Poet John David Thompson celebrates Iowa’s 175th birthday in poems

When Pella poet John David Thompson started his ambitious new book, “Iowa Poems 175: Poetry to Observe Iowa’s 175th Birthday,” it required “the kind of research you can’t do on the internet,” he said with a warm and rueful smile. One excursion was to the Mother Goose statue that once loomed over a vanished nursery-rhyme themed kiddie park in Davenport. The statue now stands in Ferjervary Park overlooking the banks of the Mississippi River.

“I just stare and listen and look for details as if framing a picture,” Thompson said, recalling the bison he saw roaming as he soaked up the atmosphere there. The result is a timeless painterly quality in his poetry, exemplified by this line: “Next time you’re there, grazing into the folded petting zoo, notice her paralyzed presence among runaway leaves.” His poem about the Little Mermaid statue in Kimballton pictures her looking out on a sea of corn.

The poems in this new book range from elegiac to playful, including titles such as “Children of a Lesser Sod” (about the Orphan Train during the Depression), “A Passel of Pig Poetry” and “Spanish Flu Epidemic, Camp Dodge, 1918.” The poem about the flu eerily echoes our current pandemic with such lines as “Malady is no lady,” and “Hope and gauze masks become scarce, as do requisite coffins.” In an intriguing twist, the blizzard does the talking in his “Voice of the Iowa Blizzard.”

“The Tenderloin Not Eaten” is a parody of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, one of Thompson’s favorite poets. Thompson says he writes his more somber poetry with a comment from Frost in mind: “No tears from the writer, no tears from the reader.” The closing lines of this homage, however, are playful:

“Two tenderloins, center-cut, in a bread-crumbed wood, and I

I divided one closest to wiggly trail, even saved room for pie,

And that has homemade all the difference.”

A challenge for Thompson — who grew up in Lamoni and studied at both the hallowed University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Harvard Creative Writing Program — was sheer quantity. This third collection of his Iowa poetry includes poems from his previous books “County Poems of Iowa” and “Collected Poems.” He wrote a whopping 88 new poems for this volume, which he started a year before the pandemic began. All the while, he has worked full-time as a teacher of English, commuting 40 miles a day from Pella to the Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont schools. In writing poetry, he said, “I try to avoid a teaching tone rather than writing for both poetry’s sake — and the poem’s sake.”

The 15 books of verse that he has published occupy a shelf in his home. They pass the fire test: if his home erupted in flames, those books would be among the first items rescued.

Thompson grew up in Lamoni, soaking up the influences of his poetry-loving mother, Marjorie, and the family’s joy in music. As a teen, he often drove the 280-mile round trip from Lamoni to Des Moines to stock up on heartfelt 45 RPM record favorites such as The Carpenters’ “Superstar” and Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me.” “I try to write reader-friendly poems,” he said. “My favorite poems have a rhyming essence.”

A poem emerging as a reader favorite in this new book is “The Wave, University of Iowa, Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Iowa City.” It explores a tradition in which, as Thompson puts it, “field and faith collide.” The Wave began at a football game in 2017 when more than 70,000 Hawkeye fans turned to the east at the end of the first quarter to wave to patients and families at the nearby UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital. All of the children and their families waved back. The poem is posted on the hospital’s homepage, which Thompson considers an honor. “It’s one of the small surprises that just come,” he said.

Another poem that resonates with readers is about an Iowa icon, “The Maytag Repairman,” who stays busy filling out an application for a lonely hearts club, because the washing machines are so well-made his services are seldom called upon.

The book will be celebrated along with piano accompaniment on Iowa’s 175th birthday in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber in Iowa City, location of the first state assembly of Iowa, at 2 p.m. on Dec. 28. The reception is free and will feature a book signing sponsored by Prairie Lights Books.