Tag: poetry

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Beyond the Chair

By Michael Zimny

James “JJ” Janis wants people with disabilities to come out into the open and talk about them, but he also wants people to see beyond the mechanized wheelchair that helps him get around. The Chair is Not Me is the title of a book of poems and prose he’s just published, which he hopes will spark a dialogue between diversely abled communities.

“My primary purpose is to foster an understanding between the diverse ability community and those that don’t have a disability,” Janis says.”It’s getting better but we need to do more work and by we, I’m talking all of us.”

Janis was born with cerebral palsy and grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation and in Rapid City. In his poem “My First Taste of Freedom,” he recalls that as a child, before he had a wheelchair, he sometimes got around in a little red wagon, “powered by my cousins’ legs.”

“We didn’t go very fast or far if people didn’t eat their morning eggs.”

Disabled people’s voices are rare in the media landscape, and consequently some of the issues they face aren’t widely discussed. Janis wants to change that with poems like “Unsung Heroes,” dedicated to direct support professionals (DSPs).

DSPs help disabled people, in countless ways, to go about their daily lives — taking them to appointments or visits with family and friends, helping them eat, shower, groom, get dressed. They are indispensable to the people they serve, not only because of the support they provide, but also because of intangibles like relationships and moral support.

“Their influence can ripple throughout our lives,” Janis writes.

DSPs are not highly valued by the market. They often receive at-or-near minimum wage pay. Turnover is high.

This places stress not only on the DSPs, but on the people they serve. “When I have somebody leave after a year, two, three, and even four years, it’s like a board pierced my heart,” Janis says. “When we lose someone, even if they’re just going to a different job, it’s like the loss of a family member.”

As an advocate, Janis is working to bring more attention to the work DSPs do. As a writer, he’s hoping to bring the issues faced by his community into the mainstream. He’s not shy about reaching out to high-profile people. He sent a book to George H.W. Bush. “I wrote him a letter thanking him for signing the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Janis says, “and told him about how civil his administration was compared to what was going on today.”

“When [President Trump] was running, he mocked a news reporter [who] had cerebral palsy, and it was kind of a disgrace. So, I was going to send one to President Trump to let him know that people with diverse abilities can do something, and he shouldn’t do that.”

The Chair is Not Me — which is illustrated by a group of diversely abled artists — is opening doors. Janis and some of the artists have been invited to present a show at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City next summer.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Fifty Years in South Dakota

Light streams in on South Dakota poet Badger Clark at his home, the Badger Hole, in 1937. Dakota Discovery Museum photo.

Editor’s Note: In honor of National Poetry Month, here are a few stanzas by Badger Clark, South Dakota’s first poet laureate, on life in our fair state.


Fifty Years in South Dakota

By Badger Clark

We lack sophistication; our lives are all frustration,
We South Dakotans, so some writers say
According to those novels we mostly live in hovels
And all our days are dun and gray.
We flounder in futility, punch-drunk to imbecility
From dust and debt and drought and dying kine,
Aridity, frigidity — yet I, in my stupidity
Have lived here fifty years and like it fine.

I nearly froze my gizzard in one riproaring blizzard,
But that was in the year of Eighty-eight.
Thought I was never wealthy I’ve been absurdly healthy
Like nearly all people in the state.
If skies went dry and coppery, if fields got all grasshoppery,
That made the good years better when ’twas done,
And though my weak humanity slipped sometimes to profanity
I’ve lived here fifty years and think it’s fun.

I wonder if the fellows who paint us all in yellows
Have heard the meadowlarks among the grass
Or seen the corn in tassel or climbed a granite castle
That stands on guard above a Black Hills pass.
We like a fat prosperity but there’s a tougher verity
That roots us to the prairies and the Hills.
It’s HOME to us, our motherland, dearer than any other land,
I’ve lived here fifty years, but yet that thrills.

It never is”verboten” for any South Dakotan
To laugh and talk as freely as he votes,
And if they haven’t riches to carry in their breeches
They always carry laughter in their throats.
Our maidens sweet and willowy, our matrons good and pillowy,
Our boys and men look you in the eye
Make up a grand fraternity to do me till eternity.
I’ve lived here fifty years, and here I’ll die.


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Art of Healing

By Rebecca Johnson

Sixteen people begin teaching new fine arts classes in Yankton this month. They’re all volunteers with the Art of Healing program started by Amy Miner, executive director of the Yankton Area Arts Association.

Art of Healing is in partnership with the Avera Sacred Heart Cancer Center and is offered free for cancer survivors or those undergoing treatment. Students may choose from classes like ballroom dancing, drawing, calligraphy, wine making, poetry and sculpture. I’ll be teaching a six-week session on yoga for beginners starting next week. Each class is small and personal. Participants can bring a relative, co-survivor, or caregiver for support. And this is not a time to worry about talent or ability. The classes are for exploration, discovery and having fun.

The initial response to the program has been slow, but Miner is optimistic. She is also a breast cancer survivor and taught guitar lessons for a similar program while living in Hawaii.”The Hawaiians celebrate this wonderful concept called kahi’au, which simply means to give what goodness and talent you have freely with no expectation of any return,” says Miner. It’s a beautiful concept. I look forward to teaching with this program and watching it grow. Besides, Miner says it will be good for my karma. So I guess it’s not entirely without compensation.

If you would like to take part in the Art of Healing Program as a student or volunteer, call or email Amy at 665-9754 and yaa@iw.net. Participants can sign up for as many or few classes as they would like. Please pass this information along if you know of anyone who could benefit!

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My Father’s Special Place

By Lee Schoenbeck

This past weekend we remembered and commemorated our veterans. Given that South Dakota had a higher percentage of their male population in uniform in World War II than any other state, there was a near universal experience about the effect of the veteran’s service on the veteran and their family. The challenge we face as a citizenry going forward is remembering how that service impacted and shaped the many South Dakotans it touched. This is one son’s effort to memorialize that service by one vet.

