Executive Overview
In the contemporary literary landscape, poetry frequently serves as a mechanism for personal reflection. However, on rare occasions, it transcends inward-looking lyricism to become an act of archival archaeology—a deliberate intervention in the historical record. Catie Rosemurgy’s poem, "Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going)"—recently selected as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week—operates precisely within this demanding territory.
Rosemurgy, an acclaimed author of two books published by Graywolf Press (My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual) and a recipient of prestigious fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, has crafted a literary artifact that interrogates the quiet violence of historical omission.
Rooted in a profound discomfort experienced during visits to regional history museums in the upper Midwest, the poem uses a deceptively miniature theatrical device—the museum diorama depicting a once-thriving, now-ghostly settlement named Gold River—to examine grander sociopolitical failures. By cataloging the overwhelming influx of settler-colonial life—the tools, the claims, the bodily tolls, and the systemic traumas—Rosemurgy exposes the fatal intersection of human inability and institutional unwillingness to construct an honest, shared public narrative of America’s expansion. This feature article explores the genesis of Rosemurgy’s latest work, analyzes the anatomy of the poem itself, contextualizes its critique of sanitized local history, and evaluates its broader implications for contemporary American poetry and historical memory.
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Detailed Chronology: From Museum Hallways to the Poetic Page
To understand the weight and mechanics of "Diorama 1871," one must trace the chronological pathway of its creation—a journey that began far from the Philadelphia writing desk where Rosemurgy currently lives and teaches at the College of New Jersey.
The Catalyst: Encounters in the Upper Midwest
The genesis of the project occurred during a return trip to the upper Midwest, near the landscape of Rosemurgy’s youth. Seeking connection to the geography of her upbringing, she visited two local history museums. What she encountered, however, was not a celebration of shared heritage, but a haunting narrative vacuum.
Both institutions meticulously detailed the mechanics of homesteading, agricultural triumphs, and industrial machinery while practicing a profound structural silence regarding the mechanics of colonial settlement, Indigenous displacement, and the foundational violences that enabled the towns to exist in the first place.
For Rosemurgy, this omission did not read as a passive oversight; it felt deliberately malignant. In the days following her museum visits, the whitewashed curation lingered in her consciousness. History, as presented in these glass cases, was clean, orderly, and entirely devoid of structural accountability.
The Diorama of Gold River
At one of the regional museums, a specific exhibit commanded her attention: a meticulously crafted diorama of Gold River, a once-booming frontier settlement that had long since withered into a ghost town. Within the glass enclosure, tiny, meticulously painted white figures stood frozen in perpetual industriousness—storekeepers, laborers, wives, and children locked in a static epoch of 1871.
The juxtaposition of the desolate reality outside the museum walls with the vibrant, artificial permanence inside sparked a creative imperative. Rosemurgy realized that if the institutional curators refused to acknowledge the messy, violent reality of colonial establishment, the miniature inhabitants of the diorama might be compelled to tell the story themselves.
Thus began an ambitious poetic project: a sequence of poems breathing interiority, panic, physical degradation, and historical consequence into the mute plastic and plaster figures of nineteenth-century Midwestern myth-making.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Anatomy of a Poetic Accumulation
The centerpiece of Rosemurgy’s featured poem is its relentless, escalating cataloging of the material and biological weight of settlement. The excerpt provided by the Missouri Review lays bare the sheer volume of "suddenness" that overwhelmed Gold River with the arrival of the newcomers:
The newcomers arrived in Gold River in such large numbers. So much sudden. So many
stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails, cleavers, ladders
chutes, pipes, levers, cinches, planks, bolts, shears
stakes, plots, parcels, holdings, claims, allotments
freighters, schooners, barges, barks, steamers
The Material Culture of Expansion
In these opening lines, Rosemurgy employs an accumulative poetics reminiscent of Walt Whitman, though drained of romantic optimism. The list operates as an inventory of extraction and imposition. Every noun signifies a claim laid upon the land: the stools and bunks domesticating the wild; the shovels, cleavers, and chutes extracting resources; the stakes and allotments carving an ancient landscape into legalistic commodities.
The inclusion of maritime and riverine transport (freighters, schooners, barges) underscores the globalized supply chains and economic pressures driving settlers into the interior of the North American continent. Gold River is depicted not merely as a community forming organically, but as an overwhelming technological and logistical deployment.
