From Forest Mills to Forest Hills…. Poet is On The Road

Story by: Guest Contributor

First posted on 08-17-2007

Poet Michael Hoerman, formerly of Missouri, will read a chapter of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a marathon reading in Lowell, Mass. today, the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication. Readers include the BBC’s Russell Brand and best-selling author Michael Patrick MacDonald. Hoerman will read Chapter 7.

“My dad left the farm at Forest Mills to hitchhike to Chicago in 1957 after reading On The Road,” Hoerman said. “Now I have the chance 50-years later to round out the road trip.”

Forest Mills is located six miles east of Carthage, Mo. on Spring River, a half-mile south of old route 66, the highway where Kerouac’s postwar generation went looking for America.

FOREST MILLS TO FOREST HILLS

On October 21, Hoerman joins Boston poets to celebrate modernist poet E.E. Cummings in a reading at Forest Hills Cemetery. Sponsored by the Forest Hills Educational Trust, the Poetry in the Chapel reading series honors poets buried at the cemetery. Cummings was important to Hoerman when as a young man he checked out poetry books from the library in Carthage.

Hoerman compares a childhood spent flying June bugs on threads and trying out the rough talk of the some of the old men with what he calls “Cummings’ metaphors for America—springtime, flowers, and language that is at times earthy, if not profane.”

This is the fifth year Hoerman is included in programs honoring Cummings.

THE ROAD AGAIN

Hoerman was a founding member of the first National Poetry Slam competition teams from Missouri and Arkansas in the 1990s. Based out of the former Cordell-Wilson Booksellers near the 66 Drive-In outside Carthage, the Missouri team competed in slams in Austin and Chicago. Their national standing was anything but extraordinary.

“The urban slam teams do better, for whatever reason,” Hoerman explained.

However, what wins slams does not always stand up to review, something Hoerman found when he turned away from the slam. His poems found new energy when he began to write his rural experience. In 2004, he received the Massachusetts poetry fellowship, a $5,000 award. Past recipients of this coveted award include two-time US poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Poems in his award-winning manuscript cover a terrain fraught with natural and human peril—poems Hoerman calls “Missouri poems.”

Growing up on what he calls “the proverbial wrong side of the tracks”—he lived in a house across from the mills now operated by ADM just over the railroad tracks on North Main in Carthage—Hoerman transformed some of those memories when he led a summer poetry workshop for at-risk teens in South Boston in 2005. The 8-week course brought teens facing home life and academic challenges together with Boston’s elite poets including Pulitzer-winner Franz Wright. The Boston Public Library collected a handmade book produced by the teens.

“One thing the towns where I grew up don’t have enough of is art as a way up for youth.”

Hoerman was a featured reader at the Writers Place with the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective in 1997. His poetry has appeared in publications including the Rockhurst Review, Chiron Review, Potomac Review and Arkansas Literary Forum. Hoerman lives in Lowell with his wife, Carole Anne Meehan, a curator at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and their two children. In June 2007, following an 8-year break from poetry slam, Hoerman took first place in Lowell’s monthly slam.

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