Poet John Thompson Visits State Library

John Thompson read from his County Poems book on July 18, 2007 at the State Library of Iowa.  The following his account of how the book came about.

Iowa history and poetry were my two academic passions as a college student in Iowa.  While studying the history of the state under Professor John Liepa at DMACC/Ankeny, we students were given blank grids of the state and required to plot famous persons, places, events, and things throughout Iowa.  The grids had no names or titles; we had to know our counties.
 
It hit me while taking these rather excruciating exams that Iowa, indeed, had a high
density of counties; we rank 9th nationally.  In fact, we are arguably the most densely populated state for counties.  Knowing that lyric poetry and rhyme writing were favorite past times of mine, I knew if I could write a poem for each one of these grids, the counties, then I would, at least by quantity, have a book.

That idea, or private goal, stayed with me for over a decade.  I earned my Master’s in
Poetry/Creative Writing from New England College in the summer of 2004 and returned to my
home state running.  While watching RAGBRAIers dip their front wheels into the Mississippi River
in late July of 2004, I knew it was time to begin.  After all, if people can travel the state each year in the
heat and humidity, then certainly I could ride around in a car for a couple of years and put the state
to poetry.  It has been a project and dream come true.

The library system of Iowa served as my invisible hand, organizer, and co-author.  I
visited each county-seat library and wrote a draft (beginning, middle, or end) while in each county.
Sometimes I would introduce myself to a reference librarian and ask for tips; other times I was
there to use the word processor and write the final draft.  I remember a particular trip to Henry County when visiting the grounds of Thresher Days in Mount Pleasant several weeks before the event.
I didn’t know if I had a grasp of what threshing was all about, so I stayed the remains of the day
in the Mount Pleasant library and submitted process drafts to the director.  She nodded in the late afternoon.  “Ode to Thresher” was added to 99 Voices, 99 Lives:  County Poems of Iowa.

I felt like a RAGBRAIer myself traveling the state in my car, receiving guidance, a thumbs-up, you might say, from the librarians and staffers throughout the state.  It seemed that everyone thought this was a good, yet sizable, idea.  The library staffs also helped me map out an area of the state so I could reach two or three county seats in one day.  I collected library cards from most of the libraries visited, and will gladly accept more (610 ½ Union, Pella, Iowa 50219) to add to my state-shaped collection of cards.

Was it difficult at times?  Of course, it was; but the project and process of writing the verses
never ceased to be a labor of love.  I did not receive grant money for the project, so I had to be diligent about travel expenses.  Creating 99 topics, though, was not that frustrating.  Iowa has hundreds of communities, cultures, events, people, traditions, and ideas.  So many of them well recorded, documented in our Iowa library system; it was usually most frustrating when having to choose.  Occasionally, patience allowed me to fuse two ideas like the crash of United flight 232 in Sioux City with two hometown girls:  Dear Abby and Abigail Van Buren.

Being a poet, I wanted symbolism/representation to be rich in the book.  You have a cow poem,
a hog poem, a corn poem, a tornado poem.  It was an honor to write about Native American populations,
Kate Shelley, Bill Riley, Floppy.  My boyhood county of Decatur is a pheasant poem; my current residency in Pella, of course, is a tribute to Dutch letters and tulips.  Poems about the Orphan Train and the Loess Hills have been crowd and critical favorites.

When I was a boy, I thought Iowa was a girl because its name ended in a.  I told my mom that I was going to marry the state someday.  Soon, I will read at the Little Brown Church in the Vale as part of the wedding reunion there.  I think, somehow, Iowa finally said yes.

John D. Thompson
99 Voices, 99 Lives:  County Poems of Iowa
statepoetpro@yahoo.com