Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems 1st (first) Edition by Fairchild, B. H. published by W. W. Norton & Company

by B.H. Fairchild

Excellent Book

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published June 1, 2002

About the author

B. H. Fairchild, the author of several acclaimed poetry collections, has been a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Claremont, California.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like the voiceover of a Terrence Malick film. That's a compliment.

Sherwood Anderson and James Wright (maybe some Philip Levine, too) are probably the closest literary analogues, however, and Fairchild more than measures up. Fairchild's line is so natural, so common, yet so taut and tempered.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me this is a magically nostalgic rendering of growing up in the fifties and early sixties. Life and learning had a distinctly different feel. Everything hit harder. These poems beautifully portray the sense of innocence and wonder that pervaded this period in time. The resulting poetry is heartbreakingly beautiful...forlorn...surreal...

[Tim Lepczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I have no idea how I came across this book. Was it the title that caught my eye, or had I seen a friend mark it as "to read" online? Either way, I'm thrilled it passed into my life. The collection is full of beauty and delves into the worlds of blue collar life, masculinity, the ebb and flow of life in the Midwest. I find writing about poetry collections to be difficult. It's a shotgun blast of poems and ideas, some of which are similar, but mostly they vary to a degree that it's impossible to be general. Instead, I'll point to some poems that stood out for me.

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From "The Potato Eaters"

They unwrap the potatoes from the aluminum foil
with an odd delicacy, and I notice their still blackened hands
as they halve and butter them. The coffee sends up steam
like lathe smoke, and their bodies slowly relax
as they give themselves to the pleasure of the food
and the shop's strange silence after hours of noise,
the clang of iron and the burst and hiss of the cutting torch.

--------------------------------------------------

From "Weather Report"

The divorcée coming from the laundromat
knows the cycles of laundry and despair:
back then, the towels they shared, but now a basket
filled with someone else's underwear.

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From "History"

Wired tight on No Doz and coffee, I've cut iron
for two straight days and nights, and the white cowbird
drifting down the sun blurs through my rankled eyes
and the grease-smeared windows above my lathe. There,
toward the vanishing point where the cowbird dips
and hovers, is history: a ghost town, the least of all

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title (not necessarily the title poem, mind you) is my favorite thing about this very strange collection. Fairchild is more fixated on particular images than beautiful phrasing, although there is some of that. But overall it leaves me with no strong feelings and no particular favorite poems. Still-that title! "Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest"--it's a spectacular promise that isn't quite fulfilled. Read for FYSP 128 Fall 2013.

[Kristi Lamont · Rating 5 out of 5]

One way I deal with death is to read poetry. This morning, meditating on the passing of my incredible 94-year-old father-in-law earlier in the week, I was drawn back to B.H. Fairchild's Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, which I purchased as a birthday gift for my husband several years ago. For many reasons, not the least of them the poet's reflected passion for the land, for hard work, and for his people, I loved it then, and I love it now. And it did not fail me: "The Problem," on p108, begins with a direct quote from Heraclitus: "The name of the bow is life, but its work is death."

And here is how the poem ends: "So in the cathedral of the world/we hold communion,/the bread of language/placed delicately upon our tongues/as we breathe the bitter air,/drinking the wine of reason/and pressing to our breasts the old dream of Being."

As it was and ever shall be. Amen and amen.

[Elise Godfryd · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Blue Buick” means everything to me

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege of hearing Fairchild read a few weeks ago, so I reread this book with new appreciation. His poems are worth many readings. This collection offers good variety. Most poems deliver his strong, nitty-gritty voice about Midwestern farm life. I suffer with the future poet too far from bookstores and libraries. The people he writes about have little money and few prospects, but are either strong enough or quirky enough for leading rolls in literature. Every good poet takes whatever life hands him and develops his craft around it.

Fairchild’s strong narrative voice makes you feel you’re listening to someone telling a good yarn. You get pulled right in. This helps me enjoy very long poems, which I rarely do, but I also promised variety. In Fairchild’s hands, a book of narrative Midwestern poems would suffice, but he can also bring you to tears with the beauty of a lyrical poem. The music, repetition, and understatement of “At Omaha Beach” allowed me to feel the moment more than the many novels I’ve read about WWII.

