Reader's Guide for B. H. Fairchild's Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest

On the collection as a whole

Who is the author referring to in his dedication “for all my people”? Are his people specifically those living in the lower Midwest? Do they constitute a larger group of “America’s despairing dreamers” or a smaller group consisting of family members, as suggested in the opening piece?

The James Agee quotation that appears before the poems demonstrates an almost comfortable lack of knowledge about oneself. How does this help the reader understand the poetry which follows?

In Early Occult Memories of the Lower Midwest, memories are not presented chronologically, but instead seem to overlap. How do memories function as a mnemonic device for recalling even more memories?

How does surrealism, a style which uses visual imagery from the unconscious mind to create art without the intervention of intention or logic, function as a theme in this book? How do sensory associations trigger memories in the poems?

On “Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest”

What does the poem “Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest” suggest about memory and time by following its images of the moving car with the phrase “earth, this earth”?

What do you think about the line in “Early Occult Memory systems of the Lower Midwest” that suggests that the son “holds time in memory with words”? What do you think the poem suggests about language?

In the poem “Early Occult Memories Systems of the Lower Midwest,” the speaker describes weeds as “skeletons of weeds on a fence.” What does this image invoke? How does the imagery convey the emotions or a sense of what is at stake in the poem?

On “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt” 

In “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt,” the speaker equates Native American success with the “story of failure in America.” The end of the poem equates baseball with a “mythology, the collective dream/the old dream, of men becoming gods” or “being recognized as men”. What does this poem imply about the effect of failed dreams?

What do you think about the speaker’s claim in “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt” that baseball is “a question of neither beauty or politics?” Do you think the speaker is offering baseball as a prototype for a more ideal society?   

In “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt,” the speaker compares the “story of failure in America” to the legend of Icarus. What does it mean when the poem says that the collective dream is men removing their wings?

On “Mrs. Hill”

In “Mrs. Hill,” the speaker refers to a whistle that “nobody can hear.” What do these whistles symbolize in the poem? Why is it significant that no one can hear them?

In “Mrs. Hill,” the speaker claims that he is “so young that [he is] still in love” with toys found in cereal boxes. Does the line break here indicate that there is a connection between love and innocence? What is the relationship between nostalgia and love, as it is presented in the poem?

What do you think about the contrasting images in “Mrs. Hill” when the speaker uses life to describe death and noise to describe silence?  In what ways do these opposites help define each other?

In the fifth stanza of “Mrs. Hill” the poem offers a catalogue of details that span from Kansas to Alexandria. What effect does this catalogue have on the cohesiveness of the poem? Why are space and time condensed?

On “The Blue Buick: A Narrative”

Think about the action that takes place while the characters are inside the Buick. Where does the Buick literally take them? Where does the Buick metaphorically take them?

There are many images of landscapes in “The Blue Buick: A Narrative.” What role does the description of the land play in the poem? Why does the poem focus on the memories of the land rather than the people?

In “The Blue Buick: A Narrative,” the poem says that “Roy believed that he was on the edge of something, something rare.” How do geographical locations correlate to mental and spiritual locations in the poem?

In “The Blue Buick: A Narrative,” while Maria stares longingly into old photographs, Roy doesn’t want to turn back to look into the “crystal ball” or the past. In what way are Maria and Roy symbols for two different methods of dealing with the past? Does the poem privilege one way over the other?

Why do you think “The Blue Buick: A Narrative” begins with quotations by Blaise Cendrars and William Butler Yeats? What do you make of the fact that the Cendrars quotation calls for a “baptism” or “conversion” into poetry so that the speaker may be catechized “into the word”? How do you think this notion of being baptized and catechized into the word plays out in the poem?

In “A Blue Buick: A Narrative,” the phrase “that something may remain” is repeated twice. What is the significance of this phrase? Specifically, what does the speaker want to remain? What does it mean when juxtaposed with the feeling that Roy “was on the edge of something” he associates with “negative capability”?  

Why is it significant that Roy’s death relates to baseball? Given Maria’s erotic perception of baseball, do you think Roy’s death relates to the brief sexual encounter between the speaker and Maria?

On “A Wall Map of Paris”

The epigraph for the poem “A Wall Map of Paris” is taken from Rilke’s The Sounds of Orpheus, which translates as “Let their [the criers] clear stream carry the head and the lyre.”  How does the invocation of Orpheus, the inventor of the lyre and the perfect musician, affect the poem? What might the poem be saying about the creation of poetry or the poet himself?

In “A Wall Map of Paris” the narrator describes a map with a “darkening stain.” What might the stain represent? How is the map a key to unlocking memories? Does the map give the speaker a final destination or does it lead him back to a starting point?

In “A Wall Map of Paris” the first stanza holds a variety of references to an ambiguous “darkness”: the “darkening stain,” Rilke’s “The Panther,” the “darkness” that came from “James Wright’s head.” These are immediately contrasted by the incursion of the “sunlight” through the “windowpane.” Throughout the poem, lightness and darkness are mediated by glass and water (the river). What affect to do these translucent mediums have on objects on either side of them?

 On “The Memory Palace”

The speaker in the poem “The Memory Palace” says, “It is the machine shop…it is all around you and/ inside you, and for reasons you cannot know, it contains everything/you did or felt or thought.” Does this statement give mechanical attributes to the thought process? What is the speaker suggesting about the nature of human thought?

What is the “certain urgency” motivating the speaker of “The Memory Palace”? How might this urgency relate to forgetting? How might it relate to death?

“The Memory Palace” seems to bend normal conceptions of time. The boy reaches to catch the frisbee, time freezes, and “three hundred years later he / came down.” What do you make of the poem’s conception of time? How does this bending of time relate to memory and how we experience the process of remembering?

What do you think of the italicized passages in the poem?  Do they seem to interrupt the action of the poem or add to it? What do you make of the fact that the italicized parts can be read by themselves to form their own separate poem?

The speaker in “The Memory Palace” says, “You hunger always for things seen in the light of everything else/and the light is endless.” What does this light imagery symbolize, and why does it matter that it is “endless”?

 --Jessica Robinson