My Father’s Special Place

It’s a special place,
over there, where that soldier lays at rest.
He was a farmer’s son,
who throughout life gave his best.

He learned life’s values on the farm,
and when Grandpa died,
It was Dad who raised the family,
safe from harm.

When the nation called him,
to foreign soil
He left that farm,
to do his share of America’s toil.

But after the War was over,
he returned to his special place.
Became a husband, a father,
a contributor to our part of the human race.

Well, several years ago,
we laid that soldier to rest.
No titles, no monuments,
to testify to his best.

No — rather,
the values he left were his legacy.
They came wrapped in that folded flag,
that day you gave to me.

Now I am just a mechanic’s son,
and when my race is finally run
I pray my son can say with pride,
that I’ve earned the right to be buried at that soldier’s side.

And if he can, then I will pass to grace,
honorably buried over there, by that special place.

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.

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The Original Badger Hole

South Dakota nearly lost our beloved poet’s first Black Hills cabin

By Shebby Lee

Badger Clark’s original Black Hills cabin (shown here) has been rescued by the Badger Clark Memorial Society.

The Badger Hole is missing! The cabin home of the cowboy poet, Badger Clark, located in Custer State Park has been demolished! No, it has not been demolished, it has been moved. But where? And why? Rumors are flying about the former home of beloved cowboy poet, Badger Clark, and it’s time to take the wraps off the mystery.

Most South Dakotans know about the state’s first Poet Laureate, the charismatic cowboy known as Badger Clark (full name: Charles Badger Clark, Jr.). During the first half of the twentieth century he lived and worked in a cabin in Custer State Park, writing evocative Western poetry and speaking to countless graduates across the state and region. His cabin was known as the Badger Hole, and the park maintains it today just as he left it, for visitors and school children to visit during the summer season.

But there was another Badger Hole, a one-room cabin that Badger Clark lived in from 1924-1937 while building his permanent four room cabin nearby. Badger Clark did not build that little cabin and never actually owned it. After his tenure, it was moved, changed hands many times, was added on to, and eventually ended up in the hands of the Badger Clark Memorial Society, which used the wings for a caretaker’s residence and storage, while returning the original central room to the way it looked when Badger Clark lived there.

In recent years the wings of the older cabin became unstable and the park added it to its list of surplus property slated to be torn down. This triggered a frantic effort to save the edifice — or at least the original central portion — as a piece of South Dakota history. After many months of negotiations, an agreement was reached between Custer State Park and the Badger Clark Memorial Society under which the park agreed to demolish the wings, if the society would move the main cabin out of the park.

The society set about finding a suitable location where the cabin could not only be preserved but serve an appropriate role. The park upheld their end of the bargain and prepared the cabin to move, but negotiations with various entities for the cabin’s new home were inconclusive. So Society Vice President Paul Jensen of Wasta, arranged to have the cabin removed from the park without a definite place for it to go. Society member Dorothy Delicate of Custer offered her land as a temporary resting spot, but somehow it never got there.

Enter Linda Flounders, owner of the historic Newton Fork Ranch, located on Deerfield Road, 1/2 mile from Hill City’s Main Street. Linda is slowly restoring the 18 acre property comprised of six full round log cabins built in 2000, a large picnic shelter plus her grandparents’ 1912 home. Her grandmother was a prolific writer, albeit unpublished, and her uncle Paul Lippman, from whom she purchased the property, was a published writer and held several workshops on the property in the 1980s. Writing is obviously highly revered in her family. When Linda built the cabins at Newton Fork Ranch, it was with the intention of creating a writers retreat. As such, the cabins do not have telephones or television sets. Linda has placed the original Badger Hole on an undeveloped lower portion to the ranch property along the Mickelson Trail and incorporated it into her writers retreat.

Why all this fuss over a dilapidated old shack? Well, for one thing history was made there. Not only was it the home of South Dakota’s first Poet Laureate for 13 years, but his first book of poetry on South Dakota subjects — Skylines and Wood Smoke — was written there. Badger Clark also wrote prose, including contributions to the South Dakota Writer’s Project, a Depression-era compendium which was almost certainly written while residing in that one-room cabin. His letters to the editor were frequently printed in Hills papers, and his poetry was published in national magazines such as Scribner’s, Outing, Arizona Highways, Sunset, the Pacific Monthly and the South Dakota Poetry Society‘s Pasque Petals, during this period.

The cabin is a part of South Dakota history. After a season of drift it has finally found a home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shebby Lee is a writer, Black Hills tour guide and member of the Badger Clark Memorial Society in Rapid City. For more information, contact the society at 343-4852. The society website is www.badgerclark.org.


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Slim’s Pickings

Even if you didn’t grow up on a ranch, Slim McNaught’s cowboy poetry is bound to make you crack a smile. We wrote about his CD Reminiscin‘ in our current issue. One of the tracks is called “Tom Cat Wreck.” It’s the story of how McNaught once got bucked off his horse when a cat jumped from the haymow and dug its claws into the mare. That’s bad enough, but McNaught landed face first in a fresh cow pie.

Here’s a short excerpt explaining what happened when the ruckus caused other colts in the barn to bolt:

So I flopped back down, tryin’ to squirm into the ground,
’cause them colts was now trompin’ my frame
And to add insult to hurt, they pushed my face in the dirt,
right back in them cowpie remains.
Now, the skin has grew back and the breaks are intact
and the years have brought out the humor
But ’til that cat was gone, we did not get along
and if you hear I like cats, it’s a rumor.

McNaught lives on a ranch near New Underwood, where he operates a custom leather business. Here’s a link to his website.