What Though the Field Be Lost

Poems

Christopher Kempf

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807175118
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: Literature

Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as a way to engage ongoing issues involving race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory.

With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival material—language from monuments, soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts of the battle—with reflection on present-day social and political unrest. Here monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. In What Though the Field Be Lost, Kempf shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all that it stands for remain sharply contested.

Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.

The Union Forever

The field lay all before us. That first

evening we could almost see

the South’s skirmish lines furling out

like a ribbon. Pickett

whirling on his stallion.

On Cemetery Ridge

Union monuments threw their shadows

across the breastworks.

That first evening

the light lured itself

west down the faces of Pennsylvania’s

low bluffs, beyond which

California, so late

our home, turned to gold

without us—its nothing

history, groves

of concrete & sex.

Our Penske truck

idled near the Angle. The engine

ticked til it cooled.

•

“This area is the most thoroughly improved I ever saw. Apples, quinces, &c. in utmost profusion, and bee hives ad infinitum. Wheat, corn, half a dozen varieties of grass met the eye at every turn, all in rock or strong and closely built wooden fences.”

—Pvt. John C. West, 4th Texas, June 1863

•

At which, the fence-rows,

the Rebel army, advancing

here on its copse of trees, stopped

to open its passage.

Anatomy

of single-family livestock farming.

Our free state’s

mute resistance, therefore, to the sweep

& pomp of plantation slavery. To acre

cotton, swamp Louisiana’s

rice paddies. To Master

gazing from his window. Amen,

the very stones would cry out.

•

In Gettysburg

it was summertime.

We tilled the side yard—year

of our engagement—

for sweet corn. We sat out

all season in our swimsuits, in

love, in lawn

chairs with fruit & cocktails. Corey

read Whitman. We knew,

I suppose, that soldiers—

day one—had fallen gut-shot

in our driveway. We found it

simple to forget this. In s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• National Anthem
• Remembrance Day
• Michaux State Forest, New Year’s
• On Iconoclasm; or, A Little History of Statuary Exploding
• Great White
• &
• BEACH PARTY STEAK FRY
• Snow in Inuit
• Color Guard
• Local News
• Indianapolis 500
• What Though the Field Be Lost
• Natinals
• Gapers Delay; or, Mise en Abyme with Fire & Corsage
• The Union Forever
• Homecoming
• Cyclorama
• Nativity Scene Dedication
• Little America
• The Fishhook
• Pro Patria
• Good Death
• “South Will Rise”
• Art of Fielding; or, The Night the Turf Tore Open
• After
• Veterans Day 5K
• Acknowledgments