Finally I've had a chance to turn back to my western Pennsylvania project. This week I've been working on a piece about the Whiskey Rebellion, but it's taken me a while to figure out the necessary form. I'm learning that (1) voice and (2) structure are the keys to beetling my way into these poems. In a way this approach feels dry and unimaginative . . . but maybe unimaginative is the wrong word. Maybe exterior is more accurate. Because the subject matter is exterior to myself, I have to find a perch, a place where I can linger and bring that voice and structure into myself as I imagine the final poem. The process is like finding a backdoor into my imagination rather than letting my imagination burgeon outward into an exterior solidity.

In any case, this current poem, which deals with opposing political reactions to a particularly ridiculous mob action against a tax collector, has fallen into columns, each with its own spelling and typeface peculiarities. The poem is dated 1786, so the spelling and type variations are typical of the time period. But setting them face to face across the page gives them a partisan grouchiness and separation that, of course, links to my contemporary cynicism about our own wretched Congress. The rebels in the Whiskey Rebellion were mostly drunks who didn't want to pay taxes on liquor, but they were manipulated by government and special interests. The Tea Party parallels are legion. None of this is imagination, yet creating a page arrangement that mirrors the situation has helped me imagine the speaking characters: two pompous old farts trying to describe a mob action in a way that supports their individual preconceptions.

Here's a sample of a stanza pair. Blogger isn't very reliable when it comes to columns, so you'll have to pretend that the righthand one is evenly flush left. If the poem is ever typeset for publication, I hope the designer will find a way to more accurately replicate the old-fashioned "f" for internal "s" style. For now I do the best I can.

The Mob then slic’d off his queue                A perfon of fairer character

and arrange’d his Hair in a manner               and greater difcretion

that render’d him Most conspicuous.            would have been neceffary

In the above Plight he was march’d              for the fuccefsful difcharge of that truft,

to the frontiers of Westmoreland-County.     but fuch did not apply.