From the Stacks: Don Welch’s “The Platte River”
By Matthew Miller
Don Welch was a local. Born in Hastings, in central Nebraska, he spent a few years in the Army and teaching English in Colorado, then returned to central Nebraska to spend the rest of his life there. For over fifty years, he taught English and philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), less than an hour’s drive by state highways from the town of his birth.
Welch published thirty-three books of poetry and won a number of prizes, including the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. His work was praised by multiple US Poet Laureates (fellow Nebraskan Ted Kooser as well as William Stafford), multiple Nebraska State Poets (William Kloefkorn and Twyla Hansen), and UNK erected a bronze statue of him on campus after he retired. For all that, his work today is tolerably obscure. To read his bibliography is to peruse a catalog of small presses, most of them based in Nebraska, many of them no longer around: Windflower Press, University of Nebraska at Kearney Press, Sandhills Press, A Slow Tempo Press, Logan House Press, The Backwaters Press. In that list of names is a whole history of a particular Nebraskan poetry movement.
Welch’s localism probably hampered his reputation, in contrast with more universalizing and nationally recognized poets like Kooser. Only a few of his late works are now available, along with a rather difficult to navigate digital archive. But it’s that localism that draws me to him. In his persnickety poem offering “Advice from a Provincial,” he chastises drivers passing through on I-80 who find “nothing, simply nothing to see”:
Go back to your homes and work on your eyes,
bring back a sight which can co-create meaning.
That localism is especially on display in Welch’s The Platte River, a collection of poems concerned with the wide, shallow river after which Nebraska was named. The name “Nebraska” comes from a phrase in an archaic form of the Otoe language which means “flat water;” the contemporary name, “Platte,” is just the French for flat. Flatness, by the way, seems intrinsic to the geographical and emotional landscape of Nebraska. It’s for this reason that when a former employer described my personality as “flat, but in a good way,” I took it as a compliment. Meanwhile, Welch observes the Platte as “a figure of love,” “a braided river” flowing slowly, “combing out / its impurities, in love with the sky.” The water is intertwined with the land, each leaving its mark upon the other. Nebraskans know love from these geographical relationships.
The poems in The Platte River bloom and sing with authentically local Nebraska, features one would only recognize from years spent observing the place. Welch writes about blue herons and sandhill cranes, the wandering nature of the Platte, rip-rap on the side of the river, water snails. He draws a particularizing rather than universalizing picture of a place, offering the reader an invitation: come and see Nebraska with him.
In finding the real character of the place, Welch finds himself: “How can we locate ourselves if not / by the things we live by.” Like the central character in the poem “The Painter and the River,” Welch “wants to be there at dawn,” at noon, and at sunset; “And he wants to return in winter.” That is, he wants to stay put in the place, constant in his attention to it, to witness whatever it has to offer, with no particular agenda except to look and see. A particular place is not just the incidental setting for a poet’s private thoughts, but constitutes the thoughts themselves. Writers who try to escape their local places to a displaced vision miss out, not just on a sense of local belonging, but on something integral about themselves.
Such is the substance of Welch’s “purely local theology.” Washed in the waters of the Platte, buried in a “funeral of ice,” Don Welch belongs integrally to the land of flat water. His poetry is the better for it.
Readers interested in exploring Welch's work can most easily find it in his collected poems, titled Homing, published in 2016 and still in print from another small Nebraska publisher, Rogue Faculty Press. Or you can do like I did and peruse the digital archive, maybe even printing a few poems off into a packet. For a poet as small-scale and quiet as Welch, something about those creased and blurry pages seems appropriate.
Matt Miller is the author of Leaves of Healing: a Year in the Garden. Find him online at matt-miller.org.
Our From the Stacks series is for books that are out of print or close to it, but shouldn’t be. If you have an idea for a column, reach out and become a contributor.