(from stanza one)
The waves wash out, wash in.
The sky comes down. It comes down.
The sky runs into the sea
that turns in its troubled sleep,
dreaming the long gray dream.

(from stanza three)
Our fathers walk out of the sea.
The air is heavy with speech.
Our fathers are younger than we.
As the fog dissolves in the dawn,
our fathers lie down on the beach.

[Zane Hesting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bet if I read this again I would give it five stars. Part One is maybe the best section in the book, and the title poem (the first one in the book) is special as it sets up the heavy use of italicized breaks and lost thoughts that almost symbolize a heavy wind or something. Everything and everyone seems to be getting away or is sure thinking about going in this book and the italics really insist on anchoring everything to that unique patch of earth in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. I loved all of the machinist shop work stuff, and was constantly thinking about metal shavings and the grime of metallic dust on a worker's cheek. Even the color of the storm front on the cover is much more reminiscent of the tones inside a machinist's shop than a real storm. There were a few too many allusions at times to all things classical, but I think it helped to break the box of lower Midwest depravity at turns. The long narrative poem, "The Blue Buick," and the ending prose poem, "Memory Systems," are quite kick ass in my opinion. I cried on a few because of the constant idea and line Fairchild takes from Agee's "A Death in the Family." The line is "but will not ever tell me who I am." Fairchild really works that idea well and the section the line comes from is used as the epigraph for the collection. Maybe the best title for a book of poems I've ever seen.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found myself experiencing a whirlwind of thoughts, images, and memories as I read these poems. Sometimes the poems were as much prose as they were verse, but oh--the imagery carried me away! Easy to see why this book won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Here's an excerpt from the final poem, titled " The Memory Palace":

"Out back in the welding shop where men were gods, Vulcans in black helmets, and the blaze of cutting torches hurled onto the ceiling the gigantic shadows you watched as a child, place here the things of gods and children: baseball; a twilight double-header and the blue bowl of the sky as the lights came on; the fragrance of mown grass in the outfield ..."

One of the reviews in the front of the book probably says it best: "There is no more lyric celebration of America's grandeurs and desolations--not regarded here as separate facets of our lives and landscapes, but as completely fused in our hopes and despairs--than this superb collection of poems."

Great stuff.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never been to the Midwest. I've been in cornfields but have never had them overwhelm me. They've never sucked the life out of me and left me a husk of boredom blowing through a breeze of washed up machinists, alcohol and painkillers.

This collection is what I imagine the Midwest to be in its mythical state. The occasional image of monastic life allows the collection to show competing images of contained life: in monasteries, machine shops, and Kansas itself. The open air itself becomes another medium of entrapment, but this does not make for dull poems. Fairchild weaves desolation with emptiness, charged with imagination.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most beautiful representation of Broken Americana I've seen. Just that fucking essence of grain elevators and Sad Farmers and small-town pianos. However, that aesthetic CAN WEAR OUT QUICK. So Fairchild threw in some French shit too. That didn't go over too well and didn't seem to fit with the tonal vision of this collection. The first third is gold, though, wow!

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

God shakes His fists eternally to say,
we're having more of yesterday today.

[Brimmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great poems here and some not so great. Not a bad collection overall.

[Nadia Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

how could i ever forget this

[Finch’s Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of poetry

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgic. midwestern odes to work, family, life... Loved this.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edit:

Book sixteen of my 2019 reread project (reread November 2019)

When I reread The Arrival of the Future I said that I was slightly disappointed, that Fairchild’s poetry just wasn’t hitting me the way that it had when I initially read it. And as I started reading this collection, I admit that I was feeling the same way for a bit. Rereading the early poems, I found myself feeling distant from them. I recognized that they were good poems but I wasn’t feeling a connection to them at all. (I even unfolded one page corner that had been folded down on first reading – something that I do not believe I have done so far in this reread project.) As the book went on, though, I started leaning into it a bit more. And then came The Blue Buick: A Narrative. This 28 page poem changed everything for me (and as I think I have mentioned before, I am not always a big fan of long poems so this is more than a little surprising to me.)

