Poem of the Week | April 21, 2014
Kai Carlson-Wee: "Jesse James Days"
This week we offer a poem by Kai Carlson-Wee, winner of this year’s Editors’ Prize in Poetry, from our brand-new spring issue, 37.1. Carlson-Wee has rollerbladed professionally, surfed north of the Arctic Circle, and traveled across the country by freight train. His work has appeared in Linebreak, Best New Poets, Forklift Ohio, and The Missouri Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco, California, where he is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.
Author’s note:
I wrote this poem as a love song to my brother. We grew up in a small town in Minnesota called Northfield, famous for its two colleges, its rolling corn fields, and for a bank robbery attempted by the infamous Jesse James Gang. As local legend has it, the James Gang rolled into town at 2 p.m. on September 7th, 1876, already visibly drunk, walked into the First National Bank and demanded the money. The teller that day was a man named Joseph Lee Heywood, who refused to open the vault, telling the James Gang that there was a “time lock” built into the safe. The gang tortured him briefly before shooting him in the head and retreating. The townspeople assembled a minor militia and went after them, wounding and killing a few of the members, capturing a few more, but ultimately, after arriving at a South Dakota canyon, allowing Jesse and his brother Frank to escape. Every year, the town has a festival called The Defeat of Jesse James Days, celebrating and glorifying the life and times of the gang. As kids, my brother and I were always stoked about the opportunity to run around with cap-guns, act like outlaws, and pretend our Huffys were horses. But as we got older, and our relationship to the town became more complicated, a certain kind of sadness seeped in, and the festival came to represent a personal tone of nostalgia, a private regret. When I sat down to write this poem, I knew I needed to write about this shift, about the failure of the present to live up to its past, and about the difficult bond between brothers.
Jesse James Days
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