19 pages • 38-minute read
So This is Nebraska
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Background
Literary Context
"So This Is Nebraska” shows the influence of multiple literary movements, including Imagism, Modernism, Surrealism, and a drive to make poetry more accessible.
Imagism is a literary movement from the early 20th-century. The poets in the Imagist movement—Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, among them—emphasized, as the name implies, images. They thought sharp, clear images made the best poetry. “So This is Nebraska” contains a bevy of vivid pictures, starting with the gravel road and “billow of dust” (Line 3), then moving on to the “loosening barns” (Line 6) and atrophied pickup, before wrapping up with the “skinny old man” (Line 22). The reliance on images in “So This Is Nebraska” demonstrates the continued impact of Imagism.
“So This Is Nebraska” also bears the marks of Modernism and Surrealism. Like Imagism, these movements emerged in the 20th-century. Instead of clarity and precision, they emphasize the subjectiveness of reality and uncanny juxtaposition. “So This Is Nebraska” links to Modernism as it demonstrates how an individual perspective dominates one’s reality. In Kooser’s poem, Nebraska is a subjective experience for the speaker: it is not necessarily the reality of Nebraska for anyone else. Additionally, the poem exhibits Surrealist elements with the bizarre, otherworldly images of “dear old ladies” (Line 5) and “loosening barns” (Line 6), and a pickup truck kicking off its fenders as if it is a person throwing off their shoes after a long day.
A final literary context for “So This Is Nebraska” is the movement to combat the perception that poems must be inherently confounding. While Kooser’s poem links to Modernism, Kooser has critiqued the movement for hurting poetry, accusing poets of elitism. In “So This Is Nebraska,” Kooser pulls off merging difficult poetic movements with the kind of accessible poems that he wants to write. The “you” invites the reader into the poem, while the direct diction that emerges in Stanza 3 helps demystify earlier figurative images that were playfully obscure.
Historical Context
When Kooser published “So This is Nebraska,” in the early 1980s America was already feeling the effects of an emerging agricultural crisis, which reached its peak in the mid-1980s. This crisis affected many farmers, particularly in Midwestern states like Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where the value of farmland dropped up to 60% in parts of the country between 1981 and 1985. In the previous decade, the Nixon administration discontinued federal programs designed to mitigate price hikes and falls in agriculture, ostensibly allowing farmers to produce freely and maximize output. Many farmers shifted their crops to commodity crops like corn and soy, and for a time they found great success, borrowing to invest in more land and equipment, as it seemed a safe bet. However, record crop production resulted in a glut in commodities and a drop in price. Additionally, while farmers had come to rely on foreign exports, in 1979 the Carter Administration placed a grain embargo against the Soviet for their invasion of Afghanistan, and this resulted in significant losses for American farmers who relied on the export market. And finally, with inflation skyrocketing, the Federal Reserve hiked up the interest rate, and many farmers could no longer afford to pay their mortgages and loans.
As a result, many farms were foreclosed on, and farmers who had expanded and bought land in the 1970’s suffered the most. Naturally, just as deindustrialization negatively affected communities in more urban areas in the 1980s, this crisis spread through rural communities, impoverishing small towns, many of which became veritable ghost-towns. In some states a quarter of the farms disappeared and the population dropped, as local residents left to seek work. As it was the largest farm crisis since the Great Depression, many farmers and rural bankers died by suicide as a result. Benefit concerts like Farm Aid, started by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young, helped raise funds and national awareness of the crisis beyond the agricultural Midwest and still continue today. By the late 1980s, farms that had survived the crisis began to recover and exports resumed, but the face of American agriculture had been changed forever.
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