Before I talk about this long poem, let me tell a quick aside. Back in my college days (let’s not talk about how short or long ago that might have been), I had a poetry writing workshop class with Sharon Doubiago who was a visiting writer at the time. When we went in for the first day of class, she had an assignment for us that would last the whole semester. She wanted us to think the whole semester about the one poem that we had always wanted to write. We were told to not write anything down at all but as we read and wrote all semester, we were to think about this poem and we would sit down and write it at the very end of the semester. I think about this assignment a lot – it made me think about my own writing in a way that I maybe hadn’t explored as much as I should have. More than that, though, I often find when I am reading other poets that I am looking for that poem that they have always wanted to write. That one poem that burns that much more intensely than the others. It doesn’t have to be super personal (though it often is…) but I sometimes think to myself “That’s it. That’s what they have been struggling to say right there.”

Not sure that was a “quick” aside, but Blue Buick: A Narrative was the poem where I sat up, felt the hairs on my head stand on edge, felt the tingles up my spine. This was the one. I could of course be wrong, but this poem felt like the one poem that Fairchild had been writing in his head for a long, long time. It is at turns touching and blunt, erotic and wistful, bleak and hopeful… I can’t imagine this poem being any shorter and working as well as it does, accomplishing so very much. It is this poem that changed my outlook on the book as a whole. (Interestingly, along with the thoughts that I have been having throughout this project about the writing that affects a young man versus the writing that affects a not-so-young man, this was not a poem that I apparently enjoyed that much upon first read. The page was not folded over, there were no highlighted lines. It is fascinating to me that a poem that elevates this book for me, a poem that blew me away so apparently didn’t impress me earlier. I’m sure that some of that can come down to having a little more patience for longer verse these days but it is still intriguing that I saw it so differently this time.) (Again I find myself wishing that I had written reviews for so many of these earlier books added to Goodreads.)

The rest of the book was good. It had its ups and downs but that poem and the other long poem in this book – The Memory Palace, were far and away my favorites. (I suppose that I wish Fairchild wrote more long poems…) Both held up to that “poetry favorites” book tag that I gave this one back in the day.

If I were to read it for the first time today, I probably wouldn’t give the collection five stars and place it in my favorites folder. That said, I can’t be sure that I wouldn’t. That blue Buick haunts me just enough that I may have rated it that highly just for that fantastic poem.

Oh, and did I mention that I absolutely freaking love that title? One of my favorite book titles, for sure.

[Kitap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fairchild's combination of controlled free verse, cultured allusiveness, and working-class sensibility communicates with me directly, in a way that few other poets do. The connection goes deeper still, though; apparently, the poet, like this reader, "hunger[s] always for things seen in the light of everything else, and the light is endless." (118)

That hunger, that light, was made starkly manifest yesterday, when I read aloud "The Blue Buick: A Narrative" (the long-form memorative meditation at the heart of this collection) after an afternoon spent strolling along Chicago's lake shore, next to LSD, on LSD. That masterful composition reflected my own continuing struggle to graft these working-class roots (as the son of a sheet metal worker rather than a machinist) to the perennial artistic, creative, and spiritual foliage that grows from being (I hope) truly educated and in love with truth and beauty. That poem, and in turn those which book-ended it, served as a reminder that what is seen on the periphery during the quest often (usually!) turns out to be more important than the ostensible object of the quest. (And the reading of the poem brought to mind too many meaningful coincidences to list here. Suffice it to say that there is a framed photo of Timothy Leary just outside the door of the apartment in which I've spent the last two weeks, and Lake Shore Drive is a mere two minutes from my front door.)

With grace and tenderness Fairchild recalls the stiffening corpse of the God-man on his cross, the bloody bodies of those sacrificial lambs on Omaha Beach, fragmentary Heraclitus, the rough hands of wildcatters sitting down to a simple supper as they watch the new shuffle off the old—and their employment prospects with it, the perpetual motion of young men chasing after their first lay, the thrown baseball—Dasein—and the welcoming earth of home.

"They didn't know what they wanted, every night,
every starlit night of their lives, and now they have it." (101)

[Abraham · Rating 4 out of 5]

the opening poem is downright fantastic.

