This Saturday, Sept. 7, we will be celebrating the life of Tulare County’s poet laureate, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel at the Tulare City Historical Museum. The spark for the event is a reading and book signing by Betty Blanks, the author of Wilma’s new biography, “Pick Up Your Name and Write.”
Betty was one of Wilma’s closest companions for her final 15 years. Also a child of Dust Bowl parents, Betty’s family stories rhymed so well with Wilma’s that she served as a daughter to this spinster Okie poet. But Wilma, a true Oklahoman, left much unsaid. It was only after her death in 2007 that Betty found herself wanting to track down the many loose ends in Wilma’s story.
I was also one of several people who served as substitute children, which gave me access not only to her writing but also to the way she lived. I was emboldened by its spareness, affirmed by her conserving, life-preserving ways. Seeing how her writing was congruent with the way she lived was enormously beneficial. But I think now, all these many years later, what I was seeing was the real labor of being a poet.
In a tape she recorded in 1991, before I was drawn to move here (in part by her powerful message,) she called her work an “affliction.” It was not an addiction, but simply something she was compelled to do, whether there was any support from her family, or outsiders to read or appraise her writings. I think she felt separated from most people by it as well, even the people whose lives she was recording. But nothing, really, could keep her from writing.
From Betty’s book I learned how many people here in Tulare County were instrumental in helping Wilma get her work published after she left Oklahoma and settled here. She was writing long before her family packed up and left, however. Always observing the people around her and capturing the essence of their lives in tiny fragments, Wilma’s work spans eight decades of her almost 90 years of life, including the unprecedented uprooting and relocating of rural people over half a continent.
Here’s an early poem written at age 14, before their departure, a premonition of weather’s power:
Nature Is Unfair (1933)
The sky is crying gray color
like the buttons in the bin
at Pettigrew’s storeAnd makes me feel the sun
will not come out for us poor folks today
but over there in Texas
where they live in their dry land
and we know they don’t
need any more sun
Although the Dust Bowl migrants come alive in her poems, Wilma didn’t humanize only Okies. We also see and feel the Italians she met in Merced County, Armenians she lived among in Fresno, and the many Mexican families in her Tulare County neighborhoods where she lived nearly 50 years. Actually, most of the people she wrote about have no specified ethnicity: they appear as just common folk, which most of us, in fact, are (including me). I think the real power of her work is that she can make almost anyone be glad to claim their commonness.
At Saturday’s event, two longstanding McDaniel supporters will be on hand to read her poems as a way of expressing how Wilma’s life added to theirs: Bill Decker of Visalia and John Dofflemyer of Lemon Cove. Marla Alberstein will sing a couple of Wilma’s favorite Patsy Cline songs, and I’ll bring some treasured artifacts I have saved from my time with her. Betty Blanks will read a small portion from her book, which will be available for purchase and signing.
The event will be from 5 to 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be reserved by calling 559-686-2074 or purchased at the door. The Tulare City Historical Museum is located at 444 W. Tulare Ave., Tulare.
Trudy Wischemann is grateful for having been encouraged to pick up her name and write. You can send her your favorite Wilma poems c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
