On Stratford upon Nothing by Seth Wieck
Highway 54, SW of Stratford, Texas, pop. 1886
by Chera Hammons
Hi. I’m Chera Hammons, a poet from Amarillo, Texas, here for Poets on the Plains. It’s a beautiful morning and the birds are singing. I’m so happy to share a poem with you today by fellow Texas Panhandle poet Seth Wieck.
Seth’s forthcoming collection of poetry, titled Call Out Coyote, will be published by Wiseblood Books in 2026. His stories, essays, and poetry can be read in literary journals like the Broad River Review, Local Culture, and Front Porch Republic, where he serves as a contributing editor. He also serves on the advisory board of the Center for the Study of the American West. He lives in Amarillo with his wife and three children.
Today I’m sharing Seth’s wonderful poem “Stratford-Upon-Nothing,” which by its title places the small Texas Panhandle town of Stratford in comparison to Stratford-upon Avon, the town in England where William Shakespeare, who is broadly considered to be one of the English language’s greatest writers, was born. It’s a surprising, and some would say a whimsical comparison, but in Seth’s hands, it’s done very well.
Stratford-upon-Nothing
Highway 54, SW of Stratford, Texas, pop. 1886
Seventy miles at seventy miles-an-hour
lullabied by sunlight, tiresong, and wind.
There’s not stitch nor sign of civilization
except the highway and highline wires;
or save the waves of native short grass plains
carved into squares by five-line barbed-wire
four fathers ago then quietly maintained.
Those slide by at eye-level, parallel
lines laid on lines, as though a book were tipped
on end and the reader tasked to discern
the meaning of some dozen or sixteen lines
by the inked letters’ mere elevations.
Where the highway comes at you and at your
eye, and your eye finds no distance in the land
on which to land as all lines converge and blur,
there is a farmer who was only patroned
by tenuous contact with humanity,
holed up in his shop, woodstove roaring
with the winter wind in his chimney.
Taken with a vision of fortifying
the broke down frame of a windmill
rebuilt as a forty-foot windvane.
A half-ton, balanced, galvanized tin cobble
like the flipped fuselage of a paper airplane
shorn of its wings, he mounted on a pivot,
so when spring winds come screaming where there is no lee
the invisible hand of God can give it
a spin. Show you where to look and what to see.
| “Stratford-upon-Nothing” is used with permission. |
The town of Stratford, Texas, is special to me because my own parents met there when they attended high school together, and my late grandparents owned a drugstore there, the Elk Pharmacy, for many years. I wouldn’t exist if it were not for the town of Stratford. But I have run across very few poems that mention this town.
This poem is a fun one to read aloud because of where the line breaks are, and the sounds the words make, giving it a rhythm and repetition similar to what you feel when you drive down a lonely two-lane highway, the white lines in the center of the road flashing past. The highway clearly ordered, all made of lines and edges, a confining route leading to an open horizon. The way this poem is written reminds me of some of the work of Gerard Manly Hopkins, or maybe e.e. cummings’ poem “What if a Much of a Which of a Wind.” The style is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the method of its lines, rhyme schemes, and turns. It is a poem that pays tribute to classics. Yet the imagery and references it uses are easily recognizable to anyone on the High Plains.
What I really love, though, is how the poem moves. How it sharpens our focus, how it goes from outside to inside, from impersonal to personal, from general to individual. We go from the viewpoint of a traveler driving by a town no one notices, to the viewpoint of a person who lives there, knows the land, knows how to repair something, and knows how to be alone. The man at the end of the poem knows both how to dream and how to remember. That sometimes, they are the same thing. He knows where to look for meaning. That sometimes the small things are the ones that matter most.
This is a poem that knows that every place is important to someone, and every person is important someplace.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Chera Hammons, Panhandle poet, coming to you from Amarillo, Texas, the Yellow City.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Chera Hammons is a winner of awards through PEN Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. She has two new books forthcoming: Salvage List from Belle Point Press in June 2025, and Birds of America from The Dial Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House) in 2026. More information can be found at www.cherahammons.com.
FEATURED POET
Seth Wieck's forthcoming collection of poetry Call Out Coyote will be published by Wiseblood Books in 2026. His stories, essays, and poetry can be read in the Broad River Review, Local Culture, and Front Porch Republic, where he serves as a contributing editor. He also serves on the advisory board of the Center for the Study of the American West. He lives in Amarillo, Texas with his wife and three children. You can find his website at www.sethwieck.com/.