After "The Art of the Lathe" I became a fan, and this book, which follows that one, seems at first to be a continuation of many of its themes, at times hitting on some truly unforgettable poems and at other times wandering around in somebody-should-have-edited-this territory. The book makes you think about how a traditional collection of poetry is not really about anything but the themes which accidentally drift through the poet's consciousness, but the title of this one, and the latter 3 parts indicate that there was a directed theme, especially the long poem about Roy Eldridge, who you realize, without just a small sense of betrayal, that despite Fairchild's earnest, confessional style, he has made Eldridge up. By the last poem you feel like he is trying to force the poem in to the title. To be fair, he writes almost exclusively about his memories, specifically his memories of growing up in Kansas and working for dad, which, by the end, seems to have been worked to the bone. For a guy who claims he was trying to get the hell out of Kansas he sure seems unable to think about anything else. So the book is sentimental and pastoral and at times absolutely brilliant and at other times bloated and unnecessary.

And that opening poem is downright fantastic.

[David Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Middle America is kind of a spooky place. If all the gritty poetry and photography is to be believed, it is constantly on the brink of falling out of the present into an apocalyptic timelessness of lost glory and liminal existence. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that it always appears to have just done so. At least that's how it looks from out on the west coast.

I like how this book handles the experience of life on the plains from so many perspectives, weaving them together in a way that almost constitutes a memoir. It's easy enough to visualize the whole thing as a novel in which all of the characters have yet to realize they've been dead for years. A fascinating effect for a rather gloomy, yet enjoyable, read.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 2003 offering from crusty Texan B. H. Fairchild goes straight to the top shelf of contemporary American verse. Fairchild's voice effortlessly combines the lyrical with the gritty, marrying a Westerner's laconic fatalism to the inchoate yearnings of the true romantic. Lonesome plains, deserted roads, tall tales, cars, jazz, baseball, liquor, sex…Early Occult is a fever dream of a lost America, the one that fell between the armrests of a beer-stained movie theater in Topeka, Kansas circa 1953, just before the fall.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving from prose poems to poetic prose to verse and more, but settled, perfectly carved out of memories of baseball players and failed artists and rock and roll and teenagers in overturned cars, mechanics and rigs and embedded in great plains and prairies, B.H. Fairchild has written a work that feels current, nostalgic and ageless all at once. EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST, a title I wanted to read before I knew anything about it, is densely pack and fits like a loose garment. I'll go back to it like a yearbook we all share. Most likely to reread.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The letter L, that narrow waisted, small breasted Audry Hepburn of consonants" B.H. Fairchild is in love with the sound of words, and this entire book is as much fun to read out loud as the first page of "Lolita" (Yes that Nebokov book is more about the English language than the characters). The subject matter is very manly: oil rigs, Fords, and dust. All used to paint a self portrait that is the most satisfying book I have read in a long time.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that this is a wonderful collection of poems, one of the consistently stongest that I have read in years. Fairchild has a wonderful ability to evoke the power and drama of memory, and the mixed blessings of youth. He also is very good a describing both the beauty and dreariness of the High Plains, a part of the world that I love. Among the many great poems, I particularly liked "Rave On" and "The Blue Buick: A Narrative".

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful. Fairchild balances personal exploration with a sweeping consideration of the geography of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, in a language that is simultaneously accessible and strikingly beautiful. This is everything American poetry could be, should be, in its looking outward from the biographical stuff of one Midwestern life. "The Blue Buick: A Narrative" is one of the finest long poems I have ever read. This book is rewarding at every turn.

[BJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great poetry here. I am sure it will find its way into my sermons. The best poet I have read in a long time, then again, I haven't read poets in a long time. Regardless, Fairchild is a joy to read.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of these poems are about Kansas, his father's machine shop, baseball, jazz and the power of memory, Fairchild's usual subjects, well-handled as usual, but he experiments, successfully, with a 28-page narrative poem about a (fictional, apparently) mentor of his youth.

[Jennifer Tuck-Ihasz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is accessible for those who believe they don't enjoy poetry. It is beautiful work that speaks with the reader, tells them a story and asks them to remember. It is not poetry written only for other poets.

[Marcel · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a great title.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man.