The Middlewesterner

QARRTSILUNI'S "FINDING HOME"

Okay, folks, if you haven't been there yet

to read the posts for Qarrtsiluni's "Finding Home" theme, now is the time to go. The post marking the halfway point went up last night. Lorianne and I, the co-editors for "Finding Home," are closing off submissions with a total of nineteen or twenty already planned.

Go over now and see the first ten, work by Dale, Karl Elder, Lorianne, Patry Francis, Diogenes, Rachel Barenblat, Tom Montag, Trix, Ruth, and Fred Garber. There's some surprising and remarkable stuff there. And the remaining work, to be posted over the next week and a half or so, will be equally intriguing.

Guaranteed.

Putting "Finding Home" together, Lorianne and I had the joy of working with some amazing and remarkable folks.  Thanks to all of them.

Thanks to Lorianne, too, who was - not incidentally - the best co-editor you could imagine.

MY "CHICAGO, BE GONE" POEM IS POSTED AT ROBIN CHAPMAN'S POEM A DAY

My "Chicago, Be Gone" poem or chant

or tirade, if you will, was posted yesterday at Robin Chapman's Poem a Day blog. I recited "Chicago, Be Gone" as the very first poem in my reading last month at Minnesota State University in Moorhead, by the way. Afterwards a woman came up to me and said "I was raised in Chicago...."

"Oh, God," I thought.

"You know you forgot to cast out the high rise condominiums along the lake," she said.

You'll see I didn't forget to cast out much, if you check out the entire poem at Robin's Poem a Day blog (and add Robin's site to your blog roll - you know you need more poetry in your life).

Here are the opening lines of "Chicago, Be Gone:"

Chicago, you sow!
You grunt-nosed, dirt-rooting, broad-shouldered sow
Eating its young,
I cast you out.
You stinking, mud-covered, curl-lipped sow of a city
Eating its young,
I cast you out.

ROBIN CHAPMAN'S POEM A DAY BLOG

Check it out!

Robin Chapman's Poem a Day Blog has not posted a poem every day since its inception in February, but it is putting up poems going great guns. Note that all the poems on the site are previously published.

Here's a sampling, posted on February 23, the first stanza of Catherine Jagoe's poem "Snapshots."

There’s a photograph of me with bleached hair
and a red sweatshirt, holding up a frozen disk
of Tombstone pizza, on a long straight road,
yellow wilderness on either side,
a Badlands wind that made my fingers ache.
I was twenty-six and drunk with possibilities.
We had six days to reach the west coast in a borrowed car,
and we had to stay ahead of the snow.

If you need a little poetry in your life, hey this is the place to get it.

THOREAU NAILS IT

In his journal entry for February 8, 1841,

Henry David Thoreau gets it exactly right. "My Journal," he says today at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau (put up each day by Greg Perry of Grapez, thanks Greg!), "is that of me which else would spill over and run to waste...."

"I must not live for it, but in it for the gods," he says. "They are my correspondent, to whom daily I send off this sheet postpaid. I am clerk in their counting-room, and at evening transfer the account from my day-book to ledger."

It is almost as if Thoreau were describing blogging. You are my correspondents, I might say, to whom daily I send off this sheet postpaid. I am clerk in your counting-room.

BEN ZEN GETS QUOTED IN MAUITIME REVIEW OF "AMERICA ZEN"

So Ben Zen gets quoted

in the Mauitime Weekly's review of the anthology America Zen: A Gathering of Poets edited by Ray McNiece and Larry Smith (Bottom Dog Press, 2004). The reviewer, Eric Paul Schafer, is a little put off by the biographical statements in the anthology (we're supposed to be striving to "overcome ego"); and he's greatly put off by the "Zen Statements" which he thinks "harsh the mellow of some good poems."

I am tickled that Shafer quoted “O, to be the junkman, Ben says,/To have everything no one wants.” Just before that, though, he said: "Ah, the humor, the humor!" Was he referring to Ben, I wonder, or to the poem he had just quoted previously, in which a dove shit on poet Mac Lojowsky's head? Hmmm

Overall, though, we have to be pleased with Shafer's remarks: "I can bang a bell with the best of them," he said, "and I rate this book with 108 ringing strokes to celebrate the New Year."

AMERICA ZEN REVIEWED IN BUDDHADHARMA

In the Winter, 2004, issue of Buddhadharma, Holly Gayley reviews the recent America Zen anthology I have the honor of being included in. Among other things, Holly says "The poems, with titles like 'on the galloping cusp of the new now' and 'Old Monks Drinking,' are evocative and witty, often filled with a sense of the poignancy and sensuality of the present moment."

