UPDATE: A few hours after the post below was published, SDPB's Lori Walsh reported on Politics & Poetry: Why South Dakota doesn’t have a new poet laureate. Good details are revealed, including names of the person nominated by the Poetry Society and the poet Noem's office wanted in the position. All the more reason for South Dakota poets to scribble more. See the July 13 post in solidarity over at Dakota Free Press, Lacking a Laureate? To the Barricades, Fellow Poet-Patriots![end update]
As a graduate of the Ozarks Famous Writers School, where I studied with those guys who taught Jimmy Carter the finer points of measuring sweet sounds together, I was flabbergasted to read Lori Walsh's article at SDPB South Dakota without poet laureate after deadline passes:
South Dakota is without a poet laureate.
State law requires the South Dakota State Poetry Society to make a recommendation to the governor’s office for approval.
Poetry society president Dana Yost said Gov. Kristi Noem rejected the board’s first proposed candidate and didn’t respond to a second recommendation.
The next poet laureate term was set to begin July 1.
“So far as we are concerned, with the deadline having come and gone, we will go without a poet laureate for the next four years," Yost said. "It’s an important cultural position in the state. South Dakota has had a poet laureate since 1926. That person is a leading advocate not only for poetry, but for the arts. It’s a very important position, and it’s just disappointing that we’re going to go vacant for four years.”
The governor is not required by law to approve the poetry society's recommendation.
Former South Dakota Poet Laureate Christine Stewart said since the laureate is not a paid position, whomever is chosen must be an effective collaborator as well as a poet of merit.
“It makes me really sad that the board’s choice didn’t get confirmed by the governor. I know the board knew they could work with their choice. They believed in that person’s track record, the quality of their work, and what they had in mind moving forward," Stewart said. " It’s just a loss. It’s a loss for that new work to happen under that official poet laureate title.”
The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Here's the South Dakota state statute that spells out the rules for picking the state poet laureate. Only South Dakota residents allowed, so Minnesota's poet laureate, Sisseton Wahpeton enrolled member but Mankato area resident Gwen Westerman, won't be able to pitch hit for poesy here.
Minnesota readers might recognize the name of South Dakota State Poetry Society president Dana Yost, an award-winning newspaperman who edited the Marshall Independent and the West Central Tribune to much acclaim.
Given that South Dakotans are a resourceful bunch, Bluestem suggests that we use our Freedom to write unofficial poetry for important moments in the state's official life.
Perhaps we could start with a poetry contest, with our governor as the subject for ditties in three forms: haiku, limericks, and sonnets. I'd have to work on meter for the limerick division, as the headline on this post illustrates, though it's okay to settle for imperfect rhymes for "Castlewood." And given South Dakota's literary heritage, perhaps "lariat" is the word to use in the second line.
What better way to break the power of the poetry society? As Smithsonian magazine reported about the Rushmore State's first poet laureate in Saddle Up With Badger Clark, America’s Forgotten Cowboy Poet:
South Dakota’s first poet laureate lived much of his life alone in a prim cabin in the heart of Custer State Park. He wore whipcord breeches and polished riding boots, a Windsor tie and an officer’s jacket. He fed the deer flapjacks from his window in the mornings, paid $10 a year in ground rent and denounced consumerism at every turn. “Lord, how I pity a man with a steady job,” he wrote in his diary in 1941.
Born January 1, 1883, Badger Clark built a career writing what many today call “cowboy poetry,” and what many others, then and now, call doggerel. Clark himself seemed resigned to this lowbrow status. “I might as well give up trying to be an intellectual and stick to the naivete of the old cowboy stuff,” he wrote in his diary at the age of 58. Yet Clark’s poetry became so widely recited throughout the American West that he eventually collected over 40 different postcards featuring his most popular poem, “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” each of which attributed the poem to “Author unknown” or “Anonymous,” as if the poem belonged to everyone—as if it had been reaped from the soil itself. As Poetry magazine acknowledged in a correction in September 1917, after mistakenly attributing another Clark poem to “Author Unknown”: “It is not everyone who wakes to find himself a folk-poet, and that in less than a generation.” . . .
Inspired by Rudyard Kipling and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Clark shunned free verse in favor of meter and rhyme, composing primarily in ballad form. The best of his poems bounce you in the saddle, gallop across the page, train your eyes toward the sun and your heart toward the West, offering a vital escape from the hassles of modern life: the overdue bills, the overflowing inbox, the wearisome commute. And today, as climate change and urbanization threaten our last truly wild spaces, and Covid-19 bullies us into quarantine, that hint of freedom tastes especially sweet. Clark’s verses beg for recitation, and it’s little wonder his work spread so quickly throughout the Western cattle country of the early-to-mid-20th century. As one old cowpuncher supposedly said after reading Clark’s first collection, “You can break me if there’s a dead poem in the book, I read the hull of it. Who in hell is this kid Clark, anyway? I don’t know how he knowed, but he knows." . . .
In his later years, Clark spent considerable time writing letters to the Rapid City Journal, the state’s leading newspaper. They reveal a staunch pacifist, a naturalist and often brazen individualist who distrusted technology and vehemently opposed segregation. “We still owe the Negro for 250 years of unpaid labor, and we owe the Indian for some three million square miles of land,” he wrote in one letter to the paper in 1954. . . .
Dirty hippies, defend the state's doggerel and woke heritage! Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend! Write that poesy ripped from the headlines (or not if haiku's your thing).
Photo: Badger Clark's grave., from the Rapid City Journal, South Dakota's first Poet Laureate captured life in the American West. Source: Brett Nachtigall/Hot Springs Star.
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