Door County Authors and After Words

With an apology to T. S. Eliot, April in Door County is certainly not the "cruelest month breeding lilacs out of a dead land" – at least not where poetry is concerned. We put out a call to read, and in this part of the world if you put out a call to read, poets will answer. This year we chose to feature those poets who have appeared in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Poet’s Calendars over the years; we filled our two April issues with such poems and this issue contains even more. I am always thrilled by the number and quality of the poets working in Door County. With the consistent effort of these and other local poets, we need to find a way to hear their work on a more regular basis and we will be working on that project in the coming months.

Earlier in April, I had thought to do a column on the Wisconsin poets who have earned reputations beyond the borders of the state. We’ve already looked at Niedecker more than once, so I felt we could let her rest this time around. Browsing through Info Soup, I was interested to discover a nice cache of books by Sauk City author, August Derleth in the McArdle Branch of the Door County Library in Baileys Harbor. I haven’t read much of Derleth, so I’ll have to do so before I write about him at length – but that’s not the point here. For the moment, I want to sing the praises of our county library system with its fine mother plant in Sturgeon Bay and its far-flung branches throughout the county. I couldn’t function without the Sister Bay/Liberty Grove Branch, as well as the main branch in Sturgeon Bay, but the other branches throughout the county must have treasures of their own. Certainly, that is what I discovered about the McArdle Branch in Baileys Harbor with its cache of Derleth books. And what should I find in that cache but a jim-dandy book of Collected Poems, 1937-1967. This volume bears witness to one of the fine points of our system which is that one can give books to a selected branch and the books will stay in that branch. This book was presented to the McArdle in recognition of the Fifth Annual National Poetry Month, April 2000 by one N. F. Rafal. Well wouldn’t you know it! Thanks again, N. F. Rafal! Is there no corner of the county she does not touch with her particular magic?

But, let’s get back to Derleth – if only for a peek. In his Foreword to Collected Poems 1937-1967, Derleth describes the poems in this book as "minor." Fair enough; they’re his poems. But that description doesn’t make them one jot less engaging. In these pages one will find poems on nature, poems on love, poems for friends, poems for this world, for the night, for the soul of the poet, portrait poems about the people of Sac Prairie, and a section in homage to Thoreau. On reading through the book, I wondered how I would characterize this ever-so various collection. For the moment, I can only offer this: here are the poems of a man who belongs; a man who stayed close to his birthplace, let his roots reach deeply into the soil of Wisconsin, so deeply and so fondly that he was able to bloom through his poetry in ways of wonder, humility, pain and joy, but always in the voice of one who never forgot where and how to belong. Out of oh, so many, and almost arbitrarily, let this one poem stand for the rest for now.

Night Ride
By August Derleth.

How quickly the road recedes,
the familiar land marks – tree,
bush, signpost – blur, disappear!
and the mists rise to drown the valleys –
oh! and the moonlight in your eyes
lights up the willowwisp I follow, follow
where time and years gone by
fall and fade
along this midnight road.

Off the dark hill
a whippoorwill calls for my soul
as were it still my own to give. *

In the near future, I will be setting off on a new adventure regarding authors whose books, although ostensibly written for children, should be read by adults as well. This goes back to my own experience reading such books over the radio but that was some time ago and I have had to return to research such books in order to write more currently about this topic. In so doing, I am finding more than helpful collaborators in this project in the librarians at the Sister Bay/Liberty Grove Branch, the McArdle Branch, and the Sturgeon Bay Main Branch of the Door County Library. That collaboration has come through research suggestions, just plain book talk and most helpfully finding books – new works I’ve got to read and also books about the authors and their work, all by exercising the long reach of our library’s association throughout the Nicolet Federal Library System. Being able to order and receive any book from anywhere…it’s the best possible dream come true. Of all the good things about Door County, our Door County Library System is one of the best.

*Collected Poems, 1937-1967 by August Derleth is published by Hawk and Whippoorwill, 1995. For information and purchase contact Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, Attention George A. Vanderburgh, P. O. Box 204, 420 Owen Sound Street, Shelburne, Ontario Canada, LON ISO