My dissertation that became the book Queen of the Platform has been out just over six months. Hooray! I thought it’s time to write an update about my second full-length collection of poetry published in December 2013 by Anaphora Literary Press. The poems in Queen of the Platform are based on the life of my great-great-great-grandmother, the nineteenth century lecturer, suffragist, and poet, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman (1842-1909). I first learned of Matilda when my father and grandparents suggested I look up my great-great-great-grandmother “who spoke at Chautauquas while her stepchildren sang and danced.” They didn’t know much about Matilda, but they did know a bit about her second husband, William Albert Wiseman, who started the Grace Methodist Church in Des Moines, Iowa.

It started as a tent, became a wooden building, and then was rebuilt a few years later in brick. It still stands today on the corner of Crocker Street in Des Moines.

So knowing these two small bits about Matilda - she was a lecturer and her second husband was a minister in Des Moines - I began talking to relatives who had interests in genealogical work, examining family artifacts and letters, and researching historical documents to find out who Matilda was, where she spoke, why she gave a lecture to over seven thousand in Indiana accompanied by what the newspapers called a “heart chart,” and why one of her popular talks and one of her published poems was entitled “The Heart of a Man.” One Wiseman cousin allowed me to look at a scrapbook Matilda kept during the first years of her lecture career.

Some of what Matilda wrote has survived-some of her letters to the editors, poems in full or excerpted—however much of Matilda’s work remains in fragments as quoted in historic newspapers, and even more remains in announcements only, such as the lecture “Are You for Sale?”

A photograph of Matilda has yet to be found.

My research allowed me to find out where Matilda was born and some information about her early life. Matilda (Felts) Fletcher Wiseman was the fifth of fourteen children from abolitionist parents, who had fled the South. She was born in Winnebago County, Illinois, and raised on a farm in Durand. All seven of her brothers served in the Civil War. In the late 1960s, Matilda married her school teacher, John A. Fletcher (1837-1875). John served in the Civil War where he contracted tuberculosis, a disease that made him increasing ill. They moved to Council Bluffs where he was a school teacher and a lawyer. They had one child together, Alice “Allie” Fletcher, a child that didn’t live beyond the age of two. The disease continued to ravage John’s health. After the death of their child, Matilda joined the lecture circuit to support herself and her frail husband. She wrote about her daughter. Two published hymns about Allie appear in Song Echo.

Matilda was a popular lecturer and she quickly began speaking with other lecturers of her time like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Francis Willard. She spoke on suffragist, education, and reform. She also stumped for a presidential candidate, even though she didn’t live long enough to have the right to vote. She wrote and had three books published. The first book, Farmers’ Wives and Daughters, was both published in 1873 by the Lincoln Journal Company, State Printers in Nebraska after she gave the address at the Nebraska State Fair.

Two years later, her first husband died of tuberculosis in the summer of 1875. That same year, her second book was released, Practical Ethics and published by A.S. Barnes & Company in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.

I’ve always admired that the illustrated heart chart inside the book.

Despite the loss of her child and her husband, Matilda continued to write and speak to earn a living and make a career. She patented a design for traveling trunks for women and wrote bills on educational reform that were passed into law. Eleven years later, she remarried a Methodist minister, my great-great-great-grandfather, William Albert Wiseman (1850-1911), and became stepmother to his three small children, all under the age of ten.

Albert became her agent and according to family legend, the family toured the country and the children sang and danced to Civil War Songs whenever Matilda took the stage. (Full disclosure: I’ve yet to find evidence about the children’s onstage presence, but family legend also says that the reason why Albert’s namesake ate dessert first at meals was due to his childhood rearing on the road. Whenever the family arrived via train in another town where Matilda would speak, they headed first to the hotel restaurant and while they waited for their dinner to be prepared, they had dessert.) What followed was many productive years of lecturing and life. For a brief time, the family even moved from Iowa to Texas where Matilda served as assistant minister in a church where Albert was the minister.

