In the contemporary literary landscape, few works manage to capture the dizzying compression of history quite like Catie Rosemurgy’s poem, “Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going).” Selected as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week, this piercing piece serves as a masterclass in poetic excavation, unearthing the suppressed complexities of the American frontier. Rosemurgy—author of acclaimed collections My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, both published by Graywolf Press—uses the micro-universe of a historical diorama to interrogate macro-level historical erasures, particularly the unacknowledged violences of colonial settlement in the Upper Midwest.
The featured excerpt from the poem lays bare the chaotic, overwhelming tide of westward expansion into the fictionalized or representative settlement of "Gold River." Through a relentless catalogue of material objects, bodily parts, administrative ledgers, and physical ailments, the verse dramatizes a civilization arriving all at once: “stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails… disputes, interests, debts, ledgers… elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries… infections, fevers, fugues.” The excerpt culminates in a haunting admission of historical failure: “Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it.”
This article provides an exhaustive exploration of Rosemurgy’s poetic architecture, examining the genesis of the work in local history museums, the broader implications of landscape curation in the American imagination, and the formal brilliance that has earned the Philadelphia-based writer fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Rona Jaffe Foundation.
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Detailed Chronology: From Museum Halls to the Poetic Page
To understand the weight of “Diorama 1871,” one must trace the chronological genesis of the project back to Rosemurgy’s roots in the Upper Midwest. The evolution from a quiet, unsettling museum visit to a fully realized poetic manuscript illustrates how contemporary artists interact with historical institutions.
The Catalyst: Visiting Regional Museums
The project began when Rosemurgy, a professor at the College of New Jersey, visited two local history museums situated near her childhood home in the Upper Midwest. These institutions are typical of many small-town historical societies across rural America: they celebrate the grit, ingenuity, and domestic perseverance of early settlers while systematically sanitizing or omitting the violent realities of indigenous displacement and colonial expansion.
For Rosemurgy, the silence surrounding the mechanics of colonization did not feel benign; it felt "hauntingly malignant." History museums are designed to preserve memory, but when crucial chapters are excised, they become monuments to selective amnesia.
Encountering the Diorama
At one of these museums, Rosemurgy stood before a diorama depicting the once-thriving, now-ghost-town settlement where the museum itself was built. Enclosed in glass, the diorama preserved a static, picturesque moment of 19th-century frontier life. Miniature wooden buildings, tiny painted figures, and meticulously crafted props froze time at a specific crossroad of ambition and domesticity.
However, the stillness of the display clashed with the violent, chaotic reality of what settlement actually entailed—a sudden influx of bodies, materials, claims, and corporeal damage. Standing before the glass case, Rosemurgy began to conceptualize a poetic response not just to the diorama, but to the "fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness that prevents us from developing a shared, public narrative of our history."
The Creative Explosion
To break through the institutional silence, Rosemurgy decided to give voice to the tiny, static white figures trapped inside the diorama. By animating these miniature inhabitants, she bypasses standard historical narratives, focusing instead on the sensory, physical, and psychological shockwaves of frontier life. The resulting poems, including “Diorama 1871,” merge the mundane details of baking pies and teaching school with the overwhelming influx of industrial tools, medical trauma, and administrative bureaucracy.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Literary Profile of Catie Rosemurgy
Catie Rosemurgy’s career is defined by stylistic innovation, psychological depth, and a relentless interrogation of cultural mythologies. Understanding her broader literary footprint illuminates why “Diorama 1871” resonates so powerfully within contemporary American poetry.
Publications and Critical Acclaim
Rosemurgy has established herself as a vital voice in modern verse through two major collections published by Graywolf Press, an independent publisher renowned for literary excellence:
- The Stranger Manual: Her debut collection established her uncanny ability to merge vernacular speech with surrealist imagery, examining identity, interiority, and social alienation.
- My Favorite Apocalypse: Her sophomore collection expanded her thematic scope, balancing apocalyptic anxieties with domestic absurdities, linguistic pyrotechnics, and sharp cultural critiques.
