Interview with Joseph Bottum, author of “This Far Country”

Joseph Bottum is a widely-published author whose works include nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Known for his writing in places like the Atlantic and Wall Street Journal, he also has a PhD in medieval philosophy. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado. His most recent work is a book of poetry, This Far Country: South Dakota Lines on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2026). He was kind enough to share some thoughts on his work and on American literature.

You have a new suite of poems, This Far Country: South Dakota Lines on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The title describes what readers can expect, but what do you hope readers will get from it? And who do you hope will read it?

This Far Country was a commissioned work, and I was happy for the commission. That was in part, of course, because I could use the money — poets tending toward the perpetually penniless: lilies of the field, subsisting mostly on air. But the commission gladdened my heart in another way, for I’ve been thinking over the past few years about the idea of public poetry. 

The initial occasion for that thinking was a commission I received to write and deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Princeton University’s 2022 graduation ceremonies. (Called “Four Seasons,” it appears in my 2023 poetry collection, Spending the Winter.) And I worried about the voice that might fit the occasion, the voice that, say, W.H. Auden could so effortlessly assume when he felt a poem demanded it. And perhaps even more, the regular voice of the Fireside Poets — those 19th-century American poets with the triple-decker names who filled the old schoolbook anthologies, now not much read and far too often sneered at: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell. 

The North Carolina poet Sally Thomas and I have started a Substack newsletter that runs daily commentary on what are, typically, classic poems (Poems Ancient and Modern, now with over 8,000 daily subscribers). And we did so in part to fight against the presentism that lets slip away, like abandoned paper falling to dust, the enormous deposit of English poetry. One of the things we’ve done, along the way, is look again at those Fireside Poets, reading them without the sneer and without the presentism, to discover their easy skill at formal verse — and the public voice that came with their assumption that they wrote for a national audience that welcomed their speaking of such great themes as death, national identity, virtue, and vice.

It was to such public voices that I turned, writing a suite of four poems that contemplate the American founding and the subsequent flood of the founding ideas across the prairie. And it’s that — a deep sense of America as an idea and a practice — I hope readers take from the book.

What made a suite of poems the right fit for this book, rather than some other form of poetry or even non-fiction? 

The four poems in the book are closely tied to one another by recurring images and figures: meadowlarks, chokecherries, rivers, etc. But they sufficiently differ in purpose and idea that I couldn’t write, say, a single epic poem that would do all that work. In the opening poem, “The Meadowlark,” for example, I name the rivers of South Dakota — and the birds they support. After describing the striving of small-town fireworks to express patriotism on the Fourth of July, I pull back to the ordinary and natural expression of the prairie, ending:

But when I imagine the great course of freedom,

I picture those meadowlarks rising to fly

Across the dry prairie to drink from the river.

I hear the new morning that springs with their cry.

The book ends with “The River,” an unrhymed tetrameter description of all the ideas, reading, British oppression, and hunger for freedom that had piled up in the colonies before the Declaration broke the dam. And it ends with as sense of the prairie as the home of all that came flooding out:

Grave by grave, they made their homes

Out on the giants’ dancing floor,

Out where the north wind runs its races,

Out where the rivers rise in fury,

Out where the meadowlark calls in spring,

Out where the chokecherry droops in summer,

Out where the parched land shows its cracks,

Out where the red rock keeps its shadow,

Out where the clear stars cast their spears —

Out where the surge of history brought them.

Out where the flood of freedom would flow.

Out on the prairie where America spilled.

I’ve interviewed different poets and I sometimes ask about the state of poetry right now. Is poetry in decline or declining popularity or is it more popular than people realize or even thriving? What is your sense of things?

Right around the time that public voice of poetry disappeared — think, for example, of the deaths of W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell in the 1970s: Who after them could be thought to speak to the whole public? — we lost a shared sense of poetry: the old reader/writer agreement that poetry matters, that to be involved in the public square requires a sense of what the poets do.

There are many causes for this, piling on top of one another. And those who blame exclusively the writing-school poets, writing for themselves, are wrong, I think — just as those who exclusively blame a philistine public unable to appreciate good art are wrong. The real loss was the old reader/writer agreement, and the result was a disaster for poetry — and a decline in public art, public trust, public comity, and public intelligence.

