The Hog Farm (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: POETRY)
One of our two poetry winners is Jonathan Wolf, for his poem “The Hog Farm.” This year’s poetry judge was Joshua Bennett. Of Wolf’s poem, he writes:
“The Hog Farm” is memorable for many reasons. But it’s primarily the poet’s careful attention to the bond between silence and song that caught my attention. The soundscape here is seemingly endless: there’s the “ruling” river, the trilling cicada, the “sun-dulled” flags that flap overhead. And of course, the flitting dragonflies only a thought’s distance from our speaker, who is perpetually in motion. It was energizing to read a poet who has so carefully honed their ear not only to the language of the writing itself, but to the surrounding world that makes poems worthwhile. In these lines, there are ordinary wonders everywhere. All you have to do is listen, and be transformed.
Ploughshares Managing Editor Rachel Dillon wrote the following questions for Wolf about his poem and process.
Rachel Dillon: Tell us about how this poem came to be—what inspired it?
Jonathan Wolf: It started as a redux of something I wrote years ago—a windbaggy sort of nostalgia-poem about Iowa, about prairies, their beauty, what a bad thing it is that they no longer exist—which failed because it never managed to be horrible, among other reasons. I also, perhaps unconsciously, wanted to write about confinement; it was late March of this year, and they’d just flown three hundred people to the supermax in El Salvador. And hogs are people too—there’s around twenty-five million in Iowa. I guess I was trying to trouble that too-clean rendering of adolescence, fascination with nature, and the Midwest.
RD: Although your poem ends with “almost silen[ce],” I was struck by the role of sound and internal rhyme throughout: “pedal westward” / “strung with humming” / “bloody history.” How does sound play a role in the construction of your poems? Is musicality something you work to find as you write, or does it find you?
JW: Both! Musicality is what makes poetry exciting. I think the spokenness of a poem—how it lives aloud, as sound, as speech—is as important as (and probably inseparable from) its content. Even if a poem uses the most ordinary and familiar language, it should sound, at least somewhere, at least a little bit, like a spell. Often, I’ll begin writing in meter, and even when it doesn’t stick, the rhythm is a helpful guide (it’s also fun when it does stick, though). A lot of my poems end-rhyme, and that’s certainly an instance where it works both ways—sometimes you find a rhyme, sometimes it finds you.
RD: The setting in this poem is beautifully rendered. I see you’re from the Midwest, where this poem presumably takes place, but are currently pursuing your MFA in Florida; how do your surroundings, specifically in terms of landscape, inform your work?
JW: Landscape is something I almost take for granted as a writer—not in any devaluing sense, but in that it’s difficult to imagine writing a poem without thinking about wherever I happen to be and what sorts of living things surround me. Even if any literal/visual description of landscape or nature never makes it into a poem, some implicit setting has to be there.
RD: Which poems or poets inspire/influence you?
JW: Since moving to Florida, my biggest influence has been Amy Clampitt, whom I now utterly adore. Last time I was in Iowa, I even drove out to her family farm in New Providence, a stammering fanboy. All the streets there are named for kinds of fruit. Clampitt had an impeccable ear for language, and it’s surprised me to find her sometimes dismissed as a poet overly concerned with words, or ornament, or “surface”—so much of her poetry is so deeply social! I also love Marianne Moore—I always start my undergraduates (who sometimes, too, dislike it) with “Poetry,” and when it goes well, the syllabics and the rhyme are rabbits from a hat—and reading “An Octopus” as an undergraduate was one of the first times any poem really floored me. I don’t think I read it very well, but it gave me an enormous awe, and it still does. There are too many! Poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Donne, Louis MacNeice—and living poets like Alice Oswald, Lawrence Joseph, Patricia Smith, Christian Wiman, Ada Limón, Ishion Hutchinson, Paul Muldoon, Declan Ryan, Joshua Mehigan, Averill Curdy, and Ange Mlinko.
This poem definitely owes debts to Ishion Hutchinson’s “The Turning Road” and Wallace Stevens’s “Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.”—two other poems in tercets, each teetering in its own way between slaughter and water. And there’s an echo of Amy Clampitt’s book Westward (Knopf, 1990) (which ends with “The Prairie,” a long poem about Iowa—written in, you guessed it, tercets).
*
After school, I’d pedal westward
on gravel, following the pylons
strung with humming wires,
finches and dragonflies flitting
two thoughts ahead. I wound
past ranks of corn to a stone bridge
where clear water made a sound
like the sun-dulled flags
above farmhouses, lapping up the air—
there I usually turned back.
I knew that farther, the creek fed
a ruling river’s valley—
I went to see it. Miles unrolled
in pale dust and cicada trill
until stink clotted the breeze,
and like some distant hell’s choir
a low shrieking clarified in the sunlight
as I neared. Four enormous sheds
squatted whitely in the heat, rank
and loud as any bloody history
drained from textbooks—their sound
was the sound that hangs in a cold
room in back of the mind, aware
only of itself and of time.
Down in the valley, the river
was the hue of mud, slow
and swollen and almost silent.
