Hemlock Peabody

John "Hemlock" Peabody (April 12, 1894 - December 29, 1970) was a 20th century poet and short story writer known for surreal, absurdist imagery. His works were primarily published in low circulation humor magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. He also published two collected works, called Pilgrim and the White Sea and Collected Works, Lost and Delivered.

Early Life

Peabody was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1894 to a milliner and a muscat maker, a job unique to Poughkeepsie. Peabody did poorly in school and spent most of his time diving for small rocks in the Hudson River. He always held out hope for finding The Circle Rock, a local legend about a perfectly spherical quartz stone that ended up in the river because of Benjamin Franklin sometime around 1783 during a time when he got bored of places like Philadelphia and New York and for some reason took a trip to Poughkeepsie. Franklin purportedly threw the rock at a kid after the kid made fun of Franklin's coonskin cap which the kid then hit with a large stick he was holding (pretending it was a snake) and knocked it clean into the Hudson River. Poughkeepsians also try to claim that this is how baseball was invented so they can take credit for more stuff that they had no involvement in. There are no verified sources for this story.

After not finding The Circle Rock in the Hudson River, Peabody began writing poems and short stories to pass the time because there was nothing else to do in Poughkeepsie. His early subjects included The Circle Rock, bowling alleys, Ms. Lattimore (his arithmetic teacher who later gained noteriety for blowing up a bowling alley), and St. Thomas Aquinas. Peabody would hang around the old paper mill where workers would sometimes throw out perfectly good pieces of paper that got cut wrong because the paper cutting guy kept screwing around on the job too much. Young Hemlock would craft these discarded pages into small periodicals that he would circulate to his friends and roaming hobos who hung out around the Poughkeepsie Memorial Train Station^1 with their waggling bindlesticks filled with jars of jam and hardtack they stole from the Army. Most recipients of these poem collections used the pages as toilet paper or as a way to start their wood fire stoves to cook muscat. Only three samples of these early collections still exist and can be found in the archives of Gamaliel University in Poughkeepsie.

World War I

Unfortunately, Peabody was born in one of the worst decades for men wanting to avoid going to war. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Peabody was only 23 and working at his father's hat shop, which meant that he was the perfect candidate to join the army and dig trenches. On December 29, 1917, Peabody was officially drafted in to the army. He found himself in France in Spring of 1918.

To put it bluntly, Peabody had a rough go of the whole war. During training, he could never hit a target and he crashed a tank the first time they tried to put him in one. He formed a close bond with 12 other soldiers who centered themselves around a charismatic spiritualist named James Bovary. All 12 of these men were killed at the same time when an artillery shell landed on their table while they drank their wine rations with hardtack. Peabody missed dinner because he was busy writing a poem that he later dropped in the mud and lost forever. After pretending to be a German Shepherd for four days straight, Peabody was sent to Paris for some much needed leave time (even though they knew he was faking the whole thing). In Paris, he locked himself inside of a hotel room where he shuffled between doing pushups and writing stories and poems. He later forgot these poems in the room when he left and didn't realize until he got back to the front lines and by that time they had already been thrown away.

Poetry

Most of Peabody's work can be found in his two published volumes: Pilgrim and the White Sea (1949) and Collected Works, Lost and Delivered (1961). One of his best known poems from Pilgrim and the White Sea is "All The Way Up."

This guy has boots that go all the way up his legs

I mean square up to his crotch

Says some Mexican round El Paso made them

Says he don’t need no chaps

Says both legs are covered good and fine

That’s called the toe bug

Blue jeans stuffed down sticking to the sides

Creases filled with Arizona dust

White stitching down one side up the other

Why aint he ever take em off

One night we get some Apache

Stick my head in his tent say grab a gun

Yardstick boots stiff leaning on the canvas

Cowboy shoots from his bedroll

Says where's the Injun? Need a scalp

Says grab my knife grab my boots

Says don't stand there lookin'!

I can't move. I only look

Seven months he wears these boots, first time I see

Fishnets

Nickname Origin

Although his Christian name is John, he is primarily known as Hemlock. There is much debate about the origin of this story and there are two major origin stories.

The first connects several facts about Peabody to create a chain of reasoning that give him his name.

Hemlock as Protector and Guardian

1. The train station was called "Memorial" because Poughkeepsians had no faith that their city would stick around very long. Might as well get ahead of the game.