Harry Humes' Girardville Poems
 Girardville native--and retired Kutztown University professor--Harry Humes has won numerous awards for his poetry. His spare, unadorned descriptions of his memories from his hometown come alive in his latest volume: Pennsylvania Coal Town:The Girardville Poems.
Retired Kutztown professor Harry Humes' latest book celebrates his hometown in Pennsylvania Coal Town: The Girardville Poems.
Printed in Kutztown by Moonpenny Press, this small volume (the author calls it a "chapbook") of 17 poems also includes an extensive interview of the author by Kevin McCloskey.
Born June 3, 1935, Harry Humes grew up in a row home on East Main Street in Girardville. While his father, Edward, only had the opportunity to attend school to the third or fourth grade before heading off to work in the mines, his mother graduated from high school. Doris Humes taught first grade for a few years, but left her teaching position when she married, which was customary then.
The couple raised four children in the small mining town: Edward, Alice, Bill, and Harry. All four stayed in school, went off to college and succeeded in avoiding their father's underground fate. The three Humes bothers became teachers and Alice became a nurse.
Humes was a professor of English at Kutztown University from 1968 to 1999. He told Contemporary Authors: "My inspiration for writing was, first of all, the place where I was born, the hard coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, the fact that my father was a miner. I wanted to try to get some of that experience down: the hardness of my father's life in the pits, and my mother's life. I thought someone ought to try to say something about all of them."
Humes lives in Lenhartsville, just over the line into Berks County, with his wife, Nancy. He returns often to visit friends and relatives in Girardville, and busies himself traveling throughout the country giving readings from his works.
Besides poetry, he also writes short stories and regularly contributes to magazines and anthologies. Most of all he enjoys the outdoors: backpacking, fly fishing, gardening, and—of course—reading everything he can get his hands on.
You can find Pennsylvania Coal Town at Borders in Wyomissing or at select gift shops around the county. You can also order it online from Moonpenny Press.
The Cough
Our young father walked Ash Alley whistling
"Rescue the Pershing," but already he carried
mine tunnels home in his black-streaked breath.
It was like first sleet against an attic window.
My mother would look at him, her lips a line
of impatience and fear. Your lungs will soon be stone, she said.
It's good money, Dorse. It's the only money.
Some of the miners who stopped at our house
to see my father had tongues like fish
that stuck out between words.
Gray-faced, shoulders bony,
they all seemed about to cave in.
My mother would leave the room,
her lips thinner than ever, but the cough
followed her across the linoleum, down cellar steps,
hunkered close when she planted sage and primrose.
The cough was like a child.
It was always hungry. It demanded attention.
It woke us up at odd times and sat in the good chair by the window.
In winter, it trailed behind my father
like a peacock feather on a woman's hat.
One summer he told us we were on a planet going nowhere fast.
He made a model he called an orrery, and showed us how the heavens worked.
The center was bright and hung there like one of my mother's peony blossoms.
That there's what pushes it, he said. And that's what made the coal.
We looked at him and nodded,
but we had our own ideas about what made it go.
We could hear it behind the least little thing.
- by Harry Humes |
Why do you keep going back to Girardville in your writings?
It is my primary landscape and I try to remember it and recreate all its wonderful smells and beat-up detail. I feel very lucky to have this connection to the voices, faces, the abandoned tunnels. Of course, there was also the danger, the cave-ins, explosions, the alarm whistles going off, the worry our mothers must have been subjected to every day their husbands left to enter the tunnels.
What was it like growing up in Girardville in the 1940s?
In spite of its being a mining town, it really was a wonderful place. There was a movie theater, a candy store that had a penny slot machine at the rear of the store. There was baseball, basketball, dances, and so on. I wandered all over the mountains, could not get enough of hiking. I'd walk over the mountain from our valley to the one south of Girardville, called Fountain Springs, a valley that was like another world, farms, a trout stream, ponds, pheasants, a whole other kind of landscape that from early on I gravitated toward. You cannot imagine how much of a contrast there was. ... It was a wonderful, if narrow, place to grow up, and as they say, I would not have had it any other way. Still, while I was walking and playing baseball, my father was working and killing himself in the mines. So there'[s the irony for you, and I never forget that. So what I do with the Girardville poems is to try to keep those guys alive for a little bit longer, that whole place.
How does Girardville today compare to the Girardville you remember?
Now the town is a lot less than it was. In 1940, when I was five years old, Girardville had about 5,000 people. Now it has around 1500. You can see the decline when you walk along Main Street. Still, people get by one way or another. Sometimes I walk around town, saying the names of the families who lived in this house or that. So I write about it to keep the names and places alive for a little longer, so that it does not fade too quickly.
Did your father want you to work in the mines?
"Get a nice job and where a white shirt," was what he'd say to us, to my younger brother and me. We'd hear that a lot. So it was pretty clear he did not want us to go into the mines.
So what did you want to do?
My brother Bill went off to college, while I just had no real idea of where I was headed. I had a series of jobs, not awful jobs, just dead-end jobs, but I was having a good time. I was reading all the time, running around with this girl or that, drinking a little beer with my friends, and so on. ... a state college accepted me, but then so did the Army. I was drafted for two years. It was the time between Korea and Viet Nam. ... Eventually, I did enter Bloomsburg State College, taught a year of high school and then went off to graduate school at the University of North Carolina. I wanted to be a write,r but also knew I had to make a living and my MFA degree was just enough for me to get a job teaching in the English Department of Kutztown University.
How did you come to be a poet?
I really do not know. I know I did tons of work, received tons of rejections, had a lot of fun writing, and then lo and behold in my mid-40s a manuscript of my poems called Winter Weeds won a literary prize and was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1983. The series in which it was published was called, aptly enough, The Breakthrough Series of Poetry. From then on, I have published a collection of my poems every three or four years. Best of all, writing for me is still a lot of fun. I never tire of writing stories, essays, book reviews, poems.
You now live in Berks County. Do you go back to Schuylkill often?
Yes, I go back often. I still have friends there; my brother and his wife still live in the house next to where I grew up. Sometimes I just wander its streets and alleys. Lots of ghosts, you bet. I drive up to my father's old mine, Packer Number Five, and look at its ruins. After the mine was shut down, the shaft into which my father and the other miners had been lowered was covered with a concrete block. I'd stand on it, over all that darkness and falling-away. I can still find the foundations of a few key buildings, but increasingly it is sinking into the landscape. When my mother was alive, I used to visit her a couple times a week. I have written about her, my father, my friends, the whole damn town. It never gives up its hold on me. It never stops giving me ideas for stories, essays, and poems. It never stops breaking my heart.
Interviewed by Moonpenny Press' Kevin McCloskey, as printed in Pennsylvania Coal Town: The Girardville Poems by Harry Humes. Photos by Lincoln Fajardo (www.StoneHouseStudios.com)
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