And yet, we’re thirty years into the Internet revolution, which is long enough, I think, to draw some conclusions, one of which is that there are enough niche audiences of poetry that they accumulate into a considerable total. The Web breaks copyright easier than sneezing, which — for those of us who mostly live off our pens is not ideal — but the effect of building an audience cannot be ignored.

I would guess that South Dakota is one of the states that is underrated among Americans. How do you see South Dakota in the context of all the fifty states? I don’t know if you have any particular metaphors you like or dislike about the United States, but if we were a quilt perhaps, what is the South Dakota square?

There is no more difference between South Dakota and North Dakota than there is between, say, South and North Korea.

How important is place in poetry and writing in general? How did being from South Dakota, and maybe even the geography of South Dakota, shape you as a writer and thinker?

Back in 1950, the Ideas Have Consequences author Richard Weaver said something that has remained with me ever since I first encountered it: “Provincialism,” he argued, “is one of the chief supports of character. To be of a place, to reflect it in your speech and action and general bearing, to offer it as a kind of warranty that you will remain true to yourself — this is what it means to have character and personality. And without these things there is no individuality.”

Poetry doesn’t absolutely demand specific places. Emily Dickinson hardly names a single place in her work. Walt Whitman is dispersed across the nation (and maybe the universe). And yet I think that place can be useful for poets, giving specificity and weight to them as writers. 

Besides, place holds meaning in itself. We could look here to, say, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but consider this stern 1775 passage from Samuel Johnson: “Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!”

I’ve probably spent more time away from South Dakota than in it, over the long years. Needs must when the devil drives, as I’m sure you know yourself. But down in the self — the hearth of character and personality — the prairies and the Black Hills remain. As I would have them do. It shows, I suspect, at the end of “The Homestead,” the third poem in This Far Country, where the narrator is looking at an abandoned gray house on the plains, and the themes of prairie and the Declaration’s freedom start to come together:

Watch the wheat like a river of summer

Wending its way, down to the fall.

Nothing much is here but the nothing:

A nothing that nothings best of all

God’s empty places. And we are the spaces

Where nothing is not: fleeting and small.

An uncertain household, a faith unhouseled —

What on these plains did they hope to find?

If not new Edens, a horn of plenty,

At least a landscape less unkind

Than what they faced in this far country

Uneucharisted, unenshrined.

And now on the verge of a gray-wood homestead,

The fallen fenceposts, a mislaid trail,

I hear the prayers they said each morning,

Hauling water, pail by pail,

Knowing in terror that freedom for thriving

Is also, always, freedom to fail.

You’re a visiting scholar at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization. Western Civilization is broad, but you’re also deeply invested in particular places. What do you see as the role of particular places in the broader culture we call Western Civilization?

We can belong to the whole only if we also belong to the part. Specific and particular identity keeps us sane as we rise to the general and universal.

I’d love to just ask you what writing from the last 250 years do you think really constitutes the American canon, but I recognize that is a huge question. Instead, I’ll just ask if you have any favorites among books you might consider part of the canon of American writing, things which you think really get at what it means to be American or things that really depict the country.

The literary heart of the country is known by the pulse that can be felt in innumerable places. Jefferson’s correspondence with Adams and Monroe. Longfellow’s certainty and Dickinson’s doubt. Such Local Colorists as Sarah Orne Jewett. Lincoln’s speeches. Robert Frost. The archetypal American song has always seemed to me “Wayfaring Stranger.” I mean what else do you want? It’s the old Protestant core: grim, brave, human beings cast into a metaphysical landscape in which only the individual soul and God are real. “I know dark clouds will gather ’round me. / I know my way is rough and steep. / But beauteous fields lie just before me / Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.”

I’ve heard This Far Country is going into a time capsule. What would be your hopes for how it will be received in 250 years? In particular, in your ideal world, what would be not so foreign about it to readers then?

Yes, the book has been chosen for inclusion in the official U.S. time capsule, to be buried in Philadelphia on July 4, as part of the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there at its Independence Hall birthplace. It’s something I cannot help but feel honored by, however improbable it seems to me.

I imagine I will be even more unknown in 250 years than I am now, but that’s all right. A book of mine dug up, causing even one reader to contemplate why this book at that moment, would be astonishment enough. 

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice