Staff reader Carina Imbornone talks with NER 46.2 author Christopher Kempf about memory and the personal essay, corporate-backed country music, and his manuscript-in-progress.
Carina Imbornone: I see traces of you, the poet, throughout your essay “Country Nation.” On the Marion Centre shopping mall, you write: “Gone too was the indelible incense of salt and chlorine given off from the terraced fountain at the mall’s center, dry now, its million sunken pennies glittering only in memory.” When you’re moving about the reported, the personal, and perhaps the poetic, how do you consider mixing these modes?
Christopher Kempf: My first two books were poetry. I moved to nonfiction because I wanted to be more critical. You can think on the page a little more in the essay form. I think of the root of the word “essay”: to try something, to wander around. I like for the sections to end on a lyrical note to tie off the thinking, almost like a little grace note. I like the opportunity prose gives to build long sentences. I tell my students that the complexities of one’s syntax mirror the complexities of one’s thoughts.
CI: The subject matter is introduced through the eyes of a child. There’s an unfurling at the beginning of the essay; initially, I’m not sure where Marion County is or what it’s like. We’re introduced to different terms, some in scare quotes. As the piece goes on, it becomes more formal. There’s a shift.
CK: An essay about the past has to have double vision. It’s got to, on one hand, recreate how the child saw the world, but on the other, it has to put a frame around that child and step back, creating a composite image. Joan Didion does this really well. It’s all over Didion’s work, almost like a double dissolve or a present tense that dissolves into the past and then dissolves back. A little wobble in the voice, maybe.
CI: How did you come to see the essay this way?
CK: I was trying to teach students what makes a literary essay or personal essay different from an academic essay. And one of the things that does make a difference is the recreation of the past. I teach Sue Williams Silverman on point of view with her essay “Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction.”
CI: There are other points in this essay where you reference childhood: the countryside’s psychological relationship to child-like wonder, the child-like politics within country music listeners themselves. How did you come to these different instances of thinking about the child-parent relationship in reference to something so national?
CK: I used my childhood in rural Ohio as a way to think about how politics in this country is routed through place. Cities are usually blue, the “country” is always red. The collection that this essay is from tries to think through “red-state” identity as an ambivalent cultural inheritance, passed down in intimate ways through the child-parent relationship you mention.
I was interested in the sense I had growing up that the world is very small; down the street seems a long way away, but ultimately it’s not. I’m trying to find the kind of insularity or inwardness that can happen in these places. Everybody looks like you, everybody talks like you, it’s not like New York, you know. In some ways that’s good, and in some ways that’s bad. I think there’s something to be said for a culture that is inward, that knows who it is and preserves values from the past. On the other hand, it can lead to all kinds of violence and erasure.
CI: The “country” that country music refers to is not a real place. It’s a construction.
CK: We’ve only started to think of the country as an idyllic haven. So, the country and city were always articulated against one another. As you suggest, it’s a post-Romantic binary and they’re both imaginary ideological constructs. Wordsworth writes from London, you know, recalling what the country was like. Western notions of rural life are shaped in large part by romanticism.
The most important moment in my life was when I went to graduate school on the East Coast and I learned what Westchester County was, you know, and that the values that I grew up with are not ubiquitous. It took me a while to see it accurately.
Another way of answering that question is to think about how rap music operates. Country looks back at the past: The past was so much better than now. Rap looks back and says: The past is something we overcame. Both are American myths.
CI: Country music is such an apt lens to examine the politics you’re describing, but did you consider other cultural reference points to frame this history?
CK: In Ohio hospitals, newborn boys are given toy footballs. In my current book project, “Local Color,” there’s another essay that works in a similar fashion about the sport. I’m thinking about how global, corporate power works through local places or routes itself through ideas of the local. I’m also writing about how the small family farm is increasingly impossible in the era of corporate agriculture. The book uses my life and the places I have lived, starting in Ohio, following me to Cornell on the East Coast and then to the West Coast’s Bay Area. There, the tech industry invokes a sense of global placelessness, even though tech actually works through very specific places.
CI: There’s a section towards the end about country stars with leftist politics such as Loretta Lynn and Natalie Maine. How did these outliers affect the thesis of your essay?
CK: There are genres of country that have always been more left-inclined, particularly styles emergent from folk traditions or something like old country. I’m largely talking about pop country in the essay. It’s a country that is produced in Nashville or is produced in LA, somewhat ironically, to reflect the image of anti-city life. In the essay, I’m looking at the late 80s when cable TV allowed country music to go global, to go corporate. Nixon and Reagan used this genre to supplant a more leftist, working-class country. I’m talking about it as a manufactured product.
CI: You’re reminding us that the current political culture has its roots long before the Obama era.
CK: I was surprised to find that Nixon and his advisors thought very carefully about how to use country music to make inroads to take the South back from blue-collar Democrats. Our present moment is noxious, but this moment was prepared by the Southern strategy. Nixon figured out how to do it. Paradoxically, the “better days” that get referenced in country music are the times when the family farm was not threatened by corporate agriculture.
CI: What did you discover when studying the history of country music songs written about the corporate farm?
CK: Songs about farming have been replaced. That mode was really big in the 90s and even the early 2000s, but you rarely hear it now. The average country song is about drinking, dating, children, and simpler times. In contemporary country music, there are even songs about old country songs. This genre of country is, in a way, anti-political—it wants you to look inward rather than look outward to social or political movements.
CI: Have you learned anything about country music from your students?
CK: There’s something in the genre that speaks to unfulfilled longing. My students largely have no experience of rural life, but they know all the songs.
Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017) and What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021), as well as of the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2022). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
Carina Imbornone is a writer from Massachusetts living in New York.