Finding Poetry in Undermined Places
MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN
What do you call it when the ground collapses under a small town? In her new book of poetry, The Caving Grounds, Michigan author and environmentalist Kathleen Heideman explores the subterranean world of historic iron mines and mine subsidence.
“The Caving Grounds excavates the rubble of Negaunee, a small town in Upper Michigan hollowed by a century of mining. The extraction of hematite caused underground collapses and sinkholes; undermined neighborhoods were deemed unstable; homes, churches and even cemeteries were moved, and dangerous areas fenced. Thankfully, a guide will emerge: Rusty.”
Heideman began her research nearly 30 years ago. “I started interviewing some of the older residents of Negaunee. I was deeply moved by the stories they shared, by the large and small tragedies that haunt families and landscapes.”
The history of mining in Michigan could fill rooms, but the undermining of Negaunee was poorly documented – and never transformed into poetry. “Everyone I met shared a fragment of the larger narrative – memories of children who drowned in mine pits, injured husbands, men who worked in rat-infested tunnels, uncles lost to mine cave-ins, homes torn down or moved because of the caving grounds,” said Heideman. “I knew a woman who’d sneak under the Caving Grounds fence every year, to pick apples from trees planted by her father. Every inch of Negaunee has been blasted and removed, overturned, or moved to make way for more mining. What remains is resilient, pure poetry.”
The Caving Grounds has now been published by Modern History Press, as part of the Yooper Poetry Series.
HISTORY OF THE CAVING GROUNDS
Since iron was discovered in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1844, Negaunee produced countless millions of tons of hematite iron ore. But the small town was undermined by the same mines that put it on the map. As underground mining expanded, many areas were condemned; 900 acres were considered “unsafe due to underground mining activities,” according to the City’s 2017 Master Plan, and residents “had to take all belongings including their homes. For decades the land was fenced off and considered unusable.” In 2003, Negaunee purchased the abandoned land from the mining company. Sections have reopened, with bike paths threading between deep mine pits, rusting fences, the cracked streets of lost neighborhoods and ominous signs that still read “Danger: Caving Grounds. Keep Out.”
“Heideman is a passionate, persistent and well-informed advocate for the natural world and human flourishing,” said filmmaker Mark Doremus, editor of The 906 Report. “The Caving Grounds is much more than an exemplary collection of poems: it’s a thoroughly researched, and visceral, account of the human and physical devastation imposed by 181 (and counting) years of intensive resource extraction in the Upper Peninsula.”
Heideman’s book launch reading of The Caving Grounds will take place on Tuesday April 1 at 6:30 p.m. at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette, MI, followed by a book signing. The reading kicks off the Library’s Great Lakes Poetry Festival. This event is free and open to the public.
ADVANCE PRAISE
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“The Caving Grounds is one of the most original books I’ve ever read. There is weeping here. There is wild humor, passion, and mystery (…) she aches for the caving ground, aches with the stories she sings to us, for all that has been destroyed and for the beauty of life somehow preserved. This is an amazing and unforgettable book.” – JIM MOORE, author of Underground and Prognosis |
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“’It all begins with loss,’ Heideman declares, and she warns that ‘You better wear long sleeves / when you enter our sunken places.’ Her poems will make you tremble at the destruction wrought: the caving ground that swallows a town; the poisons left behind by mining. In a prodigious act of mythmaking, the poet has begun the difficult work of mending our greedy past, probing the most intimate pockets of place and history. Her imagination shows us how to mourn and love.” – TODD DAVIS, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems |
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“Kathleen Heideman has written a heartbreaking exegesis of the gutted iron mining communities of the Upper Peninsula. The Caving Grounds is simultaneously loving and damning, hallucinatory and erudite, playful and ruthless.” – MARCIA BJORNERUD, author of Turning To Stone and Timefulness. |
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“In Kathleen Heideman, Upper Michigan’s wild woods and creatures and old timber towns and mining communities and rich but wounded earth itself have found one of their truest poetic voices. Hers is work that both sings and heals the place that births it.” – JONATHAN JOHNSON, author of May Is An Island and The Desk On The Sea |
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“The Caving Grounds unfold ‘accordion-style’: they constrict, fold in, crackle, and breathe out the history of Negaunee. As poems explore ‘the delineation of the orebody,’ how ‘these lands are pocked with holes that swallow anecdotal evidence,’ Heideman unearths the narrative, blending her position as poet-investigator to ensure a grand effort in crafting a ‘Complete History / of the Terrain in question.’” – CARLY JOY MILLER, author of Ceremonial and Like A Beast. |
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“In The Caving Grounds, Kathleen Heideman memorably marries poetry and history, labor and geology, as she goes down into the old mines beneath Negaunee, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Sometimes she has a guide, her own Virgil, as she peels back the history and geology, until she arrives at the oldest fossils in the world. But she comes back to the people, the old ones who give her the necessary stories of the work and the place. She comes back to the land and the Lakes, even as the ground caves into the abandoned mines below her.” – KEITH TAYLOR, author of All The Time You Want and The Bird-while |
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“The Caving Grounds is one hundred pages of unique, incredible, brilliant, harrowing, sad, funny, informative, and powerfully moving poems.” – TOM POWERS, Michigan in Books |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathleen M. Heideman is the author of The Caving Grounds, A Brief Report on the Human Animal and Psalms of the Early Anthropocene. A poet, artist and environmentalist working in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she has completed residencies with the National Park Service, watersheds, research stations, private foundations, and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. Drawn to wild and threatened places, she works to defend them as a board member of the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition. Curious woman.
MEDIA CONTACTS
Modern History Press
ModernHistoryPress.com
5145 Pontiac Trail
Ann Arbor, MI 48105-9627
info@ModernHistoryPress.com
(888) 761-6268
Media Kit for The Caving Grounds
https://orebody.com/media-kit
