Into the Past, Into the Present--Historical Poetry as Warning: A Review of Julie Swarstad Johnson's Pennsylvania Furnace

Abstract

Into the Past, Into the Present--Historical Poetry as Warning:A Review of Julie Swarstad Johnson's Pennsylvania Furnace Alyse Bensel (bio) Into the Past, Into the Present--Historical Poetry as Warning: A Review of Julie Swarstad Johnson's Pennsylvania Furnace Alyse Bensel Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 2019. 91 pages. $18.00 Pennsylvania Furnace, Julie Swarstad Johnson's debut poetry collection, explores what possibilities arise when a newcomer encounters the relics so common to a place that they have gradually disappeared into the landscape, becoming increasingly inscrutable and obscure. By listening to those artifacts, Johnson performs a resurrection through poems that traverse history, time, and space. Different registers resonate in this collection: persona poems inhabit the lives of those who lived in Pennsylvania furnace towns, meaningful landscapes across the country are painted with precision, and other poems interrogate the poet's own role in relaying this reclaimed history through research and her own encounters. Pennsylvania Furnace serves as both testimony and historical document, illuminating the need to not just simply preserve history but dissect its complications, gaps, and contradictions. The collection's central core is comprised of poems that animate the dead, who are pieced together or imagined through the archive. For readers unfamiliar with furnaces, these structures were used until the early twentieth century in rural areas of the American landscape to smelt iron ore into iron. Because furnaces needed to be continuously lit to operate, which required a constant fuel source from the surrounding forest, entire villages grew around them. Johnson deftly weaves in much of this context within the poems themselves, as characters reveal how their lives revolved around these furnaces. In "Night Watch, Greenwood Furnace," the distanced speaker describes the light from the furnace at night while the filler's wife observes him perform his work: "thin divide between his lungs / and hell, between him and a light like Armageddon // beginning in this valley, here along the familiar, / whistling stream." The juxtaposition between the filler's nightly labor and the potential danger of the incredibly hot ore are placed in a landscape both fantastic and ordinary. Yet even the filler succumbs to the furnace, as his Christian belief that "Satan's armies fought the Lord" cause him to "[throw] himself down there beside // the tunnel mouth of pray and cry aloud" in response to the Biblical allegory that has been made material. Using a similar perspective of contrasts, "The Woodcutter" describes a widowed woman performing her task harvesting wood in winter so she can earn enough money to care for her children. She becomes otherworldly, larger than herself, in the process of clearing the forest to feed the furnaces. "Her body fills / the space between the trees," the speaker notes, "stretches to meet / the sky she's opened, her children's lifted hands." In serving as the sole provider during a time in which women were homemakers, the transformation is almost monstrous yet beautiful, as she is still tender with her muscles that are "strong enough to down these trees / or darn socks, stitch a quilt to keep our cold." For her children, the mother is represented as the world in all its shapes and forms. These specters of the past truly begin to come to life through the more intimate persona poem. "The Record Keeper" offers insight into the record keeper's life while visually presenting the process of keeping brief notes alongside a ledger. The poem's sonnet-like structure is halved with a narrow column of words that describe everyday events: "Snow / Balloon ascends from Bellefonte / White broke hand / rain / rain." The quotidian anchors the poem in lived experience, reinforced by the record keeper who admits, "Two inches, all I have. Read my words, see / my only act of keeping in a burning [End Page 282] world." The idea of making do with what is available is further reflected in the sonnet "The Ironmaster's Daughter," where the young woman, choosing fabric for elaborate dresses, proclaims, "This narrow hall can't hem me in: I swell / to fill its bounds." Like "The Woodcutter," the daughter grows beyond her physical form but does so in order to catch "admiring looks" from men. Through her...