After moving back to Des Moines and to their home in Sherman Hills, Matilda’s brother needed her assistance. In 1905, her brother, George W. Felts (1843-1921), a civil war solider, was charged with murder and sentenced to life in the state prison in Joliet. Matilda writes that Geo was jumped at a saloon. Somehow one of the men involved and a friend of Geo’s, was stabbed. The injury hit the man’s femoral artery. He bled to death. Between 1905 and 1909, with the help of her husband, Albert, Matilda challenged the Illinois court’s ruling, a task that culminated in the publication of her third book, The Trial and Imprisonment of Geo E. Felts: A Deaf Old Solider Robbed of his Rights (1905) and her early death in a hospital in Rockford, IL. Beyond her insistence of his innocence, her contention with his sentencing concerned the court’s failure to accommodate her brother’s disability. Geo was deaf due to his service in the Civil War, a combined result of cannon fire and measles. Throughout the trial, no one provided Geo with a written account of the proceedings, nor did anyone speak directly into his ear-tube, a device through which he could hear imperfectly. In short, Matilda argued that his trial wasn’t legal because Geo neither heard nor understood the charges. All attempts failed. She died at the age of sixty-six and is buried in Des Moines in Woodland Cemetery beside her daughter and two husbands. What became of Geo is unknown. He is buried in Durand Cemetery. This series of poems in Queen of the Platform, partly fact and partly imagination, is where all this research took me.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk about this research in WomenArts Quarterly Journal and the Country Dog Review.

She started lecturing in 1869, shortly after Allie died. John died in 1875. During those brief six years, Matilda lectured hundreds of times, all over the country, and even in Canada. She wrote and published three books. She was an editor and writer for the Iowa State Register (which was renamed as The Des Moines Register in 1903) where she describes her travels, her lectures, and her experiences on the train.

I was able to talk about research and fact and the use of found poetry in Compose Journal.

I wanted poems in Queen of the Platform to offer up a taste of the linguistic phrasings of nineteenth-century newspapers, especially how they recapitulated and paraphrased her two hour lectures. To savor that language, I employed the ghazal, the sestina, and the acrostic.

Reviews of Queen of the Platform are in Weave, Broad Blogs, and The Volta.

With her graceful rhythmic flare, and real and imagined homey narrative, she presents upended views of the meaning of equality via the men around her suffragist ancestor in the time before women could vote…With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman suggests that there is a great man behind–and moreover, beside–each great woman…Wiseman challenges perceptions of feminism and justice, with her poignant and heartfelt writing via the perspective of the inspiring Matilda and the men around her…. -Weave Magazine

 

Imagine having a great-great-great-grandmother who fought for ‘votes for women’ alongside Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Poet, Laura Madeline Wiseman’s great-great-great-grandmother, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman did just that. Collected letters and newspaper clippings inspired a book of poetry that Ms. Wiseman calls, Queen of the Platform. -Broad Blogs

 

What makes Queen of the Platform, Laura Madeline Wiseman’s eleventh collection of poetry so different from these other books is that the protagonist of this historical research already had a voice. A loud and influential voice. This book is less the powerful contemporary writer reaching into history to unearth something lost, and more the writer allowing herself to be lost in the rich and varied experiences of a powerful woman who has much to teach a contemporary readership about the nuances of power, gender, and the importance of language. – The Volta

Finally, there’s a YouTube Playlist of readings of poems from Queen of the Platform.

What’s next for my work on Matilda Fletcher and for Queen of the Platform? There’s a Goodreads giveaway for two signed copies going on through the first of August.

There are also copies of the book in my hometown public library, Des Moines Public Library, and my local library, Lincoln City Libraries. Later this year, I’m presenting a paper about my research at MMLA in Detroit.

Traveling the Urban Landscape Panel
MMLA, 56th Annual Convention
November 13-16, 2014
Detroit, MI

And, it’s being taught this coming term in a university classroom. Hooray! (*Dear unknown poetry student, I hope you enjoy my dissertation that was turned into the book Queen of the Platform. I know I certainly was delighted to write about a super cool suffragist ancestor that I didn’t know I had until I began this research. Enjoy!*)