Year of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Degree Name
Creative Writing (Poetry)
Department or School/College
English
Committee Chair
Sean Hill
Committee Co-chair
Brian Blanchfield
Commitee Members
Jeff Wiltse
Keywords
Docupoetics, Historical Poetry, Indiana, Folklore, Landscape, Place, Storytelling
Subject Categories
American Politics | Appalachian Studies | Archaeological Anthropology | Cultural History | Folklore | Human Geography | Native American Studies | Oral History | Poetry | Radio | Social and Cultural Anthropology | United States History
Abstract
In Jackson Mills Smith’s Workable Seams, readers encounter the stories, landscapes, and lives of rural Knox County, Indiana, from the oscillating vantage of a Hoosier boy raised with a Cajun sensibility. After relocating from Louisiana to the river bottoms of the crossroad state at a young age, the speaker gradually uncovers a local history only previously understood in fragmentary shards and fading glimpses.
Alternating between semi-lyrical embodied experiences and memories, documentary pieces in conversation with the state’s historical archive, and the retelling of exaggerated local yarns, poetry is a means of inquiry in Workable Seams. Topics range from Indigenous histories and sites, floods and twisters, UFO sightings, ghost stories, Black settlers, white colonizers, dilapidated moonshine stills, mussel harvesting, vanished towns, and abandoned coal mines, just to name a few. The writer recalls several instances of searching in the tilled fields with his father, beyond their door after a thunderstorm, kicking up bird points, pottery, broken crocks, glass bottles, shotgun shells, and beads. Every object — a layer in the sediment, a piece of the story, a living remnant of the voices of the dead.
Split between five varying sections, these poems grapple with a regional colonial past’s environmental, economic, cultural, and social implications. The detrimental consequences of heavily industrialized agriculture, resource extraction, and unchecked capitalist greed weigh heavily on each scene. The speaker’s recollections, imaginings, and first-hand experiences unfurl alongside the historical and the folkloric in overlapping locations. Mechanisms of storytelling and the act of remembering generate glimpses of a fly-over state’s small-town peculiarities.
Workable Seams is a case study of the metaphorical glue trap that is “the middle,” “the in-between” of a nation. The crossroad state is, in fact, a uniquely American junction where the voices of the dead and the living harmonize. Where the rib bones of an original landscape show through the skin of a newly altered terrain. Where the borders of oral and documented history are often indiscernible. Readers will come away with a heightened awareness and appreciation of the contradictions and complexities of a place, especially one so seemingly liminal and subdued.
Recommended Citation
Smith, Jackson Mills, "Workable Seams" (2025). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12496.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12496
Included in
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© Copyright 2025 Jackson Mills Smith