Boyd Bauman in his workspace at his house (photo by Jim Barcus)
The Kansas City poet melds foreign experience with a homespun aesthetic
Many a writer has left the Midwest for a time. Kansas City poet Mbembe Milton Smith, who died at age 36 in 1982, spent a year in New York in his early 30s, in hopes of making his mark as a writer. This, despite already having been celebrated by the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight and others. Richard Rhodes spent much of his youth at the Drumm Institute for boys, in Independence, and made it to Yale on scholarship, where, he once said — I’m paraphrasing — I quickly became an insufferable snob. He got over it, of course, and returned to Kansas City to eventually write his “triple-crown” winning book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
This act of returning has brought my attention to Kansas poet and children’s book author Boyd Bauman, raised on a 520-acre farm-and-cattle operation near Bern, in northeast Kansas. Growing up one of five children in a 1910 house, he writes, “Mom stuck her hands / in every kid’s boot before we put them on / checking for rodents.” The poem Winging It shows his father releasing an army of “Coccinellidae” (ladybugs) to combat “The cinch bugs / … biblical in the milo that year.” The poem shows his father, arms spread and covered with ladybugs, waking in the summer sun, “his arms winging up and down,” Bauman writes, “in rhythm with the opening and flutter / of a thousand tiny wings.”
It would be Bauman, however, who literally would take flight. After he graduated from Baker University in 1989 — the only one of six boys from his high school class of 16 to go to college — he worked as a TWA flight attendant for two years. “I think I knew I needed to travel,” Bauman says, “that that experience was missing if I wanted to be a well-rounded person.” Let me tell you.
It isn’t necessary to travel to be a good poet or a well-rounded person, unless it is necessary. In the poem Carpal Diem, Bauman describes leaving TWA because of a wrist injury from wrestling service carts down airplane aisles; he then worked as a salmon fisherman out of Sitka, Alaska, where Filipino workers in seafood processing factories suffered a similar affliction. “I left Sitka,” he writes, “and that row of weathered Filipino noblemen and women / sitting on the dock for a brief respite in the sun, / hands twitching in laps like landed fish.”
Bauman worked on a dude ranch and at Keystone Ski Resort in Colorado; he taught English at four middle schools in East Hiroshima, for the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, then one year in Saigon, returning to Kansas in 2001.
To become a poet, however, is another type of journey. “I wrote very bad poetry in my flight attendant days,” Bauman says. “I put it aside for 10 or 15 years to amass experience and hone powers of observation.” Bauman, 59, married with two daughters, is a librarian at Sumner Academy in Kansas City, Kansas, with two books of poems from Spartan Press and a children’s book from Meadowlark of Kansas.
“My poems are often about my rural Kansas upbringing or travels or social issues,” he says, well-roundedly. He recalls roughly 20 years ago, attending the Key West Literary Seminars, where he sat for days in the front row, listening to such poets as James Tate, Rita Dove, Robert Pinksy, Yusef Komunyakaa and Kay Ryan. “That’s when I decided I wanted to read and try to write poetry for the rest of my life.”
Take note. The poets who turned Bauman toward that decision — for the rest of my life — hail from far off but remember their place: Komunyakaa’s Bogalusa, Louisiana, Ryan’s California and Bauman’s Kansas. In The Zen of the Hostess Bar, he writes, “There is nothing metaphorical / about this poem,” being heartlandishly direct. One might say, foreign experience meets a homespun aesthetic.
“When you see our local poets…” wrote the late Kansas critic and writer George Gurley, in his classic essay about heartland poetry, The Emperor’s New Overalls, Chouteau Review 1985, “you see how many there are with a national reputation.” Bauman’s poetry takes off, now, plying an aesthetic Gurley identified back then, “to put into words aspects of the relationship between the visible world of our senses and the invisible world suggested to us by our imaginations and our desire to live forever.”
Bauman’s Tasks I Hope A.I. Can Never Accomplish, #117 opens with his version of a desire to live forever, “Be married to the same woman 40-some years,” and concludes, for what is it but the steeping of years of care consideration that still warms her heart, yet in the recipe of gestures that make us human, may this be one passed down through the generations.
