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The Poetry of Lifting Potatoes To ask a farmer of poetry is a strange request, worse yet a potato farmer. I have known Horia for a long time, to a time before either of us imagined being grandfathers. We were compatriots in what is the durable and subtle empire of the potato. He a researcher, I the actual dirtball. As fellow writers we were a touch odd for our earthy environment, whence came a certain compassion for each other. Of a poet caught, or perhaps trapped, in this hectic, grimy business of agriculture. As an essayist I’m not well mannered compared to the spare words of the poet. As a story writer I do approach words rather like a Lenco potato harvester comes to the harvest. In bulk form. Lots of words, though I’d never admit to excess. Decent people do not recognize the Lenco reference. In practice a farm machine the size of a nice house, wheels the size of small sheds, propelled by traction motors capable of lifting off the face of the earth every fall to avail the potatoes laying beneath. A Lenco is not a poetic thing. Monstrosities are not often seen as poetic. This machine hogs the town road. Impatient drivers honk at it. The Lenco disembowels the earth 12 rows at a time. It bellows. It smokes. It smells. It leaks. It works. It isn’t poetic. Poetry is a potato fork. I have several. With a fork you feel the earth, feel gravity, feel the lifting, feel the worms, feel the soil, feel the sweat, feel the tilth. And if you are like Horia and me, feel the godliness of the potato. This book of poems by Horia is not that monster Lenco, instead a potato fork. Poetry equipped with a short handle to feel the gravity of our lives, its worms, its tilth. A forkful at a time, digging is necessary, and in the lifting, to feel the earth’s desire. These words of this potato researcher I’m so honored to know and call friend. Justin Isherwood, writer and potato farmer, in Plover Township, below the moraine where all the streams run west.
