© Croft Gallery 2025 with permission
… even this,
these little gestures that can re-birth a nation,
reconcile not only colors like blue and red,
but reconcile us one to the other.
— Marc Harshman, Dispatch From the Mountain State
Marc Harshman, the poet laureate of West Virginia, was raised in rural Indiana, has an MA from Yale Divinity School, and is practiced in performing his poetry in front of an audience however scant and comatose, his delivery saturated with heartfelt rousing intention. He wants us to wake up, not only to the natural world, but to our brethren, the person sitting to our right and to our left, literally and figuratively.
A primary school teacher for many years, poetry was always, and still is, his passion though he's also written many childrens' books. It was a pleasant surprise to find him at my local library one evening as a guest of Next Years Words, a monthly prose and poetry reading that welcomes both published and novice writers. It's been a feature of the library's programming since 2015 and is still going strong, thanks to Susan Chute, one of its founders.
How sweet it is to experience poetry during these hard times. "It makes the unbearable bearable," Mark mumbled a bit sotto voce, between one poem and another. I heard the aside loud and clear and wanted to rise up and sing, as though I was in church. In normal times, such an impulse would have felt out of place in a sedate library setting, but not this week, this month, this day.
At some point Marc uttered the word "Appalachia," a reference to his rural upbringing and the geographical locus of his work. I thought of our vice president who was raised in the same/or similar geographical locus, and has a (well-written) book now offered as a free download for those who may be curious or adoring. But that begins and ends the comparison between these two men, as writers, so I'll leave it there.
I have attempted poetry from time to time, have had a few published in literary journals, and collected them into a trilogy called Nomads. Most of these poems are narrative, what a poet might call prosaic. I consider them prose poems or mini-stories. I've performed them, and hosted an evening when actors performed them, but unlike Marc Harshman, ideas do not get laid out in my brain as poetry. I wouldn't presume to know what it feels like to write a poem that begins with an image, for example, and I'm admiring of poets who pierce our indifference and fear with words that fly off the page with a cadence and aliveness we cannot resist.