The Captive Coyote | Prairie Public Broadcasting

In 1918, a McLean County farm boy named Clell Gannon entered the Art Institute of Chicago full of hope. Two or three years later, disillusioned and weakened by diphtheria and influenza, he was back in Bismarck. In 1924 he published (with a pay-to-play publisher, Gotham Press of Boston) his book of poems, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. In which he declares,

The city has its features, but I like the prairie the most
They want me to listen to them now.

While Gannon listened to the prairie, the cries of the coyote and the curlew, I think we should listen to Gannon now, a century later. We will have ample opportunity to do so, because UND’s digital press is preparing a centennial reprint of his book. I have been asked to write an appreciative foreword, and here are my initial thoughts.

There are two good reasons why we should listen to Clell Gannon. First, because he is important. Second, because he is delightful.

First things first, take your medicine. Gannon is an example of his generation of Great Plains regionalists, the people who created the Great Plains as an intellectual construct and cultural commonplace. In her beautiful book, Grasslands cultivatedhistorian Molly Rozum describes the process by which Prairie boys and girls acquired their sense of place from the soil itself. In Bunch Grass Acres Gannon writes,

Because my calloused feet have known the tread
From the paths that the bison walked.

Such boys and girls went out into the larger world—as Gannon went to Chicago—saw things, and also came into contact with other prairie boys and girls, and got to talking about what they had in common. Out of this, says another historian, Richard Dorman, came a greater “regionalist sensibility” in the arts, sciences, and literature—what I have lately called “the regional project.”

So Gannon, back home in Bismarck, began writing about the possibility of an architectural renaissance on the Great Plains, using the rocks brought here as glacial mortar and building permanent walls under broad rooflines, with large windows to let in the sunlight. He built this rustic ideal into his own Bismarck residence, The Stone HeapHe floated down the Missouri River with his regional kinsmen, Russell Reid and George F. Will, studying flora and fauna and native cultures. And he painted—including his murals in the Burleigh County Courthouse, a commission Reid had secured for him.

But the poetry, back to the poetry in Bunch Grass Acres. The best-known North Dakota poet of Gannon’s generation was James W. Foley, who was both more refined and hokey (use of dialect, that sort of thing) than Gannon, but Gannon simply has more to say, and he says it with heart and soul. Many of his poems deal with iconic features — the pasque flower, the prairie rose, the magpie, the plover — but the most moving, I think, is “To a Captive Coyote.” (And Gannon insists that in this part of the plains we should say it ki’-ot, two syllables, not ki-o’-te.) Here Gannon reflects metaphorically on the future of a fenced-in and bounded Great Plains, “staring with sad and empty longing at the flat prairies where the west wind plays.”

More about Gannon’s sublime and heartfelt poems later this year, when the book comes out.