Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
50° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Books

Leading Off: Lessons from the Life of Robert Trammell

We spend a lot of time wondering about Dallas’ cultural worth – what this city makes, where it’s going, and how it is perceived. Especially since we shouldered the weight of the responsibility of those great, expensive buildings on the northern edge of downtown, we wonder how they will elevate this city or how we will rise to meet the challenge of greatness they present for us. But sometimes lost in this chatter is the recognition that a city’s culture is not made or built. Our cultural investments only capture the art that articulates the nature of the soul of a city. We rely on the art, not the art houses. And that art is made by warm-blooded human beings. Poet Robert Trammell, as Ben Fountain reminds us in Sunday’s Morning News, was one of those people who articulated ourselves for us.
"Of all the insane things to do," Bob once said. "To be a poet in Dallas."
By Peter Simek |
Image

We spend a lot of time wondering about Dallas’ cultural worth – what this city makes, where it’s going, and how it is perceived. Especially since we shouldered the weight of the responsibility of those great, expensive buildings on the northern edge of downtown, we wonder how they will elevate this city or how we will rise to meet the challenge of greatness they present for us.

But sometimes lost in this chatter is the recognition that a city’s culture is not made or built. Our cultural investments only capture the art that articulates the nature of the soul of a city. We rely on the art, not the art houses. And that art is made by warm-blooded human beings.

Poet Robert Trammell, as Ben Fountain reminds us in Sunday’s Morning News, was one of those people who articulated ourselves for us.

“Of all the insane things to do,” Bob once said. “To be a poet in Dallas.”

Trammell died in May 2006 from cancer, but Fountain says the disease merely rooted itself in the fertile soil of writer’s anxiety:

“Some who knew Bob suspect that cancer was merely the proxy for the disease that actually killed him, the same disease that has been known to kill American writers and artists (and a great many others, too) – anxiety over money.”

It’s not that Trammell didn’t like money, or forced himself into poverty to realize some vain, romantic notion about what a writer’s life should be. Trammell merely chose one of the most difficult, un-trodden paths a person can go down. He was a poet outside of academia, reliant on selling his craft in a market that valued it little, relying on the generosity of a handful of foundations and organizations that actually set aside money for lonely artists like Trammell, toiling away in an unpopular medium. Again, from Fountain:

“One could go even further and argue that by aspiring to do serious writing, Bob placed himself in opposition to mainstream society, a society in which the existential question – how am I supposed to live my life? – is essentially an economic question, a matter of justifying one’s existence based largely on the money one makes and the things one owns.”

When I first stumbled upon this article, the editor in me immediately wondered about the “time hook.” Why Trammell? Why August 1? But the appearance of this piece on a hotter than hot Sunday in the middle of a Dallas summer – free of anniversaries, posthumous prostrations, honorary designations for the deceased – is perhaps exactly how we should be reminded of one of this city’s few sages, like stumbling across a moving line of verse sandwiched between columns of political writing in The Atlantic. In the Texas summer, as Trammell writes in his poem “We Came Out of the Night:”

“The heat decides everything, Suspends / thought. Cactus dominate.”

This random appearance of our poet, in the pages of the Sunday papers, is a line break in the discussion about our arts scene: the cuts in funding, the resigning administrators, the ticket sales and construction, the economic stimulus, and all the other noise that makes us think that building culture is some sort of public work, like constructing a bridge or laying asphalt for a toll road. Very few of the dollars ever spent in this city went to support artists like Robert Trammell, and yet his work represents some of Dallas’ only true cultural artifacts: fragments of thought and craft that fill the imaginary ark of our city’s soul, words that cozy up against the melancholy melodies of Blind Lemon Jefferson or the horrific beauty of a Frances Bagley sculpture, resonating mysteriously – almost imperceptibly – with the tonal character imprinted on the souls of all who have lived or will live on these weather-stripped prairie crossroads.

Why else do we care about self-flattering things like art and culture except that the art itself moves us towards some broadened understanding of our selves, our place, and our time? We build monuments to our status, patrons’ names etched like hieroglyphics on the legs of Ozymandias. But no one funded Trammell or built Trammell. The man was suddenly on our city streets – a pearl plucked from a concrete shell. This city received him, part out of luck, part because of Trammell’s own integrity and fidelity to his calling.

So Ben Fountain’s midsummer memories of his poet friend remind us to reorient our cultural effort. We ought to spend it finding and supporting the true artists in our midst. And Trammell’s life is a challenge to our artists, sleeping out the August heat: stand and be counted.

Image: The Texas Black Prairie c. 1900. Via WikiCommons.

Related Articles

Image
Travel

Is Fort Worth Really ‘The New Austin’?

The Times of London tells us it's now the coolest city in Texas.
Image
Dallas 500

Meet the Dallas 500: Chakri Gottemukkala, o9 Solutions

The o9 solutions leader talks about garnering a $3.7 billion valuation, growing 10x over the next few years, and how the company is innovating.
Image
Local News

An Early Look at 2026 FIFA World Cup Logistics

The World Cup matches will be held in Arlington, but Dallas will be home to a great deal of team and fan experiences. We're getting an early look at what that will look like.
Advertisement