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Clell Goebel Gannon, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. New Edition. With a forward by Tom Isern and an introduction by Aaron Barth. Grand Forks, ND: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2025.

Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres is a minor monument to the literary culture of the Northern Plains and American West. At a century old, it continues to speaks to the complexities of the settler colonial experience on the Northern Plains of the United States. From the vantage of Bismarck, North Dakota, Gannon’s poetry looks across a landscape being shaped by development and induces a deep nostalgia for the beauty of a fading nature. Along the way, Gannon sings songs love, loss, and hope that resonate as strongly with us today as they did a century ago.

This reissue of Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres also includes an 1926 article describing Gannon’s raft float down the Missouri river and the historical and natural sites he documented along the way.

This new edition features a new historical introduction by Aaron Barth and a foreword by Tom Isern. Their historical lyricism amplifies Gannon’s poetry and celebrates this lost gem of the American prairie.

Clell Gannon (1900-1962) was a poet, essayist, artist, and visionary of American Plains. He was born in Nebraska, but spent most of his life in Bismarck, North Dakota.

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What others are saying about Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres:

Everyone who has a relationship with the Northern Great Plains should read Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres originally published in 1924. His vivid poetry about grasses perfumed by prairie roses and spicy breezes wandering through grasslands looking for scattered trees sings of an abiding love for plains ecology and landscapes. The land speaks in thousands of voices. A painter as well as a poet, Gannon views the Missouri River as a master painting filled with ancient earth mysteries too vast for human understanding. He sees jewels of emerald, sapphire, and topaz in Badlands that parade purple-painted buttes. Headlining many of the poems are his original pen and ink illustrations of coyote and antelope, ranch corrals and rodeo cowboys, and Indigenous horseback riders hunting bison and traveling with travois. Words render his geometric farm fields alternately fairylike green and billowy wheat gold. His anticipation of precision weather forecasting and bill-boarded interstate highways and his contemplation of cattle fenced in on all the bunch-grass acres he knew question the future of modernity’s plains regionalism. Gannon believed that only community makes eyes into eyes that see beauty. His poetic reflections call out to his contemporaries—and us—to respond creatively and lovingly to the environment.

Molly Rozum
Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History
University of South Dakota

As if Clell Gannon’s masterful [Oscar] Will seed packet designs weren’t enough, now we find him to be a genuine prairie renaissance man.

Walter Piehl, Jr.
MFA, Emeritus Professor of Art, Minot State University

Clell Gannon understood the art of the rural. Trained at the Chicago Art Institute, he returned home and engaged the Northern Plains landscape as his medium, exemplifying how individual artists shape regional identity and legacy.

Jessica Christy
MFA, Executive Director of the North Dakota Council on the Arts.