CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Poet Christopher Kempf’s new collection of poems, “What Though the Field Be Lost,” reflects on issues of race, national identity, and social and political unrest in America, against the backdrop of the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Kempf, an English professor who teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, lived there while teaching at Gettysburg College.
“It’s one of those places in this country where you feel the past so insistently. It’s very overpowering,” Kempf said.
His poems reflect that connection between present and past. “Remembrance Day” depicts Civil War reenactors marching down a Gettysburg street in a parade and sharing cocktails, then imagines the injured soldiers from both sides sipping whiskey before their limbs were amputated, and another man being marched through a street, during Reconstruction, before he was lynched.
Kempf’s poems were influenced by the language on the monuments at Gettysburg National Military Park, as well as letters written by soldiers who fought at Gettysburg and eyewitness accounts of the battle.
“I wanted the book to be close to the experience of the individual soldier and capture the materiality of what it was like to have been a soldier, capture their feelings,” he said.
He also was interested in examining how history gets remembered and reproduced through art, such as the monuments and the Gettysburg Cyclorama.
“The Union monuments are relatively boring. They were produced by government committees. I was really interested in the Confederate monuments. They were designed by individual artists and the statues are quite striking, even as they enshrine a horrible cause. They are very nostalgic. They totally ignore slavery as they try to romanticize and idealize the past,” Kempf said.
“I was trying to understand why people find those Confederate monuments so moving and why they are so powerful for so many people. There’s a powerful and dangerous nostalgia that they draw on – the cult of the Lost Cause, a way of remembering something that is lost and illusory,” he said.
He felt ambivalent toward them – finding the monuments powerful but hating the cause for which they stood, he said. Kempf thought about Gettysburg as a pilgrimage site that helps keep the Confederate memory alive for many who visit. He often saw Confederate war reenactors there.
While Kempf lived in Gettysburg, Confederate monuments were being taken down elsewhere. That topic was never broached in Gettysburg, he said, nor did he see any protests against the multiple police shootings that took place in those years.
“At Gettysburg, you see a reverence for the landscape. The history was there, but present conflicts were absent,” he said.
Eight Confederate soldiers were buried in the national cemetery at Gettysburg by mistake. All the graves were decorated with flags on the Fourth of July, but additionally, the park rangers placed Confederate flags at the graves of the Confederate soldiers, Kempf said.
“It was so jarring,” he said. “It was an effort to honor these men who would have been poor soldiers, conscripted to fight for rich people. It struck me as a different way of framing that flag, though of course problematic in its own way.”
In “Color Guard,” he wrote about the Confederate flag – the “blood-stained pennant” – standing for “the Carolina boys buried forever now in some back acre the past is,” as well as for the horrific institution of slavery, and about the Union flag carried with care, “to guard the single history given us to speak of.”
Kempf and his wife were married at Gettysburg College, on the steps of a building that was once a Civil War hospital. His poems equate “union” with both fighting to preserve the union of the country and with marriage. In “The Union Forever,” Kempf wrote about gardening, picnicking, watching fireworks and getting married in the same place soldiers were injured and died.
“What though would be a just form of remembrance? It was a year of champagne & police shootings. Statues toppled. Schoolkids tracked Pokéman across the hill – the highwater mark, men named it – where Armistead, saber flickering above him like lens-flare, fell from his horse into eternity. … The past, that year, kept coming back like a fever. … Everywhere white men carried torches,” he wrote.
Not all of the poems are set in Gettysburg. Kempf examines what it means to be an American in poems about the Indianapolis 500, traffic accidents, a high school homecoming and basketball game, a gas station/rest stop, football and a “Beach Party Steak Fry.”
Kempf said he came away from the experience of living at Gettysburg with a renewed value for understanding opinions that differ from his own.
“A reverence for the past is still with us and brings a humility for our own present,” he said. “You can stand where the Confederates would have marched off on their doomed Pickett’s Charge. I hate the cause, but I would never have been so brave to do that march. I was struck by the courage it must have taken, among soldiers from both North and South, to stand up behind those low stone walls for an idea.”
He said he hopes readers come away with a generosity of emotion and understanding.
“I’d like people to understand how the past is reconstructed and redeployed as a kind of political tool. How the memory of the Civil War continues to resonate,” he said. “There are battles we continue to fight in many different forms.”