The Somatic Toll: From Tools to Tissue
As the poem progresses, Rosemurgy performs a striking linguistic pivot. She moves seamlessly from manufactured objects to human anatomy, demonstrating how the bodies of the settlers—and by extension, the land itself—became sites of operational wear and tear:
pins, hats, curls, cuffs, feathers, buttons, tokens,
elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries, knuckles, spines,
carvings, whittlings, peelings, dusts, shavings, fumes
This leveling effect—placing clothing accessories (pins, hats) alongside skeletal parts (femurs, spines)—evokes the brutal reality of frontier existence. In the frantic rush to build and claim, human beings are reduced to biological machinery subject to mechanical breakdown.
The poem subsequently plunges into an exhaustive clinical terminology of injury and pathology:
spills, falls, pops, knocks, gouges, guttings
nicks, cuts, bruises, rots, punctures, sprains
fractures, limps, twists, tears, pulls, knots
pithings, pokings, severings, suturings, swellings
infections, fevers, fugues, visions, airs, aches
contusions, blisters, ruptures, drainings
abrasions, breakings, brandings, bulgings
boils, plaques, rashes, pimples, pustules
scrapes, bumps, gashes, stings, dislocations
oozings, numbness, faintings, blindings, chokings
The Failure of the Archive
The climax of this catalog arrives with a profound epistemological admission: "Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it."
Herein lies Rosemurgy’s core critique of traditional historical curation. Small-town museums pride themselves on ledgers, land titles, birth certificates, and grave markers. Yet, the poem asserts that the true metric of colonial expansion—the cumulative, compounding physical and psychological trauma inflicted upon both the landscape and its inhabitants—defies bureaucratic accounting. The archive fails because the scale of suffering and displacement outstrips the capacity of the ledger.
Official Statements and Authorial Intent
To fully appreciate the scope of "Diorama 1871," it is vital to examine Rosemurgy’s own reflections on the work. In her official Author’s Note provided alongside the publication, she articulates the ethical and artistic motivations driving the project:
"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."
Confronting Institutional Silence
Rosemurgy’s framing identifies a deep cultural paralysis in contemporary America. The inability to craft an honest public history is diagnosed not merely as an educational deficiency, but as a dual pathology: a fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness.
- Inability suggests a structural deficit—the lack of cultural vocabulary or imaginative frameworks required to confront the violent realities of nation-building without descending into simple cynicism or defensive nationalism.
- Unwillingness points toward active evasion—the deliberate institutional choice to sanitize the past, preserving comforting mythologies of heroic pioneering while erasing the darker chapters of Indigenous displacement and ecological disruption.
By giving voice to the static figurines of the diorama, Rosemurgy bypasses the official institutional narrative. The miniature citizens, trapped in their frozen epoch of 1871, bear witness to their own complicity and distress, shattering the sanitized glass of the museum display case.
Future Outlook: The Legacy of Revisionist Poetics
As Catie Rosemurgy continues her work on this collection—building upon the critical acclaim of My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual—her poetry signals an important evolution in how American literature engages with historiography.
Reimagining Regionalism
For decades, regional poetry and Midwestern literature have frequently wrestled with tropes of pastoral nostalgia, Midwestern stoicism, and agricultural grit. Rosemurgy’s intervention disrupts this tradition by interrogating the very architecture of regional memory. By turning her attention to the museum display case—the primary site where local communities encounter their own ancestral myths—she demonstrates how contemporary verse can function as a critical historiographical tool.
Implications for Public Spaces and Education
As cultural institutions across the United States face increasing pressure to decolonize their exhibits, diversify their curation, and confront difficult local histories, works like "Diorama 1871" offer a vital cultural touchstone. They remind readers that history is not a static diorama behind museum glass, but a living, festering accumulation of material choices, physical tolls, and unacknowledged debts.
In elevating Rosemurgy’s work to Poem of the Week, the Missouri Review invites readers to look closer at the miniature worlds we construct to explain ourselves to ourselves. Through her piercing catalogs and unflinching gaze, Catie Rosemurgy reminds us that until we learn to accurately account for what hurt, how much, and who felt it, our historical narratives will remain incomplete—burning pies left unattended while the schoolteacher’s wife frantically, desperately keeps going.
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