pillars robbed. While we were at the funeral home, waiting to make the trip to the cemetery, the undertaker received a call from the church. The gravesite was occupied. Where should he go? Next to the family plot was a swale, the ground sometimes wet. I chose the spot, despite the undertaker’s caution. I thought, my father was a farmer, for Christ’s sake; he understood wet years and dry years, loams and gravel, life in death. I wanted to say, if you accept what we’re doing, a wake and a burial aren’t about warehousing something; they’re about transition and transfiguration.
St. Cecilia’s, at Hilltop—the mission church of St. Juliana’s at Rock Lake, where an Irish settlement grew in the 1830s—closed in 2009. Constructed in 1865, St. Cecilia’s may have been built to serve a rising population of tannery workers at Tanner’s Falls. Positioned on a plateau, the Hilltop churchyard sits on solid earth; no mining here. The Morris and Wellsboro loams have slow permeability, the water table in wet times rises to a depth of twelve to twenty-four inches, and erosion is a concern when the ground gets disturbed.62 Among the stones, Irish names (McCormick, O’Neill, McGraw) predominate. Touched little by the rural cemetery movement, ironically enough, the ethos of this rural cemetery is vastly different from that at Forest Hill; Hilltop reminds one that death is an awful, sublime calamity. Bound by stonewalls and the Bethany Turnpike, the graveyard huddles tight to the little clapboard church. No mausoleums, no obelisks, no Ozymandian blocks. No shade trees, no flowering shrubs, no gently curving roads. No one runs here. Once a congregation of farmers, the dead at Hilltop knew no separation of work and home; rest, relaxation, and recreation were homegrown, work related. One with the fields that back it, this field, the vacant half still cut once a year, doesn’t invite one to linger; it waits for you to stay, to turn its soil, to plant and grow.
For too long, I’ve occupied space and called it living in a place, but, like a lot of people, I don’t really know much about my home or even fully realize that I’m from here, and there. A reorienting experience, paying closer attention to home helps me to see what I’m doing in the world. These days, I find myself relearning my home grounds, their histories and soils, their tendencies and possibilities, and the arguments about them, which has been an education unlike that promoted in the institutions I’ve attended, K–12 and B.A. to Ph.D., which have taught me to leave home, even at home.
With yet another reworking of this place underway, I have to ask, when we drill, do we create or destroy?
2
Merwin and Mining
what he does / All his life to keep alive gets into / The grain of him
—W. S. Merwin, “The Miner”
I first read “The Drunk in the Furnace” in an English class at the University of Scranton. The instructor led us through a close reading and then asked if anyone knew where the poem was set. No one did. “Here, in Scranton,” he said. Most people in class were out-of-staters, mainly from New Jersey and Long Island, so they knew nothing about the furnaces. I didn’t know much about them either, I confess, beyond their location. It never occurred to me—or anyone else, I imagine—to visit them, despite the fact that the furnaces were no more than a few minutes’ walk from where we sat. Looking back, I see that I was being taught what most literary critics are trained to do: to keep my head down and pay attention to the text, only the text. Readers should put the ordinary world aside: you cannot get there from here anyway, after all, because a poem offers a perception of the world, not the world.
But these days, I cannot get the world off my mind.
Had we walked along Monroe Avenue, stepped across the railroad tracks behind the Lackawanna Station, and made our way down into the hollow to read the poem in the shadow of the furnaces, would our reading of it have changed?
I think so. If nothing else, we would have asked, in the open air, under the sun, a different set of questions, because we would have been reading the poet’s experience of the place in light of our own experience of it. We would have seen it, the poem and the place, from a new angle.
When I finally did visit the furnaces, many years later, the first thing I noticed was how big—and castle-like—they really are.
Literary scholars analyze poems and write about poems, and they require their students to write in response to poems, but they often don’t experience the places to which the poems respond.1
Few, I bet, have rebuilt a stone wall, farmed in Kentucky, or shoveled coal. Poets may do those things, but scholars? I don’t think so. They have enough to do in reading, writing, and teaching. Texts take a lot of time and attention.
But this is changing, I know. Debates about the environment have led some scholars to do fieldwork, to see a text against the world it represents. A place-based study examines a literary piece in the “exact location about which the text being studied or used was written.” Stepping out of the office and into the field, a scholar traces the “correspondences... between the text and the place” in order to offer new readings of each.2
I tried this at home with some W. S. Merwin poems.
Studied alongside the places they portray, Merwin’s mining poems describe a shattered landscape populated by people who cannot see the damage around them, despite the fact that the damage haunts them. Here in the Anthracite Region, mines burn, “Smothered and silent,” as “Burning Mountain” suggests, and retired miners find that a life’s work “at last cannot / Be washed out, all of it, in this world.” Intimately exploring this “inexcusable / Unavoidable” ground, Merwin gropes for answers to a question I’ve been asking myself lately: what are we doing to the world—and to one another?3 If poetry—and any literature, for that matter—has any use value it’s that it leads us to rethink what we think we see. Merwin’s mining poems show us that we have an infinite capacity for making the unnatural natural.
The work we do shapes, for better and worse, the world and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. Coal mining landscapes may be an extreme and obvious example, but they are often out of sight, out of mind. With mines usually located well outside major population areas, Americans have the luxury of not seeing the “hard places” where the nation’s “dirtiest work” is done. Mine-scarred landscapes repel most people, I think, because they represent the “unfinished, crude, and imperfect; perhaps they are too honest a depiction of how we have treated the environment and each other.”4 One of those hard places, the Anthracite Region, has been described as a “lunar landscape,” as “one of industrial America’s sacrificial zones,” and as “grievously scarred.”5 Within the region lies Scranton, Merwin’s boyhood home, a city of mines.
Son of a Presbyterian minister, Merwin moved to Scranton with his family in 1936, and he remained there until 1944, when he left for Princeton at age sixteen. In 1948, he sailed for Europe, returning in 1956 “to go back to Pennsylvania, and write about it.”6 His homecoming, I believe, shocked him, mainly because he saw his old neighborhood anew.
The years Merwin lived in Europe coincided with the final collapse of the anthracite coal industry.7 While the postwar economy boomed in much of the United States in 1946–1960, the Anthracite Region slid into its steepest economic decline. By 1956, strip mining was widespread, unemployment topped 10 percent, and most deep mines were idle.8 Although coal mining may have all but ended by the year of Merwin’s return, culm banks burned, abandoned breakers dominated former patch towns, and streams ran orange with acid. Its wounds raw in the mid-1950s, Scranton’s cityscape made visible the long history of environmental exploitation that made possible mid-century America’s political, economic, and military power. Merwin probes the damage that human work has inflicted on the Lackawanna Valley.
As others have noted, The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marks a break between Merwin’s first three books of poems, which were “so objective, so mythic as to be anonymous,” and the next collections, within which one hears Merwin’s “personal poetic voice.” A “master-poem,” the title piece “radically recasts the material Merwin has been sifting over and over,” material that examined family history and place. Merwin later admitted that he was