7 minute read
A Day in the Life
South Dakota’s new poet laureate wants to capture the present
Story by John Andrews
BRUCE ROSELAND admires Badger Clark, the man who lived a solitary life in a spartan Custer State Park cabin and wrote cowboy poetry that so reflected South Dakota’s rural lifestyle that he became the state’s first poet laureate in 1937. Clark was known for his witticisms and his ability to turn a word in just the right way, but Roseland’s appreciation is much simpler. “He wrote about his time and place,” Roseland says. “He used cowboy poetry to a great extent, and he did it well. But he was trying to capture the essence of what it was like to live in that time and place.”
In many ways, that’s what Roseland’s work does, and it’s that philosophy he plans to carry through his term as South Dakota’s new poet laureate. Gov. Kristi Noem appointed him to the position in August upon the recommendation of the South Dakota State Poetry Society. His term runs through June 30, 2027.
Roseland has written seven books, four of which have won national awards. His first book The Last Buffalo (2006) won the 2007 Wrangler Award for Excellence in Western Literature and Media, Poetry. He has won the Will Rogers Medallion Award in Western Poetry three times, for A Prairie Prayer (2008), Cowman (2018) and Heart of the Prairie (2021).
Roseland is a fourth-generation cattle rancher who splits time between a home in Spearfish and the homestead near Seneca in Faulk County where his great-grandfather Gabriel Roseland settled. He credits those deep family roots and a desire to know more about Gabriel’s life on the Plains for sending him down the path of writing. “It must have been quite something to have been one of the first settlers out here,” he says. “What could it have been like? I’d love to know a day in the life of my great-grandfather. But he didn’t write, and that’s what inspired me. I have just a few handme-down stories, and I’m sure if I could go back and ask, he’d say it was just another day. But if I could have known what happened on one of his regular days, that would have been of great interest to me.”
Roseland studied at South Dakota State University in Brookings, where he served as editor of The Calliope, the forerunner of Oakwood, the school’s student literary magazine. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology at the University of North Dakota. In 1980, he returned to run the family farm. The ensuing decade, a bleak time for farmers, didn’t leave much time for writing. “I spent a lot of time thinking,” he says, “and the 1980s were definitely formative because they were tough times. Probably three out of five people my age had to leave, and it got me thinking. Why did people try so hard to stay? What was it that tied us to this land?”
At the same time, he thought of Gabriel, and what tied his own family to their part of the prairie. “I could write a few of the stories that got passed on about him and other relatives, but I can also write about my times, because I look around and I ask myself, ‘Who is writing about north central South Dakota?’ I really couldn’t think of anybody. Twenty years from now, who would be around to tell the story of what it was like to live through this time? Because no matter what era we are in, it’s historical. There is no such thing as an ordinary day in the life of anyone. So I just started writing about a day in my life, things that struck me, neighbors, events. Something would happen and I’d think, ‘Gee, I should write about that.’”
His late wife, Barbara, collected a few of Roseland’s writings and submitted them to the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies. An editor there helped shape the poems into Roseland’s first book, The Last Buffalo, published in 2006. Since then, he’s kept his eyes and ears open, carefully considering our daily lives. “When something strikes me, I write. I might see something — a lone tree along the road, or a snippet of a conversation — and I mull it over for a long time. Most of the things I write are 80 percent done the first time, but I might have spent a couple years thinking about them. The other 20 percent, the rewrite, is the hard part, because that’s where you make it into something that other people can understand and want to read.”
A PRAIRIE PRAYER
Here, on this arc
of grass, sun and sky,
I will stay and see if I thrive.
Others leave. They say it’s too hard.
I say hammer my spirit thin,
spread it horizon to horizon,
see if I break.
Let the blizzards hit my face;
let my skin feel the winter’s freeze;
let the heat of summer’s extreme
try to sear the flesh from my bones.
Do I have what it takes to survive,
or will I shatter and break?
Hammer me thin,
stretch me from horizon to horizon.
I need to know the character
that lies within.
I want to touch a little further
beyond my reach,
for the something that I seek.
Only then let my spirit be released.
— from South Dakota in Poems, 2020
Roseland was a board member of the South Dakota State Poetry Society for 14 years and its president for eight before resigning to apply for the poet laureate position. He intends to remain active with the society, which recently launched Poetry on the Road, a tour of 15 cities around the state funded through a grant from the South Dakota Humanities Council. Society members read their work and then an open mic session allows locals to share poems and feedback. He has also begun thinking about a South Dakota-centered poetry anthology, which he hopes to release before the end of his term.
It’s all about making poetry more accessible to more South Dakotans.
“Being poet laureate is not for the promotion of myself,” Roseland says. “It’s for the promotion of poetry in the state of South Dakota as a great means of communicating with each other. A poem is a little story about what we value. When we understand what folks value, and why, we can connect in a very real way. If, at the end of my four years, more people are writing poetry — or just plain writing — then I’ve been successful.”
CELEBRATE: WE WANT TO KNOW
Sing to me of South Dakota, tell
it like Carl Sandburg did about Chicago’s big shoulders.
Tell me about the workers
of infinite variety within this state.
How goes their day?
Tell me the what, tell me the why,
tell me about a day in your life.
Did Spring creep up on you one fine morning
on cats’ feet as you beheld your first crocus with the snow of winter barely gone?
Who has not had a night of the dark soul
that broke on through to the other side?
Did you light your candle on both ends
with a flame oh so bright and now, years later, are you ever more wise?
Have you climbed the former Harney’s
Peak and from that vantage point seen five different states?
Standing on the dome, did you hear Black Elk speak?
Were the words whispered? Did they roar?
Tell me.
Tell me if Sioux Falls is the best little city,
on a summer Friday evening’s air,
as the young and the restless,
arm in arm, slow dance down the sculpture walk
on Phillips Avenue.
Tell me about the endless prairie,
quarter sectioned, row cropped and drilled.
Tell me of short grass, cattle and small town bars,
blue skies and red tail hawks,
until you reach the distant Hills.
Then sing to me of Rapid City’s
Main Street Square popping
to sounds of music
mingling with the sunset colors rainbowing from the pulsing water fountain’s spray.
Sing me all of South Dakota,
sing me your life,
for the good of poetry
is the celebrating, the telling
of the Golden Age of We.
All that is blessed, all that is struggle, tell me your heart.
Sing of yourself, sing South Dakota.
I want to hear the voices of angels,
I want to hear Walt Whitman’s barbaric yelps
singing through you.
