Poet Dave Etter and the Issue of Belonging

 

John Hallwas

 

Illinois poet Dave Etter, who was the most noted contemporary poetic voice for small-town America, died in late July, 2015, at age 87. His books and papers are in a collection at the WIU Malpass Library Archives, so even though he wasn’t from Macomb, there was a memorial gathering at the library’s Garden Lounge.

I knew Etter for many years, and even before then, I admired his poetry. Although I write nonfiction, we shared an interest in several themes, including the decline of community, the experience of small-town life, and the crucial importance of belonging.

Originally from California, Etter studied at the University of Iowa, where he majored in history and graduated in 1953. He spent most of his adult life in Illinois, primarily in small towns like Elburn and Lanark. He had an intense, traditional longing to be “at home”—in the sense of feeling deeply connected to a particular place. As he pointed out in a volume of prose reflections about Illinois, called “Home State” (1985), 

“I’m sure I have found my right spot on the planet, and if it is my fate to stay here for the rest of my life, I will have no complaints whatsoever. In the end, the true ‘art of living’ is to belong in one place, a place that is always ‘home.’” 

He was living in Elburn (just west of Chicago) at the time, and he and his wife later moved 100 miles farther west, to Lanark—which was not impacted by suburban sprawl—but he was talking in general, too, of small-town Illinois, which he appreciated so deeply. The achievement of intense belonging was easier, he knew, in a more knowable, more personal cultural-social context.

Etter realized, however, that we are living in a world marked by increasing community decline and individual alienation—which is what his most famous poetry collection, “Alliance, Illinois” (1978, 1983), is all about. In that small-town volume we encounter folks like Sandra Joyner, who complains that in Alliance “there is no one to talk to,” and Lloyd Kellogg, who calls himself “forgotten me,” and Guy Hansen, an aging man who reflects, “So this is retirement, this empty nothing.” As those and other poems reveal, the small-town world, too, now includes people with no local family connections, no long-time friends, and no sense of purpose.  

Of course, those small-town monologues reveal the challenges that Dave Etter experienced, and saw in other people, as he continued his own quest to be at home, to belong in a meaningful place. And increasingly, that’s the situation confronting individuals today.

A major difficulty that we all face is the rapidity of cultural change, which ultimately alienates us from others. One of Etter’s finest expressions of that comes in a poem called “The Second Death,” which I quoted as a frontispiece to one of my books. And it begins in this way:

 “Here in this tranquil Illinois town,

    Old Settler’s Day has come once more.

  Following the noon parade,

  noisy games in the park,

  and the evening band concert,

  deep in our moonlit graveyard,

  stoical in summer’s green heat,

  the ancestors stand by their headstones

  so we can learn their faces.

  They don’t smile, don’t make a sound.

  They know this is not their world,

  no place they would feel at home. . . .

  Perhaps, in time, we too will stand

  next to our own carved stones

  on some humid Old Settler’s Day,

  and stare hard without seeing,

  like the ghosts we have become. . . .”

What this poem—about harmless, disconnected ghosts in a small-town cemetery— dramatizes is the impact of accelerated cultural change. If they did appear, the dead of generations ago would not feel at home in our world, and we—tomorrow’s dead—will eventually be little-known components of a very remote past, not much in sync with the human culture that will follow us. 

         Implied here, too, is the realization that so many people now lose their “place,” their psychological fit in the flow of generations, which once allowed men and women to accept their own deaths without fear of disconnection. If we live to be senior citizens, we already know that, in a sense, we have become the ghosts, or still-remaining spirits, of a vanished past. And today, unlike generations ago, so many younger individuals find older people irrelevant to their own experience—which is locked into the present moment.    

         In a sense, Etter’s impact on those who have read, and will read, his poems is partly to help them become aware of this matter of modern disconnection, and to cope with it through broad social interaction, remembrance of the local and regional past, and appreciation for our cultural and natural contexts. As I’ve said, too, in books like “Western Illinois Heritage” (1983),  “Remembering McDonough County” (2009) and “Here to Stay” (2012), those are the keys to a sense of meaningful belonging.