Notes on the Book

ON MUSHROOMS

I was introduced to mushroom hunting in Iowa by Dr. Barbara Ching, writer (Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, Oxford University Press) and President of the North American Mycological Association. Under the oaks, Barbara told me about the process of mycoremediation—the ability of mushrooms to break down trash, plastic, toxic chemicals and human remains. Having lived my entire adulthood in terror of the anthropocene, this was great news!

Barbara also introduced me to one of the planet’s greatest connectors: mycelium—the base organism from which mushroom spores sprout. Mycorrhizal mycelium brings water to a tree’s roots in exchange for sugar, produced in the tree during photosynthesis. Scientists appropriately call this exchange “a conversation”—a long and expanding one, I’ll add—the kind you have with a complete stranger at a Grateful Dead show.

And there’s a lot of mycelium out there. Beneath the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, Armillaria Ostoyae mycelium (AKA, the Humongous Fungus) is the largest contiguous living organism on the planet, measuring 2,385 acres across.

Mushrooms show us that a self distinct from the hive, the herd, the flock, the forest, the colony, the web is an illusion. Some speakers in Crushing It are victims of that egocentric illusion; others see the inexorably interconnected world beyond it.

ON THE POEMS

“THE MORNING I MET MY NEW FAMILY”
The part about ancient trees at the bottom of Lake Tahoe is true, as is Merle Haggard’s encounter with one while doing cocaine aboard his yacht, according to my husband, who read it in one of Merle’s autobiographies.

“FRIEND OF THE DEVIL” was inspired by a summer trip to Minnesota. I simply could not relax. News regarding the disappearance of Ron and Mary Tarnowski on local public radio kept interrupting “The Grateful Dead Hour” (which was actually four hours long).

“HOW TO MANAGE YOUR ADULT ADHD” was inspired by my roaring torrent of thoughts as I listened to the audio version of Taking Charge of Your Adult ADHD by Russell Barkley.

“VISITING UNCLE J IN KING COUNTRY”
The “King” is former Iowa Congressman Steve King.

“THE DAY AFTER THE FAIR” was inspired by a conversation with an Iowa DNR agent on chronic wasting disease (an inverted protein, like mad cow disease) and its catastrophic impact on the Iowa deer population. That same day, India recorded a record heat wave; trees and animals were bursting into flames, a BBC reporter said.

“CHARLIE VESTAL’S MEMORIAL SERVICE” Never met him, but I love him.

“MEETING MYRON FLOREN”
I lived in Milwaukee for seven years, so I’ve seen my fair share of polka legends perform, but Myron Floren was the GOAT.

“FINDING A DRAWER FULL OF DRIVER’S LICENSES” was inspired by I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.

“IRWIN ALLEN VS THE LION TAMER”
In Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviewed four experts from very different fields: robotics, topiary gardening, naked mole rats, and lion taming. The lion tamer said that when he was a boy, everyone loved Clyde Beatty movies because people didn’t know who would win in a battle of man versus nature. “Man versus Nature” is also the title of a song by 80s punk band, Killdozer, about Irwin Allen, whose movies have appeared in many of my poems.

“DOE STORIES” was inspired by the podcasts, The Fall Line, “Christmas Doe and Dennis Doe” and Stuff to Blow Your Mind, “Are Stories Bad for Us?”

“#DONNERPARTY #THOUGHTSANDPRAYERS” was inspired by The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown.

“WHITE PEOPLE DAY” was inspired by the podcast series, Seeing White. I’m grateful to poet Rachel Zucker for turning listeners on to it (and so much more) in her podcast, Commonplace.

“CAKE IN PARLOUR”
The poem was inspired by This Podcast Will Kill You, “Episode 20: Apocalypse Cow.” The title refers to the (customarily) British practice of feeding dairy cows “cakes” in the milking “parlour” made of “rendered meat products made from other dead, disabled or diseased cattle or sheep,” which can infect the cow with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease.

“Tissue from infected cows’ central nervous systems (including brain or spinal cord) is the most infectious part of a cow.  Such tissue may be found in hot dogs, taco fillings, bologna and other products containing gelatin, as well as a variety of ground or chopped meats.  People who eat meat from infected animals can contract the human version of the disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). The disease slowly eats holes in the brain over a matter of years, turning it sponge-like, and invariably results in dementia and death.  There is no known cure, treatment or vaccine for vCJD.” From the Center for Food Safety

“GUINEA PIGS” was inspired by This Podcast Will Kill You, “Episode 19 Scurvy: Thanks A Lot, Evolution.”

“CALIFORNIA HOBO INSURANCE” was inspired by the article, “How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace” by Jon Billman in Outside Magazine. Details about John Muir in the poem are fictional.

“HERO” was inspired by the podcast, Criminal, “Episode 60: Finding Sarah and Phillip.”

“TODAY ON ‘UNTAMED IOWA,’ THE LAND OF BIG BALL HEAVERS”!
My husband, Collin, and his friend, Dave, have a long-running imaginary public TV show called “Untamed Iowa.” Collin’s been asking me to write a poem about it for years, and he’s never asked me to write a poem about anything. The poem suggests that watching approximately 10,000 hours of Warner Brothers cartoons before the age of 10 may infect the adult poet brain with Flubberistic qualities.

“THE RABIES SONG”
After listening to This Podcast Will Kill You, “Episode 14: Rabies: Don’t Dilute me, Bro,” I found myself drinking at the local pub with one of the world’s foremost experts on rabies (Ames, Iowa, the town where I live, is home to the USDA headquarters, so things like this happen). This was (mostly) our conversation, which really did have the whole bar whoop!ing and yeehaw!ing.

“THE EFFIGY MOUNDS” was commissioned by the Poetry Society of America. I had not yet visited the Effigy Mounds National Monument when I wrote it; I’d only seen aerial photographs. My friend, Barbara, who had visited the Monument several times, said that you can only view the mounds at eye level, while standing on the ground. You can’t see the animal shapes that the mounds make from above.

But it would be impossible to build all those shapes (they go on for hundreds of miles) unless you could see the construction from above, I thought. Maybe something was directing its construction from the sky, and the people were seeing through its eyes, I thought, then imagined real animals lying down and willing themselves to grow gigantic, like a queen bee does, and show off their shapes to this thing in the sky and become one with it. Then I thought, Whoa!