Writing the Rural Without Postcards

“Defamiliarizing the familiar” was the title of a generative poetry workshop I took at the University of Iowa’s summer writing conference, and the phrase has followed me ever since. It names the oldest problem in writing about home. The places we know best are the places we’ve stopped seeing, and the places a reader has seen in a thousand calendars are the ones they skim.

The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky called this problem automatization: we perceive familiar things the way we climb familiar stairs, without noticing. Art, he argued, exists to make the stone stony again. Rural writing is where this gets hardest, because the landscape arrives already wrapped in a sentiment. A red barn means “simpler times” before the poet has written a word about it.

Here are four ways I try to get underneath the postcard.

1. Name the thing a local would name

Generic nouns produce generic feeling. “Field” is a postcard. “Bean stubble,” “the north eighty,” “the drainage ditch along the county road” are places. The test I use: would someone who lives there use this word, and would someone who doesn’t need to look it up? A little friction in the vocabulary signals that the speaker has stood in the place.

The same goes for verbs. Farm work has precise verbs, and most of them are better than “work.” Disc, bale, walk beans, pull a calf. A single exact verb can carry more of a life than a stanza of description.

2. Find the commerce and the paperwork

Nostalgia edits out money. Real rural places are full of it: auction bills stapled to a telephone pole, seed company caps, the price of diesel, a property tax notice. A farm auction is a heartbreaking occasion and also a transaction with a cashier’s table and numbered bidder cards. Putting the bidder card in the poem keeps the grief from floating free.

When a draft feels like a calendar, I ask what in the scene costs something, and who is paying.

3. Let the landscape be unfinished

Postcard landscapes are complete and still. Real ones are always in the middle of something: a field half-cut, a fence half-mended, a cemetery where the prairie grass has been allowed back between the stones. Remnant prairie, the small patches of native grassland that survive in old cemeteries and along railroad rights-of-way, has always interested me for this reason. It’s a landscape that is both very old and still going, a leftover that’s alive.

Ask what the place is in the middle of doing. Write the poem at that moment, not before or after.

4. Change the distance

Most rural description happens at one distance, roughly the view from a car window. Defamiliarizing often means moving the camera. Go close enough that a cornstalk becomes architecture, or far enough that a whole township becomes a quilt with a tear in it. Or change the time scale: a field described across one minute of wind is a different field from the same ground described across a hundred years of ownership.

A workshop exercise I use: describe one place three times, in three sentences, at three distances (an inch, a hundred yards, a mile in the air). Then write the poem from whichever distance surprised you.

Why it matters

None of this is about avoiding emotion. Rural places carry real loss: farms consolidated, towns emptied, the people who knew the names of things getting older. The postcard is a way of not looking at that loss directly. Precise, strange, unfinished language is how a poem looks at it anyway.

Try it

1. Pick a place you have known for more than ten years.
2. List twenty nouns from it that a stranger wouldn’t use. Cross out any you’ve seen in a greeting card.
3. Find one thing in the place that costs money, and one thing that is unfinished.
4. Write the poem from an unfamiliar distance, using at least five of your nouns.