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“A low prairie wind whistles through B.H. Fairchild’s new volume of poetry,” writes one critic of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. The prairie metaphor, drawn from the landscape that the poet knew growing up in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, is a perfect analogue for his literary genius. Fairchild’s poetry, like the prairie, is deceptively simple and open, but the subtleties and variations are there for the attentive reader to savor and sift through. He is equally at home writing poems about the working class world of his youth (he’s been compared to the painter Edward Hopper) and timeless philosophical and theological questions. Fairchild’s faith is not something proclaimed; it is something inhabited. We’re delighted to see that he’s being recognized, with a series of awards and honors, as the literary treasure he is.

Some of Fairchild’s work is featured in Image issue 35, issue 55, issue 56, and issue 79. Read a poem by Fairchild here.

Biography

B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and, as well as Houston, was raised in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. He attended the University of Tulsa and University of Kansas, working part-time as technical writer for a nitroglycerin plant and English tutor to the Kansas basketball team. The Arrival of the Future was his first full-length book of poems, originally published by Swallow’s Tale Press in 1985 and recently republished in a new edition by Alice James Books. His third book, The Art of the Lathe, won the 1996 Capricorn Award, the Beatrice Hawley Award at Alice James Books in 1997, and was subsequently a Finalist for the National Book Award. It also received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Williams Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, the California Book Award, the Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Honorable Mention for the Poet’s Prize. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Yale Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and in several anthologies, including The Best American Poems of 2000. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Fairchild is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. The American Academy of Arts and Letters recently awarded him the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize for “consistent excellence over a long career.”

Current Projects
October 2003

My current project, with which I will be involved well into 2003, perhaps longer, is tentatively titled, The Death of the Heart: The Decline of the Small Town in the Rural Midwest. It is a poetry/photography collaboration with Sant Khalsa, formerly a student of Walker Evans. The connection is not irrelevant since his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is unavoidable as a model for what can be done in word/picture collaborations. If I wanted to be a bit more dramatic, I would subtitle our projected book, On the Ghost Town Phenomenon in the Midwest, for what is happening is that rural small towns in the midlands, but elsewhere, too, I think—in particular those located far from interstate highways but near Wal-Mart’s and surrounded by corporate farming—are dying at an alarming rate. This summer I drove the country highways through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Oklahoma and was astounded by what I saw. An entire layer of American culture (including folk arts, religious institutions, communal values) is vanishing before, or rather, beyond our eyes. I will never forget driving through Dresden, Kansas, formerly a thriving community of five hundred, with thirty-five businesses, including four newspapers, three grocery stores, and an opera house, is now a town of forty-seven citizens (all elderly) with no businesses and barely a post office. Two miles away is perhaps the most beautiful, and one of the largest, Catholic churches in Kansas (magnificent towers with copper domes, over a million dollars worth of European stained glass) that at one time (when it was surrounded by thousands of small farmers, and their large families, rather than by gigantic corporate farms) would have had seven or eight hundreds souls at high mass. Now they have ten or twenty, and lost their priest a few months ago. Amazing. Sant and I want, through photography and poetry, to give aesthetic presence to this, to create a form to embody historical and cultural loss, to make visible what is vanishing.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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