Executive Overview
In the contemporary literary landscape, few works interrogate the silences of the American archive with as much kinetic, unsettling precision as Catie Rosemurgy’s poetry. Recognized widely for her critically acclaimed collections My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, both published by Graywolf Press, Rosemurgy has carved out a distinct space as an architect of psychological and historical dioramas. Her poem, “Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going)”, recently featured as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week, serves as a masterclass in confronting what remains unsaid in local histories.
The poem emerges from an impulse shared by many contemporary historians, cultural critics, and artists: the profound disquiet that settles over visitors when encountering regional museums that gloss over the foundational violences of colonial settlement. In Rosemurgy’s hands, a quiet afternoon in an upper Midwestern historical museum transformed into a creative excavation. Confronted by a diorama depicting a once-thriving, now-ghostly settlement named Gold River—where the tiny, whitewashed figures are frozen mid-domestic routine while larger historical erasures loom—Rosemurgy began writing a sequence that gives voice, breath, and overwhelming physical reality to those miniature inhabitants.
This article provides an exhaustive exploration of Rosemurgy’s work, examining the structural framework of the Poem of the Week selection, analyzing the text’s granular accumulation of material and bodily trauma, and contextualizing the piece through the author’s own statements regarding colonial curation, historical amnesia, and the failure of public memory.
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Detailed Chronology: From Upper Midwest Museums to the Page
The genesis of “Diorama 1871” is rooted in a specific geographic and emotional journey. To understand the weight of the poem, one must trace its evolution from a regional encounter to an expansive poetic critique of how communities construct—and sanitize—their origin stories.
Phase One: The Museum Encounter
Years prior to the completion of her newest manuscript, Rosemurgy visited two local history museums situated in the upper Midwest, not far from the landscapes of her childhood. These institutions, typical of many small-scale regional repositories across the United States, were designed to celebrate the pluck, ingenuity, and perseverance of early pioneers. However, both museums exhibited a glaring omission: they curated their artifacts, photographs, and dioramas entirely outside the context of Indigenous displacement and colonial settlement.
For Rosemurgy, this erasure did not feel merely like an oversight; it felt hauntingly malignant. The curation presented a sanitized Eden where tools, claims, and domestic machinery appeared ex nihilo, untethered from the human cost of territorial acquisition.
Phase Two: The Gold River Diorama
At one of these museums, a central exhibit caught the poet’s attention: a meticulously crafted diorama of Gold River, a boomtown that had once buzzed with speculative energy, commerce, and human ambition before fading into a silent, deserted relic. Within the glass case, frozen in static postures, stood tiny white-painted figures representative of the settlement’s Victorian-era inhabitants.
Staring at these miniature citizens—particularly the figure of the schoolteacher’s wife, locked in an endless domestic tableau while a metaphorical (and literal) pie burned in the background—Rosemurgy recognized an artistic challenge. The diorama was an extreme metaphor for how modern society relates to history: frozen, miniature, neatly contained, and utterly incapable of capturing the chaotic, overwhelming influx of bodies, injuries, and moral debts that defined the actual frontier experience.
Phase Three: The Poetic Influx
Seeking to expose the "fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness" that prevents modern communities from forming an honest, shared public narrative of their past, Rosemurgy began drafting poems that imagined these tiny diorama figures breaking free from their paint. Rather than preserving the tidy narrative of pioneer triumph, her verses unleashed a flood—an overwhelming rush of nouns, tools, and bodily trauma that destabilizes the comforting nostalgia of the museum display.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Anatomy of "Diorama 1871"
To fully appreciate the scope of Rosemurgy’s achievement, one must examine the mechanics of the poem itself. The text operates through an accumulating avalanche of cataloged items, shifting seamlessly from the tools of commerce to the intimate, fragile architecture of the human body.
THE ARRIVAL IN GOLD RIVER:
[Newcomers] ──> [Tools & Hardware] ──> [Claims & Ships] ──> [Debts & Vows] ──> [Bodies & Trauma]The Influx of Things
The poem opens with an overwhelming wave of immigration and material accumulation into the settlement of Gold River:
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
disputes, interests, debts, ledgers, accounts
names, births, graves, clans, vows, curses, oaths
In these opening lines, Rosemurgy utilizes parataxis and an expansive catalog to mimic the dizzying speed of westward expansion. The sheer weight of the nouns creates a sonic accumulation. There are no verbs to slow the descent; the items simply pile up—hardware, property claims, maritime vessels, legal instruments, and ancestral burdens.
The Transition to the Corporeal
As the poem progresses, the inventory shifts from external machinery and property to the intimate, fragile anatomy of the settlers themselves. The catalog transitions from the manufactured world into the biological:
pins, hats, curls, cuffs, feathers, buttons, tokens,
elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries, knuckles, spines,
carvings, whittlings, peelings, dusts, shavings, fumes
spills, falls, pops, knocks, gouges, guttings
nicks, cuts, bruises, rots, punctures, sprains
Here, the poem performs a brilliant prosthetic maneuver. The buttons and cuffs of Victorian attire blur directly into femurs, arteries, and spines. The human body is treated with the same utilitarian detachment as a shovel or a ledger. Life on the frontier is registered not as an epic tale of manifest destiny, but as an endless series of physical degradations—splinters, infections, fractures, and punctures.
The Pathology of Erasure
In its concluding movements, the poem descends into a visceral litany of medical and physical afflictions, mapping out the biological cost of living inside a historical myth:
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 poem culminates in a profound epistemological failure, matching the failure of the museums that inspired it:
Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it.
This final declaration serves as the thematic core of Rosemurgy’s project. Historical amnesia is not merely an accident of poor record-keeping; it is the inevitable result of an overwhelming accumulation of bodily and territorial trauma that a culture lacks the capacity—or the moral courage—to inventory.
Official Statements & Authorial Insight
To contextualize the artistic motivations behind "Diorama 1871," Catie Rosemurgy provided an explicit statement detailing the genesis of her collection and her critique of regional museum curation:
"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."
Key Analytical Takeaways from the Author’s Statement:
- The Geography of Memory: Growing up in the upper Midwest gave Rosemurgy an intimate vantage point on the myths of pioneering and homesteading that populate regional lore.
- The Malignancy of Silence: The omission of colonial violence from museum exhibits is categorized not as a passive oversight, but as an active, haunting distortion of reality.
- The Micro-Macro Metaphor: The diorama functions as a brilliant microcosm for national historical denial—neatly painted, easily manageable, and entirely divorced from systemic pain.
Future Outlook: The Evolution of Historical Poetics
As American cultural institutions continue to grapple with the politics of display, provenance, and historical omission, works like Catie Rosemurgy’s "Diorama 1871" point toward a vital new direction in contemporary poetry. By infiltrating the tidy spaces of the historical archive and injecting them with the unruly, aching realities of the human body, Rosemurgy demonstrates how art can repair—or at least honestly map—the fractures in our shared public memory.
The recognition of "Diorama 1871" as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week signals a growing appetite among readers and critics for poetry that refuses comforting nostalgia in favor of difficult truths. As Rosemurgy continues her work from Philadelphia and her academic post at the College of New Jersey, her forthcoming collections promise to further dismantle the myths we tell ourselves about the spaces we inhabit, ensuring that the forgotten cries of Gold River—and the countless other ghost towns like it—are no longer so easily swept aside.
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