America Zen is edited by Ray McNiece and Larry Smith and includes such notables as Diane Di Prima, Tess Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Jane Hirschfield, and Anne Waldman, and twenty-five others. It is available from Bottom Dog Press, PO Box 425, Huron, OH 44838 for $16.50 postpaid. More information here.

NEW PAGES REVIEWS PHIL HEY'S HOW IT SEEMS TO ME

Some of you know

I am a small publisher, as well as a writer. Some of you know that the most recent title I've issued is Phil Hey's new and selected poems, How It Seems To Me. Some of you have already seen me brag and brag about the book. Yet it is not bragging, is it, if others keep a similar opinion? Ann Stapleton, over at the NewPages book review, holds How It Seems To Me in equally high regard. This is how her review opens:

“I want to talk about things I love,” begins Phil Hey’s poem “At the river’s edge,” but this line might speak for all the work here. For these are love poems, not in the man-woman sense (though you’ll find some of those as well), but in that these poems make a place (a star-filled night, a green field, a known house) where what is loved is brought to be saved, even if (perhaps especially if) it cannot find any other way to survive in this world.

And this is how it closes:

How It Seems To Me is not your typical “nice words, but so what?” book. Life matters here. Every transcendent, mud-caked moment of it. And the stakes are very high: all we are or have a chance to become before we leave this world, and what, if anything, we leave behind.

You can read the complete review here. You can order your copy for $12.50 plus $2 s&h from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI. Make checks payable to me. You'll be glad you did.

LOVE IN THE DESERT: (OR FILL IN THE NAME OF YOUR OWN PLACE)

You know I contend that the place you choose, or that has chosen you, gets its claws in you and doesn't let go. Your Honor, I offer this post by Doc Rock at WriteOutLoud, "Love in the Desert" as Exhibit #1.

She writes:

Warm or cool, summer night air in the desert has the aura of a fragrant, erotic embrace. It wraps itself around you, runs its fingers through your hair, soothes you with nonstop crickets and occasional birdsong. Its warmth, and its heady blend of cooling sand and grasses, sharp creosote, flowering vines, blooming citrus, invite you to take off your clothes. Especially in the vicinity of a swimming pool, especially if its underwater light is on, rippling turquoise depths beckon, Siren-like: "Strip down and jump in!" they call. "We're waiting!"

THEY CALL IT "THE EXECUTIVE RESIDENCE" IT'S STILL THE GOVERNOR'S MANSION TO ME

Mary and I received this invitation in yesterday's mail:

"Please Join Governor Jim Doyle and First Lady Jessica Doyle for a Reception Honoring Poet Laureate Denise Sweet on Wednesday, October 13, 2004, 5:30-7:00 p.m. at the Executive Residence, 99 Cambridge Road, Madison, WI 53704. Please RSVP...."

"Shall we, my darling?"

"Yes, let's."

"What shall we wear?"

"Oh, you're married to a poet poor as a church mouse, wear what you have."

So we shall go to Madison, to offer Denise Sweet our wish that she have a strong and successful tenure as Wisconsin's second Poet Laureate.

And we shall get to see what the Governor's Mansion looks like.

(Though I may have to pull into a gas station and say: "Hey, fella, I'm trying to find 99 Cambridge Road.... Can you help me?")

YOU MIGHT WONDER WHAT CAN I DO?

We often think

that we're powerless to change the world. That with things going so badly, we can't make a difference. And so we go down to defeat before we ever get up in the morning.

But I'm here to tell you: there are angels in the world; they be thee and me - mostly thee; me only in my best and brightest moments. One of those angels is Doc Rock; read "Sayonara, Malibu" to see the difference one of us can make.

Thanks to another angel, Beth at cassandra pages, for bringing "Sayonara, Malibu" to my attention.

AMERICA ZEN IS NOW AVAILABLE

Copies Arrived on Saturday

On Saturday I received my copies of the anthology of Zen poetry, America Zen, edited by Ray McNiece and Larry Smith and published by Bottom Dog Press. A preliminary perusal suggests that it is indeed as lovely a collection of poems as I had hoped. And when Mary saw the book, she said: "You're in with some of the big names." Some of the big names, yes; and some lesser-known names with big Zen hearts. You can find information about how to order the anthology here.

Here is one of my poems from America Zen, out of my "Plain Poems" series:

April 30, 2001 (1)

The hawk is present in its absence.
The hawk tree is here as emptiness.

Mindfulness, like a cup full of wind -
I've got the form of it this morning.