Preface to The Sunshine Mine Disaster

It is somewhat irregular for a poet to include a preface to a collection of poems; after all, the poetry should be able to speak for itself. But what I’ve written here is neither simply a collection of poems nor a history of a significant event in Idaho’s past. Yes, there’s poetry and history here, but my objective in writing this book wasn’t to write poetry or history. Quite simply, something had disturbed me, something very much like the dead who occasionally bother to speak to us, something I had to answer to.

Much of the book is poetry. Much of the book is found artifact: the Lola letters, the “Brautigan-inspired” lyrics, the interview between James McParland and Harry Orchard, the Bill Haywood case, the Danny Taylor report. And much of the book is fact, in as much as reporters record fact from primary sources. Thus I culled information from articles in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Idaho Statesman, The Lewiston Tribune, from a variety of histories and narratives on silver mining, and from biographies and autobiographies of Clarence Darrow, Big Bill Haywood, Harry Orchard, and William E. Borah. I also relied upon my personal memories and knowledge, having been a thirteen-year-old in Boise when the disaster occurred. Perhaps this book is more of an example of life-writing than it is poetry.

And while I did not alter the facts as I discovered them, I obviously shaped them to the truth of fiction. For instance, the main character, Dan Taylor, is a fiction. As far as I know, no man survived in the shafts for eight days, only to die one day before being rescued. The only immediate survivors are, of course, Tom Wilkinson and Ron Flory, the two who lived seven days in the mine after the fire, drinking water from the condensation of the air conditioners and eating the lunches remaining in their buddies’ lunch pails, and who were rescued alive. And yet, I choose the perspective of Dan Taylor to dominate the book, his voice beginning and ending the sequence, almost always the “I” of the opening and closing sections, and it is his life I focus on: his grandmother, his parents, his brother, his wife, his son. Other perspectives enter in, and I do refer to real miners, their spouses, and their children. I have kept the actual names of some; other names I conflated. I tried to keep the names intact, but the more I tried, the more they coalesced. And so I yielded, perhaps wishing to be true to the way the dead lose their individuality, the way I cannot separate and distinguish ninety-one deaths, the way the dead become the vanished, thousands of feet underground with too much monoxide and smoke to recover and reclaim them. I pray I have not offended the living relatives by these changes.

Finally, I wish to express gratitude to those who encouraged me with this collection over the years. Thank you, Annette Sisson, Don Boes, Jane Hilberry, Pam Wampler, Kimberly Carlson, and Gerri Reaves. Thank you to Joe Calandriello for the Lola letters. I also wish to recognize the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Alex Haley Foundation for fellowships that gave me the time and the confidence to try to do something important. To you, the readers for the University of Idaho Press, William Studebaker, Ron McFarland, and Roger Mitchell (you, old friend), I am indebted for your advice. I am most grateful for your nerve, Peggy Pace. And to Maggie Ward, wherever you are, thank you for teaching me that in Idaho, too, there is poetry.