Fellowships and Institutional Recognition
Her contributions to American letters have been recognized by some of the nation’s most prestigious literary organizations:
- National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowship: A testament to her impact on the national literary conversation.
- Pew Fellowship: Supporting her artistic vision and creative longevity within the Philadelphia arts community.
- Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award: Recognizing emerging women writers of exceptional talent and promise.
The Midwest Landscape in American Letters
Rosemurgy’s work aligns with a rich tradition of Midwestern literature that seeks to reckon with the landscape’s layered histories. Writers like Louise Erdrich, Tim O’Brien, and agricultural essayists have long grappled with the ghosts inhabiting the American heartland. Rosemurgy’s contribution lies in her focus on the miniature—the diorama, the dollhouse, the frozen tableau—as a metaphor for how we sanitize history into manageable, bite-sized museum exhibits that obscure the true cost of human settlement.
Official Statements & Authorial Insight
In her exclusive Author’s Note provided alongside the Missouri Review feature, Rosemurgy articulates the driving philosophy behind her latest work:
"This poem is from a book I began writing after visiting two local history museums in the upper Midwest near where I grew up. Both museums largely ignore the role of colonial settlement in their curation, and that silence felt hauntingly malignant to me in the days after my visit. One of the museums features a diorama of the once-thriving, now-deserted town in which the museum is located. As a way of exploring the fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness that prevents us from developing a shared, public narrative of our history, I began to write poems that imagine the tiny, white figures in the diorama beginning to speak."
Deconstructing the Poetic Strategy
Rosemurgy’s statement highlights the core tension of her project: the "fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness" that plagues public historical discourse. By choosing to focus on the figures inside a diorama—objects of observation for museum-goers—she turns the gaze back onto the viewer.
The poem’s breathless, accumulating catalogues mirror the sensory overload of frontier life. Consider the dizzying transition in the excerpt from tools to human anatomy:
- Machinery and Claim-making:
stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails, cleavers, ladders / chutes, pipes, levers, cinches, planks, bolts, shears - Legal and Familial Structures:
disputes, interests, debts, ledgers, accounts / names, births, graves, clans, vows, curses, oaths - Physical Trauma and Medical Reality:
elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries, knuckles, spines... nicks, cuts, bruises, rots, punctures, sprains / fractures, limps, twists, tears, pulls, knots
Through this linguistic cascade, Rosemurgy argues that settlement was not merely a romantic march of progress, but a violent bodily and bureaucratic collision. The final line of the excerpt—“Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it”—functions as a devastating critique of official historiography. When history is curated by the victors, the metrics of human suffering are invariably lost to the ledger.
Future Outlook: The Ongoing Legacy of Historical Re-Examination
As cultural institutions across the United States face increasing pressure to decolonize their exhibits, re-evaluate their collections, and incorporate Indigenous perspectives, Catie Rosemurgy’s work feels remarkably prophetic.
The Evolution of Public History
Local history museums are slowly beginning to reckon with the omissions Rosemurgy noted in her youth. Curators are partnering with tribal nations, updating interpretive panels, and moving away from nostalgic, mono-cultural presentations of the frontier. However, the resistance to these changes—rooted in the "unwillingness" Rosemurgy identifies—remains a formidable barrier to a unified public narrative.
The Role of Poetry in Historical Truth-Reckoning
While textbooks and museum plaques are bound by the constraints of institutional consensus and civic self-image, poetry possesses a unique capacity to probe emotional and psychological truths. By giving voice to the voiceless artifacts of the museum display case, Rosemurgy demonstrates how art can fill the historical gaps left by political expediency.
As Rosemurgy continues her work on this manuscript from her home in Philadelphia and her classroom at the College of New Jersey, readers and scholars eagerly anticipate the full collection. "Diorama 1871" signals a major poetic achievement—one that forces us to look past the glass case of nostalgia and confront the messy, painful, and unrecorded realities written into the American landscape.
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