Mark Bennett: In new book, Matt Brennan waxes poetic on Hautean sites, legends

Jan. 5—Most Hauteans may not consider their hometown a place of enchantment.

But if readers of Matthew Brennan's new book "The End of the Road" fulfill his wish, they'll feel charmed by the descriptions of Terre Haute in several of its poems.

Consider "At Sonka's Irish Pub," a toast to the popular watering hole at the corner of Wabash Avenue and 14 Street that George Sonka opened 90 years ago.

Brennan's words depict a bartender pouring beers for a gamut of patrons from a priest to a prof, firefighters and others. She's "making small talk and smiling to charm whoever ordered last; the faces change, but not the chores ..."

Then there's Brennan's rhythmic portrayal of a teenage Scatman Crothers, chatting with a downtown Terre Haute hotel chef when "the city shined: Dark nights and early mornings, the fingered frets and kept the beat on snares in speakeasies north of Sycamore and in the alley next to Hulman's Dray Goods Store."

His pieces paint visual images, but Brennan also wants them to stir readers' emotions.

"I hope they get some kind of feeling of enchantment and empathy for the characters described," he said Friday by phone from his home in Columbus, Ohio.

Brennan's poems also explore local luminaries such as Theodore Dreiser, Eugene Debs, Madame Edith Brown and Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, as well as sights such as Collett Park and Turkey Run State Park (a half-hour north of the city). Several poems also feature his personal reflections on places he encountered through three decades of living and working in Terre Haute as an English professor at Indiana State University. He lived in the 12 Points neighborhood.

He retired in 2017. Brennan and his wife, Beverly Simms, then moved to Columbus, allowing them to be closer to family along the East Coast and Mid-South regions. Still, he and his wife, a retired music faculty member, often return to Terre Haute. Brennan gave a reading of his poetry last February in a local art gallery.

"The End of the Road" (published by Kelsay Books) is his seventh book and first since 2021's "Snow in New York: New and Selected Poems." His style is described as lyric realism. Many of his poems are written in iambic pentameter. For those trying to remember their high school or college literature courses, iambic pentameter is a poetic format crafted by 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, typically featured 10 syllables in each line.

His latest book's poems often center on his own experiences, from those growing up in the St. Louis suburb of Rock Hill to his college years at Grinnell College in Iowa and the University of Minnesota, his teaching years in Terre Haute and retired life now in Ohio.

Now 68 years old, Brennan came to Terre Haute in 1985 to teach at ISU. After just one year, Brennan was asked if he would teach the poetry courses. He eagerly agreed.

"It became a dream job for me," he said.

At least a half-dozen of his former students became published poets. And, Brennan honed his own poetry writing during those years, bolstered by reading poems aloud to his Sycamore students day after day.

"I learned so much," he said.

Actually, he began writing poems as a kid. He still has his first, written as a third-grader in suburban St. Louis. His teacher had assigned the class to craft a poem about a dream.

He got more serious about writing in high school, after reading J.D. Salinger's classic "Catcher in the Rye." His teacher encouraged Brennan and his classmates to read Chaucer, James Joyce and other literary greats.

"That made me fall in love with poetry," Brennan said.

Ironically, though, he never took a creative writing class through his college years at Grinnell and U. of Minnesota.

That art came to him, nonetheless. And his ISU students benefited. His final semester at ISU was one of his most enjoyable, full of energetic, engaged students and good campus interactions with his colleagues. That made his retirement better.

"I want to leave with this kind of feeling," Brennan recalled thinking in spring of 2017. "I don't want be like Willie Mays or Hank Aaron, hanging on too long till you have two or three bad years."

In his early Terre Haute years, Brennan lived in the same area that was once home to Athletics Park, a baseball stadium where the 1908 World Series teams — the Detroit Tigers and the champion Chicago Cubs — dueled again in an exhibition game just six days after the '08 Fall Classic ended. "Ty Cobb was probably patrolling center field in my back yard," Brennan said.

When it came time to compile "The End of the Road," Brennan tapped into more Terre Haute legends.

"There were so many great characters in Terre Haute history," he said. Brennan saw many of their names in the Terre Haute Walk of Fame plaques embedded in the sidewalk along Wabash Avenue. Capturing their stories meant Brennan had to delve deeply into character poetry.

One poem can't tell an entire life story. So aimed at highlights. "As in any other poem, you've got to come up with an angle," he said. "It's kind of intuitive to me."

With Dreiser — the renowned, crusty novelist who grew up in a talented but impoverished family in Terre Haute — Brennan wrote about the writer's letter to fellow Hautean Eugene Debs, who spent years in a Georgia federal prison for speaking out against the draft in World War I, and Dreiser's boyhood in St. Benedict Church, and Dreiser almost boarding the ill-fated Titanic. Dreiser's distaste for the wealthy class led him to find less expensive transportation across the ocean.

"It saved his life," Brennan said.

Or as Brennan wrote through Dreiser's eyes, "I paid my passage on a cheaper ship instead, and it delivered me from evil."

His goal is for readers of those Hautean-driven poems and others such as "Playing Spin the Bottle, In Rob Noble's Backyard" and "Mickey Mantle's Nightmare" to be entertained and motivated.

"I hope it would inspire a reader to go look at more poetry and make it a habit," Brennan said.

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.