Book review—Chicken Train: Poems from the Arkansas Delta
Chicken Train: Poems from the Arkansas Delta
Middle Island Press
2016
I suppose I should explain what the Arkansas Delta is. Although I’d rather not. That is, I’d rather not have to. I wish you already knew about the delta, the place where my father lived and is buried now, the place where I was born.
Nearly all the eastern border of Arkansas—until you get to that jag in the northeast corner, that single dip-down toe of Missouri—runs along the Mississippi River. And all along the west side of the river lies the Arkansas Delta.
Flatlands, mostly.
Some call this landform an alluvial plain. Some call an alluvial plain a flood plain. Some call this particular plain the most southern place in America.
Even though my father worked as a grocery-store manager, transferred from town to town, and we ended up in El Dorado at the bottom of the state, the delta still felt like home to me. A lost home.
Terry Minchow-Proffitt captures this sense of loss throughout his collection Chicken Train. He reveals loss in the poem “Helena Bound”:
that plywood sheet
nailed across the storefront window
on Cherry Street is not the saddest thing
I ever saw, but for the 1000th time
I forget what is.
He names loss directly in the titular poem “Chicken Train”:
Helena, I cross your bridge
where you wait, but not a soul
welcomes my return
to feel again the sting of your loss.
There’s your unmistakable pang of displacement from a rural past. He invokes the town of Helena, lightly personified, as if to reawaken her. She allusively resonates on the plain of another poem, Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen.”
Minchow-Proffitt doesn’t need to tell me how his Helena is akin to Poe’s “regions which are Holy-Land.” I feel it.
I feel it because the poet treats this landscape with rare precision, in descriptions not gratuitous, nor used as overture, but central:
The black Arkansas delta fans out flat
--
Not even the tangled sway
and squander of your kudzu
cascade could stop the erosion
of Crowley’s Ridge . . .
--
Slow on these knees through Johnson grass
--
. . . the sun-baked
parking lot of a Walmart
--
. . . we drowse across summer’s thick middle
on a narrow belt of two-lane blacktop
Minchow-Proffitt also zooms in close to capture images specific, familiar, and haunting to an Arkansan like myself:
pig’s feet jars
sweet potato pie
white rabbits in hutches
Huddle House
two cowboy boots stick out
a median of green
secret hot chow-chow
These images are realized in often short lines with delicate enjambments. The white space conveys the openness of the plains, while the line breaks reflect the ambiguity of navigating multiple realities, home and away, past and present. Across these brief lines Minchow-Proffitt suspends long sentences, accruing energy, hypnotically intoning, giving the sense that no matter how much you say, the past keeps on pulling up, more and more material, maybe endless.
Some of the most exciting small moments in the poems come when I hear dialect:
grab aholt
Lord knows what with whom
all this carrying on
Naw, I will, too
so many it busted us up
commences to tell
My only wish here would be for more. More voices, more words from this world. Especially when a southern speaker is paraphrased, there is room to even more completely realize dialect in the poetry.
I’m grateful Minchow-Proffitt doesn’t stop short of telling why the delta got emptied by rural flight. In “To a Green Patch of Yard” we learn:
Before Big Ag beat
the Delta like a rug
and flung field hands
like motes to light
elsewhere for a spell
before being beaten
into flight again,
you weathered
the beginning of the end
This is fearless writing, revealing—for those who have wondered, especially in 2016 and 2020—one factor in how so many rural Americans got desperate enough to look for help in the wrong places, from politicians who tell them lies they need to hear.
The very title of the collection is fearless. It moves into territory where a writer might not be taken seriously. The poet even goes so far as to identify himself fully with a chicken:
I know exactly where I am:
now walking deserted rails,
now on Cherry again, cradled
where dreams bud and beam
me back buck-buck-buckAWKing—
prodigal chicken
in your arms tonight.
Speaking as someone whose mother once worked the night shift in an Arkansas chicken plant, and who learned to fret about class ramifications of the in-town chickens next door, embracing chickens takes courage, even when they’ve become trendy in other parts of the United States. Minchow-Proffitt, who writes about raising chickens, too, gets it just right. The chicken images trouble yet satisfy, disturbing but dignified.
Something Minchow-Proffitt does masterfully is explore the way religion shapes the inner life. Probably not a surprise, given he’s a retired pastor. But his work does not aim to provide certainty. When he details a church scene, in “Proceedings of the 15th Annual Session of the Rock Solid Association,” he sticks to what is concrete and lets the reader draw conclusions about the events and characters. He tells us
Deacon Holt ain’t been right in a month of Sundays,
not been a shining
light to sinners, not even a fit
father to his five children.
But there is distance between the poet and the speaker. We know this is how the church community assesses Deacon Holt, not necessarily how we would judge him. Maybe we wouldn’t judge him at all.
. . .
In an email exchange about what Arkansas and Glasgow as written places might have in common, writer-teacher-publisher Alan McMunnigall of thi wurd quoted author Alasdair Gray to me:
“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”
“Because nobody imagines living here . . . think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”
―In Lanark
Really it was that last sentence Alan quoted. “If a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”
Writing about Arkansas as Minchow-Proffitt does, as an artist, is about writing Arkansas into existence.
This writing act need not be more than curiosity: What does Arkansas look like on the page? How does it sound? Not the way you’re told it should be, but the way you know it, the way you feel it, dream it, the way you know it could be.
I said mere curiosity would do. But chances are, the impulse comes from the layer of longing. Deeper.
. . .
You can purchase Chicken Train here, and visit the poet’s website here.