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I was first introduced to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology when I was 9 years old. My parents were both theater majors and one summer decided to teach an acting class to elementary school children. Each student had to perform a different poem from Spoon River Anthology – mine was “Emily Sparks.” Several years later I was cast in the Spoon River Anthology play at my high school. I have grown up reading and re-reading the poems of Spoon River, but it wasn’t until I decided to do a Prairie Fire segment on Edgar Lee Masters and the Spoon River Valley that I really learned about the life of the Spoon River poet. Primarily famous for his best selling anthology, Edgar Lee Masters was a prolific poet and eccentric personality who suffered great tragedy in his youth and whose boundless curiosity and creativity eventually produced the more than 250 epitaphs in Spoon River Anthology.
Setting out to do something different
When I set out to film this segment, I decided I wanted to do something different from the Prairie Fire pieces I had done before. Having actors performing a selection of the Spoon River poems and weaving performance with biography was definitely different and proved to be very challenging as both a producer and editor. As I usually do when I get obsessive about a subject I’m doing a Prairie Fire segment on, I read as many books as I could about Masters, including “Illinois Poems” and his autobiography “Across Spoon River.” I spent three months doing research on him and had great difficulty in figuring out how to condense and incorporate the biographical information into the piece. So ask me anything about Edgar Lee Masters and I can probably give you a four-minute or longer answer. Saddy, it’s a talent I only find useful at poetry parties.
At the cemeteries
There were four different film shoots. The first was mostly spent getting B-roll of the towns in the Spoon River Valley during the annual Spoon River Drive in early October. I also spent that day combing the two most famous cemeteries that inspired Masters – the Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg and the Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown – and let me tell you, it’s really hard to find a specific tombstone in a big cemetery when you have no clue where it is! Eventually I got a map and that helped a lot. The second film shoot was filming the Edgar Lee Master’s Memorial Museum in Petersburg, and the interview with Museum custodian David Edwards. The fourth film shoot was spent on pick up shots at the museum during their Winter Open House, and an interview with James Michael Pisel, a board member of the museum whose interview was not able to be used due to time constraints (alas! I’ll use it somewhere, some how).
The primary shoot
The third shoot was, of course, the primary shoot in Oakland Cemetery where six actors and seven crew members filmed the poems and a variety of wonderful footage. Five of the six actors are related (the “Clan” MacLeod) which made it rather fun, and the sixth was an actress from the Chicago area. Everyone seemed to have a great time that day. Mary Stasheff did a fantastic last-minute job with the costumes, hair, and makeup, and Brian Paris, Shane Pangburn, Virginia Steffen, and David Noreen all did a wonderful job behind the camera, providing me with an editor’s dream of rich and varied shots.
Rain holds off
The weather forecast said it would be raining all day, and we almost canceled the shoot at the last minute, but decided to go ahead with it and film whatever we could before the rain hit. However, the sun rose on a gorgeous morning – sunny and bright with a vivid autumn blue sky. We filmed all the poems in the morning, then broke for lunch around 1 p.m. and by 2 p.m., we continued filming the cemetery B-roll with three cameras and crews shooting simultaneously in different areas of the cemetery. The storm clouds moved in and we were able to get gloomy, “ghosting” shots as the sky became increasingly darker. We wrapped shooting by 4 p.m. and just after we had finished loading all the equipment into the vans, the rain hit and quickly became a downpour. That film shoot is one that I will always remember.
Segment duration: 12:03
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Producer: Eleanore Stasheff
This segment is filed in these categories: Arts/Culture • Literature
I am trying to find folk music about Spoon River that i sang in the 1970’s. I want our choral society to sing it. The music still haunts me.
The state of elanoy was one piece from it. then there was one about, “the river is time and it flows toward the sea, and in leaving it’s banks you are free, you are free. but it hunts you and haunts you, wherever you roam, Spoon river, Spoon River is calling me home. I need to find this musical score and who it was by.
if you find it, let me know. I sang it too, in the ‘60’s.
Decadent sons and daughters!
You must have life to love life!
In answer to the post by Carly, here are the lyrics for the “State of Elanoy”:
http://www.lyrics007.com/Unknown Lyrics/Elanoy Lyrics.html
The music is probably available in a number of songbooks. Here’s one such songbook, titled “From Sea to Shining Sea”:
http://www.piano-pal.com/twoint.htm
Here are the lyrics to the song “Spoon River”:
http://members.tripod.com/~kalisch13/lyric_qui.htm
Bonus:
Steve Goodman’s Spoon River Lyrics:
http://www.wearethelyrics.com/2/steve_goodman_lyrics_23430/spoon_river_lyrics_272313.htm
Excerpted portion of letter to a classmate about the Anthology:
“As stated in poet May Swenson’s forward to the 1962 edition (it was first published in book form in 1915) the Spoon River Anthology is a series of poetic monologues by 244 former, now deceased, residents of Spoon River, Illinois. Spoon River is the fictional version of the small Illinois town where author Edgar Lee Masters spent his boyhood before moving to Chicago.
“The monologues are written in free verse and delivered by voices from the graves in Spoon River cemetery. The monologues deal with the venality, corruption, and the occasional overwhelming goodness of the townsfolk.
“Frankly, it might well have been the “Hillsdale Anthology” had Masters been raised there, though perhaps you don’t remember our hometown in the same light I do. That is not said with bitterness but, from this writer’s point of view, a realistic acknowledgement that most small towns have that same venality, corruption and goodness found in Spoon River.
It also could well be the 1915 poetic version of Grace Metalious’ “Peyton Place”, though certainly more literate and intellectual than that mid-century novel. Metalious, however, as tortured a soul as Masters, knew her own small town at least as well as he knew Spoon River.”
interested now?
songs:
He’s Gone Away
TImes are Gettin Hard
Water is Wide
Paper of Pins
Sow got the Measles
Who Knows Where I’m Goin
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