Abstract
Ode to Times Beach, MO (1925-1985) is a research poem written in Prof. Rachel Webster’s class during the winter quarter of the creative writing poetry sequence. Times Beach, MO was a rural, primarily agricultural town of over 2,000 people, evacuated in 1983 just before the largest flood in the town’s history, and after 260,000 gallons of waste oil containing dioxin were sprayed over the town’s roads from 1972-1976. The town was declared a Superfund site, and the EPA finished decontaminating it, along with the entire state of Missouri, in 1997. I was drawn to Times Beach because I’m from Missouri but was prior unaware of the town’s existence. My poem aims to recall and revitalize the memory of a crucial piece of Missouri history that the entire country was once aware of, making extensive use of interviews and newspapers from the time period. Since, in the words of e.e. cummings, feeling is first, I wrote into the poem starting with the emotional logic of a people facing environmental crisis, their government repeatedly failing to save them. By centering the emotional logic of a sensationalized and forgotten story, my poem found a greater understanding and clarity. My poem asks—what is at stake when we sacrifice the remembrance of our uglier history in exchange for the benign, or even a blank period where a town once was? To not write this poem would have been, for me, to let the town die a second death, and make its repetition more likely.