Iowa Farm in Your Pocket Photograph

Iowa Farm in Your Pocket: A Beginner's Guide, by Kirk Murray

CORN COUNTRY by Lee Allen

Gift of Dr. Clarence Van Epps
Reproduced with permission of Lee Allen's daughters, Mary Lee Hoganson and Elizabeth Williams
Courtesy of the University of Iowa Museum of Art

New Forms: The Avant-Garde Meets the American Scene, 1934-1949, Selections from the University of Iowa Museum of Art, edited by Kathleen A. Edwards

MARCH (1939)

Grant Wood’s Iowa not—what

            did you call it?—my Ohio.

Nothing mine about it, especially not

            those creatures scurrying, resentfully

alive, on the sides of snaking roads and somehow

            more unsettling than the remnant dead.

For two years I try not to have anything.

            Instead, I imagine Grant Wood in Paris.

How unlikely the time a certain kind

            of American spends in Europe,

wondering what exactly he is. I suppose

            for some it doesn’t matter:

anywhere but home is home, which is how

            I thought of myself. Not so. Not so

for Grant Wood, hopelessly American and in

            the dark middle of the nation from which

no traveler returns. Picture him ensconced at home,

            his bitter family crowded around to watch

him at a favorite pursuit: tableaux vivants.

            Wood reclines, Wood supplicates, Wood reaches

up to a wordless heaven.

            I know that stillness

from his cartoon swells of hill and field.

            Picture him a latter-day Antigone,

able to speak but unwilling. There is

            something in his paintings

of the burden of what he could never say.

            Sometimes the only choice is

to be buried alive. My Ohio. I say it over

            and over again. In the corner of the window,

on the corner of a street in Mount Vernon,

            the glassy eye of the stag stares at no one.

You can see that particular look

            in the eyes of men buried alive by longing.

Are they not everywhere around here,

            nearly turned to stone by their own

reluctance? I know those men, casting about like

            wolves afraid of their own teeth.

Something about the sky says,

            Take this land. In the end, the land wins.

What heaven, Grant Wood, were you

            looking for that you could not find

in crooked stiles puncturing the soil

            along the broken roads of America?

You wanted to love it, but you couldn’t understand

            the shame was a form of love.

It is dark here, especially tonight,

            and far too quiet. I cannot stay

any longer waiting for you. But I will

            follow the road you’ve left,

to the house on the hill in the dream of the sky,

and I will wait for the stars to swing open a door.

Natural Selections, by Joseph Campana