Ode to a Stump Farm: Fragments of Memory Lost

By Clyde B Northrup

A collection of poems about life as a teenager, living in the north woods during the 1970s that recapture some of the joy and pain of growing up in the small north Idaho logging town of Priest River.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clyde B Northrup
• Release date: Apr 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301226672

Clyde B Northrup

Who am I?–a question I often ask myself, without ever coming up with a satisfactory answer: am I just a husband, father, professor, scholar, writer, poet, or some combination that changes from moment to moment, depending on the day, and time of day. . . . Nah, not really–but it is an intriguing way to begin–kind of mysterious and tormented, with a hint of instability that promotes empathy in the reader, and lets all of you know that I am a professor of English, down to my bones, and I cannot help but play around with language. My areas of specialty are 19th-20th century British Literature, the novel, Tolkien & fantasy; my dissertation was on Tolkien’s 1939 lecture “On Fairy-stories” in which he created a framework, as I discovered, for the epic fantasy that I used to critique several modern/contemporary works of fantasy, including Tolkien’s. I have taught at the university level for 14 years. My wife, of 30+ years, is an elementary school teacher.As a poet, I am much like Wordsworth, while as a novelist, I am more like his pal Coleridge, both of which illustrate the influence of my education and areas of expertise. My poems are predominantly narrative in nature, reflecting, no doubt, the overwhelming impulse to tell a story, using the compact, compressed form of the poem to narrate significant moments in the daily life of the poet. As a novelist, my biggest influence is Tolkien, flowing out of my study of his ideas for what he called a “fairy-story” for adults, what we term epic fantasy.

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Author’s Preface

The following collection of poems deals with the teenage years, a difficult time, at best a kind of no-man’s land: too old to be a child, too young to be an adult, in many ways trapped between two separate and disparate worlds, a member of neither. Thus, the poems are filled with teenage angst: anger, pain, and self-inflicted suffering; it is a wonder that any of us survive them; it is miraculous that our parents survive, although none pass through unscathed–we all receive our share of scars. We experience the highest highs and the lowest lows, all that we experience and learn informing the adults we become; we experiment with life, and most of us push our experiments too far, moving too fast in areas best left to adults, although some might argue that one is never adult enough for some of these experiments.

These poems re-collect some of the highs and lows of life in the woods of North Idaho, the memories of one person, part of a family of city-dwellers transplanted into the primitive north woods, where the comforts of a civilized life were supplanted by a daily fight to survive, taking nothing for granted; where water flowed into the house as long as the spring ran and electricity powered the pump, and if either failed, one was forced to carry water from another source, often distant or involving chipping out blocks of ice that had to be thawed before one could slake one’s thirst; where a group of ‘city slickers’ learned why one did not run one’s water pipe beneath one’s driveway, and learned that the house would stay warm only if we continued to feed the insatiable appetite of the wood stove; where we learned why everyone had fleets of used cars, hoping that one of them would start and run on those too frequent sub-zero mornings; where, on the opposite side of the year, one prayed that the storm clouds would not produce lightning, for one lived in a wooden house, surrounded by very dry and very flammable trees. We learned first-hand the truth of humorist Patrick McManus’s description of the residents of the north woods as those who owned the wall their back was against. I would add that to live in this wilderness, one must either be independently wealthy, or willing to eat grass in the wintertime, and believe me, there was no grass in the winter!

These poems are not meant to criticize anyone, but to re-member life as it was for the growing poet in the North Idaho wilderness, although no one, including the poet himself, had any inkling of what the years would bring, in particular, that he would become a wordsmith. In spite of the difficult life, fighting tooth and nail to survive, there is something compelling and beautiful about the wilderness, something that brings it often to mind, with the attendant desire to recapture some of the magic of that time and place, or perhaps it is merely a nostalgic attempt to recover and relive one’s lost youth. . . .

Finally, I must express gratitude to Professor Foriyes for the original idea for this collection, and the encouragement to