Two places dominate Julia Kasdorf's poetry and essays:
the valley of Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, where she spent
significant periods of time growing up, and New York City,
where she attended college and graduate school at NYU. And
some readers and critics of her work have seen these two
very different locations as symbolic-one being the simple,
humble and sometimes stultifying rural home; the other representing
sophistication, urbanity, diversity and freedom. Of course
these critics are right, and of course they are also wrong.
In Julia's two exceptional books of poetry, Sleeping
Preacher and Eve's Striptease, she does indeed
juxtapose images, voices, and experiences from her days
in New York against the landscape and recollections of the
Amish and Mennonite communities of central and western Pennsylvania.
And of course these juxtapositions are telling about both
places, and about the poet herself.
However, I think to read Julia's poetry (or any poetry
worth reading), as merely caught between two different locations
is not to do honor to either the poems or the places they
inhabit. I think a collection of essays, The Body and
the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, demonstrates
precisely how difficult it is to locate ANY work of literature,
to trace all the paths that lead one from a landscape to
a page and back again.
A story about Julia might help make my point. Several years
ago, I invited her to read at a school in downstate Illinois
where I was teaching, and to also read at First Mennonite
Church in Champaign-Urbana. To get Julia to my native place
in the world, I borrowed a college van and a willing student
and trekked to Carbondale, Illinois, where she had given
a reading at Southern Illinois University.
The road back to Decatur was not an interstate, but rather
a two-lane highway winding through the small towns of southern
and central Illinois. And on that trip I observed a way
of interacting with place that impressed me. As we drove,
Julia observed, commented, made comparisons to her own landscapes
of Pennsylvania and New York. She asked questions and listened.
And more, she insisted that we stop, several times, at the
most amazing roadside flea markets-sprawling junkyards,
really, where we picked our way through the debris and treasures
of a half a century of whatever it is that various lives
might collect. Finally, she insisted (peaceably of course,
she is a Mennonite after all) that we search for a hole
in the wall restaurant, not a chain, where we could order
a lunch that was as inexpensive as it was authentic.
So here I was with this most iconic of Mennonite writers,
a poet with work in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris
Review, and we were eating deep fried something or other
at a little café in McLeansboro, Illinois, after having
pawed through old jars, records, and assorted metal objects
in an "antique" shop just down the road.
What's telling about this for me (and I think for any literary
treatment of place) is the particularity of the experience,
the details. Julia demonstrated on that trip what I find
in her writing: that to faithfully and lovingly engage with
any landscape we have to look closely and carefully, to
get lost, a bit, in the intricate particulars of a place
and to allow the place to inhabit us as we inhabit it. Wendell
Berry has written that the well traveled are sometimes the
most provincial of folks because they touch a place briefly
and think they know it. It's those who stay put who understand
the impossibility of ever utterly knowing or writing about
ANY locale.
Brooklyn or Pennsylvania both are more complicated than
a tourist can know, and Julia's poems and essays, while
grounded within and between these landscapes, demonstrate
the vivid beauty and particular joy to be found in both
these worlds.
Another poet, William Stafford, once wrote: "the world
says have a place / be what that place requires." Sometimes
our places in the world require that we leave them-as Julia
left Pennsylvania to study at Goshen College in Indiana
and then to live and study in New York City. Sometimes they
require that we return, as she's also done now to direct
the MFA program at Penn State University. Whatever our own
worlds demand, we can also dwell in Julia Kasdorf's work,
as she dwells in and on what her world's various places
have required of her-bodily, artistically, spiritually.
