On Barn by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
by Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma Poet Laureate Emeritus
Hi, there. I’m Benjamin Myers, a poet from Chandler, Oklahoma, and I’m here to share with you a poem by Oklahoma writer Jeanetta Calhoun Mish.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish has influenced literature in Oklahoma as a writer, a professor, a publisher, an editor, an intellect, and a mighty presence. Her most recent books are What I Learned at the War, a poetry collection, and Oklahomeland: Essays. Her 2009 poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible won an Oklahoma Book Award, a Wrangler Award, and the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West. Her first collection, a chapbook entitled Tongue Tied Woman, won the 2001 Edda Poetry Chapbook for Women Competition.
They say that America has little sense of a past, that we have no ruins. This is not true. Driving through rural Oklahoma, I see remainders and reminders of a vanishing past all around me: abandoned farmhouses, empty fields stripped to bare dirt for another housing addition, barns crumbling into the tall grass, tractors that haven’t moved in twenty years. These remnants of Agrarian glory may not be the ancient walls of Mycenae or the gothic bones of Tintern Abbey, but like all ruins they say, simply, “we were here.” They tell a human story of work, of struggle, of family, of love, and of loss. It is worthwhile—it is good for our humility, our compassion, and our sense of shared humanity—to pause sometimes at the abandoned well or the empty shed and peer into the darkness there.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish makes just such a pause in her quietly moving poem, “Barn.” With its short lines and elemental diction, the poem seems simple. It is simple. But, in a sense, all truly profound art is simple—even The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost—in that it speaks to our most fundamental realities. Here is the poem:
Barn
leaning on a rounded hill
waving to buzzards
what’s left of an old red
A-frame barn soars upward,
a cathedral of loss, a
shelter for mice and
possums and maybe
a rare tawny-eyed bobcat
whose kittens are tucked
under the rotting manger.
witness the gaping hayloft,
sweep your eyes down
to slovenly underbrush—
here is a thing like a jar
that makes the world
rise up and call out—
a skeletal frame to rein in
undulating miles of sky
which would otherwise be
more than we could bear.
Used with Permission.
I love the way this poem begins with a subtle personification in “leaning” that then escalates in the next line where we see the barn waving to buzzards. The image is almost jolly, yet there is also something darker suggested by the presence of the buzzards. These are carrion birds, scavengers. Already there is a sense of loss in the poem, which is cemented in lines that follow as we imagine the barn as a “cathedral of loss,” a phrase that puts us in mind of old world ruins.
The barn may be in ruins, but it is not without life. In a poetic move reminiscent of Biblical poetry, Mish depicts the way nature works back into what humans have deserted. Mice, possums, and bobcats: these are animals of desolation. They are to the rural Oklahoman what the hyena, owl, ostrich, and jackal are to the Old Testament prophets.
I love also how the poet invites us into the poem in its second half, asking us to “witness” the hayloft and the underbrush. Following the imagery of the cathedral and the Biblical desolation, the use of “witness” brings a further solemnity to the moment. We are asked to contemplate the ruin, to ruminate on time, change, and loss. In a colloquial and simple style, Mish evokes the classical theme of Ubi Sunt or “where are those who went before us?” In the combination of this theme with the straightforward manner, this poem about a barn is reminiscent of the great Old English elegies, such as “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” and “Deor.” Like those poems from the early middle ages, it is a lament for a vanished world.
And then come the remarkable lines near the end: “here is a thing like a jar / that makes the world / rise up and call out[.]” Suddenly, this straightforward poem seems a little strange. How is the barn like a jar? I believe the poet is alluding to the great modernist poet, Wallace Stevens’ poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” which begins,
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
The jar—perhaps a container for light that brings the surrounding wilderness into view—serves as a focus for human perception. It is a giver of signification, of meaning. So to the barn in Mish’s poem, though crumbling and falling, gives us something to hold onto in the face of indifferent nature. It gives us a human story. As the poem closes, the speaker in the poem clings to that piece of the human story as some comfort in what seems like an uncaring universe. The barn, then, is, like the poem itself, a quiet message across time saying “We were here.”
For Poets on the Plains, I’m Benjamin Myers, planting my little jar on the hill in Chandler, Oklahoma.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Matthis Professor of Literature and the director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, he is the author of four books of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Image, The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Rattle, and The South Carolina Review, and his sonnet sequence, Black Sunday, was praised by The Wallstreet Journal as one of the “five best books on the dust bowl.” He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and lives in Chandler, OK. His most recent book of poems is The Family Book of Martyrs (2023), and his second book of nonfiction, Ambiguity and Belonging, was recently published by Belle Point Press.
Benjaminmyerspoetry.com
OKLAHOMA – FEATURED POET
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish was born in Hobart, Oklahoma. She received a BA and an MFA in English from the University of Texas - Permian Basin and a PhD in English from the University of Oklahoma. Mish is the author of What I Learned at the War (Lamar University Press, 2015) and Work Is Love Made Visible: Collected Family Photographs and Poetry (West End Press/University of New Mexico Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry. In 2019, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Mish served as the 21st Poet Laureate of Oklahoma. Her first collection, a chapbook entitled Tongue Tied Woman, won the 2001 Edda Poetry Chapbook for Women Competition.
Dr. Mish is a faculty mentor for The Red Earth Creative Writing MFA @ Oklahoma City University where she teaches criticism and theory, poetics, poetry craft, and research for writers. She is also an instructor for the Creative Writing MFA at University of Arkansas Monticello where she teaches poetry craft and literature courses. https://jeanettacalhounmish.com/
