Broken Heartland

Creve Coeur
by Robert Fitterman
With an Afterword by Joe Milutis

Just after the Civil War, St. Louis, Missouri seemed destined for greatness. Among the citizenry, heady optimism reigned, only to be dethroned when Chicago’s population growth trounced that of St. Louis in the 1880 US Census. Denton Synder, a local philosopher, described the phenomenon as “the Great St. Louis Illusion,” followed by “The Great St. Louis Disillusion.” Overconfidence that begats disappointment wasn’t a one-off here in the Gateway City. It’s something I have observed during my 20 years as a St. Louis resident, and it’s the tragic theme running through the new, book-length poem, Creve Coeur by Rob Fitterman.

The model or Fitterman’s poem is William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, a volume of verse mixed with journalistic prose that creates an idiosyncratic epic poem devoted to the New Jersey city and its environs. As his geographic locus, Fitterman uses the city where he grew up—Creve Coeur, an appellation from the region’s French past that means “broken heart.”  Creve Coeur is one of the 98 distinct municipalities that compose the St. Louis area, some as small as a few hundred people, most with their own mayors and police departments.

Fitterman opens his book with the “dubious myth” that Creve Coeur was named for the tortured love of an Osage woman and a French fur trapper, ending in the woman’s suicide by jumping to hear death at Creve Coeur Lake Falls. Fitterman writes that the falls are “more like a ledge than a waterfall” and not an ideal or even possible site of a suicide. Yet the romantic fantasy he’s “grown to live with” obscures a discouraging set of St. Louis truths:

Following this statement, the poetry switches to a wildly optimistic power walker on sidewalks of Creve Coeur. Through the book, Fitterman contrasts the buoyancy and boosterism of characters like the walker with the region’s ugly legacy of racism, corporate folly, and horrendous urban planning, this last indignity Illustrated by Pruitt-Igoe, a housing development built in 1954, allowed to deteriorate, and demolished in 1972. The repeated contrast—optimistic illusion versus sour disillusionment—is what enables Creve Coeur to express the broken heart of St. Louis.

Fitterman’s craft is such, while the tragedies of St. Louis drone through the book, we also hear the light counterpoint of Fitterman’s amusing personal history in the region. A fine example is Fitterman’s humorous devotion to Schnucks—a local chain of supermarkets that is indeed the foundation of life for many of us here. Fitterman has shopped at Schnucks. He has taken his parents to Schnucks, during visits after he moved away to New York.  He even worked at Schnucks, that “giant among supermarkets”:

Creve Coeur is very touching to people who know St. Louis. In addition to Schnucks (and its local rival Dierbergs), the book expounds on such local curiosities as Provel cheese on pizza (gross to transplants like me, delicious to those born here), toasted ravioli (honestly good), and the obsession about where people went to high school (Fitterman went to Parkway North, my husband went to Kirkwood). We relive the hot, humid summers and chilling winters when “Creve Coeur Falls freezes over with its thick slabs of white ice.” These regional details, I believe, also enrich the experience of the book for readers outside of St. Louis, creating an intriguing poetry of place with a broad appeal.

As an epic poem, Creve Coeur also performs an epic task: preserving a societal record over time. The greater St. Louis, Missouri–Metro East Illinois region was home to the indigenous Mississippian culture, including the mound builders of Cahokia (c.1000–1350 CE), once the largest city north of Mesoamerica. Pierre Laclede and Auguste Choteau established St. Louis as a French enclave. Since then, the place has seen all manner of social twists and turns. Much has been driven by racism and white supremacy: the 1917 massacre in East St. Louis, in which white vigilantes murdered over 100 African Americans and destroyed their homes and businesses; the Veiled Prophet, a cultish, secret, whites only society; and the organizing zeal of white property owners against Dr. Phillip Venable, a Black resident and ophthalmologist who bought land in Creve Coeur. Another feature of St. Louis life has been reckoning with environmental toxicity produced by defense contractors and herbicide and pesticide manufacturers.

Fitterman’s book covers these and other cultural touchstones beautifully, in both lineated verse and prose. One prose sequence captures the intersection of racism and toxic chemicals in St. Louis, directed toward the mostly African-American residents of the Pruitt-Igoe complex, where the government tested the spraying of weaponized aerosols. Another sequence, structured as prose followed by a prose poem, begins with journalist Ida B. Wells’ reporting on the 1917 massacre, followed by an indictment of the gun-toting white couple (Mark and Patricia McCloskey) threatening Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020:

Fitterman deploys many literary techniques in his construction of Creve Coeur. He deftly switches from poetry to prose and to quoted text. In this, he shows himself a worth heir to Williams’ project in Paterson. The poetry in the book, while often narrative, also pulls in elements of the imagist approach, of which Williams was a practitioner and advocate. Fitterman’s poems say volumes with terse images, like “In Autumn, the red and yellow leaves fool/no one” or “A cop points/to a sign nailed/to a tree: here lines the city!” The prose in the book is equally vivid, and catches little details that light up a story. Fitterman is also a wonderful mimic in prose, especially as a send up to the city’s corporatists and marketers, urging everyone to “Grow your brand and reach a larger consumer audience with help from our Specialty Leasing property management team.”

In a book filled with memorable lines, there is one that resonated in my ear with special poignancy: “If there was not beauty, there was a strangeness.” The line riffs on a quote from Edgar Allen Poe, who said that exquisite beauty requires some strangeness. It suggests Fitterman’s deep feelings for a region that might not be pretty, but sure is interesting.

Fitterman’s line moved me because I have felt since moving here that St. Louis is a strange place. Strange because a chunk of its white population still can’t admit that Black St. Louisans, such as Josephine Baker, Dick Gregory, and Chuck Berry, helped put the place on the map. Strange in the politeness and tidiness of the fans at Cardinals baseball games, all decked out in red and white. And, of course, strangely optimistic after a long run of heartbreak. I’ve seen in the failed Delmar Boulevard trolley to nowhere, in the “lifestyle shopping center” built in my community of only 14,000 people, now home mostly to vacancies, and among several medical professionals who simply couldn’t anticipate that an intervention might go awry.

I have learned to navigate the strangeness of St. Louis, and I have come to love this oddball city of illusion and disillusion. In Creve Coeur, Fitterman captures this strangeness, criticizes it, but loves it, too—loves it enough to write an epic poem that digs down into every cranny of the place. In book’s lyrical afterword, New York media artist Joe Milutis writes that “there still remains in Fitterman the shadow of bedrock, the unchanging layers of the past.” Fitterman’s bedrock is St. Louis, Creve Coeur, his tender excavation.

—Dana Delibovi

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