52 Arkansas State Parks: 52 Poems

14 June 2023

Conway, AR

84º (feels like 92º) sunny with big puffball clouds drifting at a lazy pace

It’s been four years and one month since I last drafted a post for Myself the Only Kangaroo. I’m dipping a toe back in the waters as I’ve embarked on a new project some folx might find interesting, 52 Arkansas State Parks: 52 Poems. Over the next year, my goal is to visit each of Arkansas’ state parks and write a place-based poem there. While I’m starting slow and will travel to 16 in 2023, I’ve been granted a sabbatical for spring 2024 (thank you, University of Central Arkansas!) during which I’ll visit 22 parks, covering the remaining 14 in that summer. Or, at least, that’s the plan. I’m hoping posting on the Kangaroo will help me stay on track!

Why this project? Why now?

I have now lived in Arkansas for longer than I lived in northeast Iowa, the subject of the place-based poems in my first two collections: Blood Almanac and The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths. While I have been curious about the land in my new home, land that is dramatically different from the glacier-sculpted rolling hills of my origin, I have not written much poetry rooted in the environment here.

I’ve read, over the years, about Arkansas’ six natural divisions and learned, in theory, the differences between the Ozark Mountains and the Ouachitas, which are separated by the Arkansas River Valley; I’ve studied the creation of the Gulf Coastal Plain in south Arkansas and the Mississippi Alluvial Plain that covers the east, those long flat croplands that hint at familiarity, and I’ve tried to comprehend the geologic miracle that is Crowley’s Ridge. Thanks to participating in Writers in the Schools as a graduate student way back in the day at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, I’ve driven from one end of the state to the other visiting towns small and large, and have, over the last two decades in the normal course of life, logged endless hours on I-40, I-55, I-530, I-49, and many state highways in between.

Compared to the sweeping, tallgrass prairie land of my youth, I walk on more rock these days and old swamplands with poor drainage. And the dirt, the dirt here is an entirely weird shade of light brown. Still, it grows sweet cantelopes and peaches, fat tomatoes, and legendary rice, among a host of other plants, shrubs, and trees.

Because I was born curious and inquisitive, I’ve learned about not only the land but also the people, the various cultures of the past and the present. I may be the one person in the last thirty years who’s checked out the entire shelf of Arkansas history books at Torreyson Library at UCA, and only the Google gods know how many hours of online reading I’ve done in the area. I can trace the lineage of the original peoples, the Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw and how they were nearly erased by first the French and then American settlers pushing west toward our manifest destiny. I live alongside descendants of slave owners and slaves. I am one of many northern “transplants,” and I am watching as new immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia reshape our sense of self.

However, the people, largely rural or suburban (but trending toward town), mostly working class and proud of a day’s hard labor, some born into racism and homophobia, others working towards a more inclusive sense of community, these are people I recognize at the root. These people, the same as the Iowans from which I sprang, both embrace and wrestle with the land to the same degree. This, the people and the land, are what will drive the poems I aim to write.

It seems that without my even being terribly conscious of the transformation, I’ve become an Arkansan. Finally, I feel like I might have something to say about this place and the authority to say it, as well as to ask the questions that need asking. Knowing that 50-ish pages of poetry make the minimum for a book of poetry, when I learned last year that there are 52 state parks here, it seemed serendipitous and sparked the idea for the project. Discovering that 2023 is the centennial of the formation of the Arkansas State Parks system was the icing on the cake.

It’s a big project, one about which I’m excited and energized. Let’s go!