Twyla M. Hansen was selected as Nebraska’s State Poet for 2013-2018. She co-directs the Poetry from the Plains website, and has conducted readings/ writing workshops through Humanities Nebraska since 1993. Her newest book, Rock • Tree • Bird, won the 2018 WILLA Literary Award and Nebraska Book Award. She has six previous books of poetry, including Potato Soup, which won the 2012 Nebraska Book Award and was selected as a Notable Nebraska 150 Book in 2017. Her writing is published in periodicals, anthologies, and websites, including Briar Cliff Review, Prairie Schooner, South Dakota Review, More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser (2021 University of Nebraska Press), Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017 (2017 SFASU Press), Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (2016 University of Nebraska Press), Academy of American Poets, Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud, and many more.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Twyla Hansen.
I am a fellow Nebraskan. I lived in the eastern part of the state near Sioux City, Iowa where I currently reside. I admit that I grew up basically across from a farm field and cows, but my life was certainly not a farm life. Not truly rural even if when I was young the street was considered a rural route. Yet, I’ve always felt a touch of magic in this natural landscape and never entirely shook that sense. When I read your poetry, it breathes fresh life into that sense of magic – destruction, creation and the full range of sensations from the sweet summer smell of corn to the wet soil after a rainfall. Your poems often bring back that childhood sense of mine. It seems to me that much of your poetry not only seeks to express that regional magic, but that living the poet's life has kept those roots and sensations alive.
Twyla Hansen: I was born in Omaha and grew up in rural Burt County, Nebraska. There was a doctor in Lyons, the nearest town where we lived on a small farm six miles to the south and east, but the closest hospital was in Oakland where my three older brothers were born. My mother did not like the doctor in Lyons, and instead took us to Tekamah, the county seat, where we saw Dr. Allen. He was an old-school no-nonsense physician. I still have no idea why I was born in the Methodist Hospital in Omaha.
Our farm was small by today's standards. We raised cattle, hogs, and chickens, and milked cows. My father rotated crops to prevent insects and disease, and spread manure for soil fertility. This was before the widespread use of off-farm inputs like coated seeds, pesticides, and ammonium nitrates. And before Earl Butz, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, admonished farmers to "get big, or get out."
My father was the youngest in his family and at sixteen had to quit school and take over farming when his father became sick with some kind of cancer. It haunted him his whole life that he never finished school. He had asthma as well as hay fever that made his life miserable for most of the year. I remember him taking injections that arrived in the mail from his doctor in Omaha, but he still had terrible coughing spells. In his mid-50s, after we had sold the farm and moved into town, he enrolled in a meat-cutter training school in Toledo, OH. When he returned, he found a job in Lincoln and so we pulled up roots and moved.
I was the youngest child, and started my junior year at Lincoln High School with more than 2,000 students after leaving a town of population less than 2,000. When I started writing in the early 1980s, I already had loads of material from my farm upbringing to write about. I only lived there until age 15, but that was where I formed my sensibilities, though I didn't realize it until much later. I couldn't wait to leave that farm, but I quickly learned that the farm will never leave me.
Randal Eldon Greene: How has your relationship to the land changed over time?
Twyla Hansen: All my books contain poems about the land, including the area where I grew up. The big shift in my writing about land came in Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, more toward the attitude of an environmentalist, as in what we're doing today to screw up the land through agribusiness. Lack of enforcement of soil conservation practices – contour farming, terraces, grassed waterways, buffer strips, cover crops – have led to topsoil loss through wind and water erosion. Typical conventional farm cropping has a mere two-year rotation of corn and soybeans, whereas pre-agribiz farmers (and certified organic farmers today) practiced multi-year, multi-crop rotations for soil health by building soil with organic matter which increases water-holding capacity. Also, today's crop seeds often contain pesticides that kill off beneficial soil organisms and/or pollinators. I know a bit about this stuff because I returned to UNL in 2007 for a master's degree in agroecology (2007) and worked for a few years in organic farming certification. This awareness seeped into my newest book, Rock • Tree • Bird, as well as almost everything I've written since it was published in 2017.
Randal Eldon Greene: Do you still own that acre of urban wildlife habitat?
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