,
it says. Wait for the honeycomb.
That hill on the farm, it is your rye bread.
It is raining there, it is pouring milk.
I endeavored to keep these excerpts — from Molly Bashaw’s chapbook The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It — short, both to honor copyright, and because I desperately want you to find and devour this book on your own.
After a bit of internet sleuthing, I contacted the lovely folks at The Word Works, who published this chapbook. They introduced me to Molly, who now lives in Germany, via email. (An aside — if you are a fan of not-so-famous authors, know that many of them actually read, and respond to, the emails you send them.) I asked her if I could reprint one of the poems in its entirety and she said yes.
As mentioned above, I want to explain the name of our newsletter, The Whole Field. As fitting as it would be to excerpt the stanza that includes “the whole field,” that poem, even more fittingly, deserves to be read in its full context. In regards to our newsletter subsections “the warp” and “the weft,” these terms arose from the delightfully-titled poem, Governed by the Thrumming of my Mother’s Spinning Wheel, which begins:
and the running of the shuttle
through the warp with the weft
A recurring theme in this collection is comprised of two parts, which I’ll call a sacred inversion. The sacred is a way of calling forth the comprehensive, expansive spirit of the thing — “the farm is everywhere, a constellation / you can see” and the inversion is a way of bottling a cloud; making a home for the expansive within a small and particular object — ”inside one grain it is last summer still,” or “in every hoof every field the field ever was.”
Contemporary artists occasionally take their direction from advances in philosophy. If the author is one of them, I’d guess a connection to Object Oriented Ontology (OOO for short), a theory of phenomenology that proposes a universe of things that thrum, that radiate, and that act. Or, maybe, Molly is one of a growing number of people to adopt animist beliefs about an energizing spirit innate to all things in nature, from toads to rivers to rock walls. Whether in connection to animism or not, OOO or not, these are poems placing humans in the continuing presence of non-human agency. This presence, among the goats and grain and “floorboards’ nails worn shiny,” is complicated by the fact that this is Molly’s childhood farm — these are memories, or dreams, and she is, by choice, no longer there.
The goat and my mother:
it rests its bearded chin on her head.
She rests her chin on its flank,
it rests its hoof on her thigh,
she rests her hands on its horns,
it rests its eyes on her eyes.
She rests her eyes in its milk.
I love the dissolving softness of these lines; the way things remain starkly alive in their detail while at the same time becoming liquid, ignoring spacetime and the boundaries of other things. Here’s another example, from the same poem, the longest in the book:
Let me kneel at you once more
I will imagine the earth inside you
beginning with the grass,
So. I chose the term “The Whole Field” both as an homage to this book, and to the notion of a field of art or academia, and poet Charles Oleson’s “Projective Verse” that populates the page as a field. Most importantly, The Whole Field delineates an idea important to Crosshatch: working comprehensively, within and on wholes, solving problems by considering them in their context.
Similarly, we chose “warp” and “weft” for many reasons: as an homage to this book, a shout-out to the many fiber workers and fiber artists in our region (including the Fiber Guild, filled with people I hold dear), and as a way to convey another important Crosshatch value: weaving as the fundamental political and cultural action. Weaving a connection between people and our home places, and weaving ourselves together, are potent acts of resistance to this bizarre neoliberal zeitgeist of utter atomization. Weaving as a way to begin building the future we want — not alone, and not as an abstract national “body,” but with the hands and bodies of our neighbors. We weave trust, and knowledge, and deeply rooted connections, and we become strong.
An MFA is not required to appreciate nuanced or complex art, just as you don’t have to live in the country to recognize when rural life is being propagandized for profit on TV, and so failing to reflect the lived experience of country people. That said, our ability to resist both late-stage capitalism and encroaching fascism is rooted, in part, in our ability to develop stronger visual literacy and sales resistance. Let’s talk back to our TVs, says I, and let’s read more poetry like The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It. And let’s weave, weave, weave.
