ARTS ENCORE
Johnny Appleseed
Seeking the man behind the myth leads writer on journey by
MARGARET DERITTER
It all started with a son’s simple questions: “Have you
ever heard of Johnny Appleseed? Was he real, Mom?” Those questions in June 2014 set Kalamazoo writer Jennifer Clark on a quest to find out who the man behind the Johnny Appleseed mythology really was, and she spent the next 17 months learning and writing about him. The result is Clark’s new poetry collection, Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman (Shabda Press, 2018). But hold on, those of you who shy away from poetry. Just as John Chapman was more than the mythical Johnny Appleseed, Clark’s book is more than poetry — it’s American history, told through an eight-page prologue, 52 poems and 32 pages of notes, plus maps, photos and illustrations. Yes, Clark did her research, and as she delved into the life of Chapman — who was born two years before the U.S. declared independence and died 16 years before the start of the Civil War — she also explored that era of American history: an era of slaves and slaveholders, pioneers and displaced Native Americans, passenger pigeons and Pony Express riders, religious revivals and large-scale consumption of hard cider. “I really had the feeling of going down a river and you see two ways you can go and you ask yourself, ‘Which way?’ I kept seeing new things and wanting to explore,” says Clark.
Clark’s choice of poetry for the book allowed her to take facts about Chapman and his era and wed them to her own imaginings to bring him and others to life. In her poem “Once John’s Feet Started West, They Didn’t Stop,” Clark writes of the day when Chapman and his half-brother Nathaniel left home: “Easy to imagine— younger siblings wailing, / older ones begging to come along, / parents unable to hide relief / as four feet leave behind the clamor / of fourteen bodies pressed into four / hundred square feet of house.” “Poetry gets at the emotion, into the heart,” Clark says. “I wanted to get into the soul of who he was as a man.” So, who was this guy with the tin pot on his head and apple seeds in his hand?
36 | ENCORE NOVEMBER 2018
Brian Powers
‘Into the heart’
Poet and writer Jennifer Clark explored the real-life world of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, for her new book.