MWPH BOOKS

LONG DISTANCE: POEMS

Mark Vinz, Long Distance: Poems. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2006. $12.50 + $2.50 s&h.

"These poems are filled with a sane, decent, clear-eyed melancholy. The world, and our life, has limits, and we reach them. 'These things that weigh me down. . . I’ll have to start giving away.' That’s Mark Vinz’s great gift to readers: memories of rooms, people, landscapes loved and named with clarity and affection, interior travels where the past finds wisdom in clouds, grass, kitchens, backroads." --Bill Holm

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From the first moment of storm cloud in the first poem of Long Distance, to the face of the moon out the window at the end of the book, it is clear that Mark Vinz is in and of this great rolling middle of America. He knows and loves this place and these people he has lived among, these backroads, the mementos, the omens and the emblems of our lives.

... the quickest routes,
the name of every crop in those mysterious fields,
and where to find the best cafes.

... and somewhere in those
darkening hills and rain, lights are coming on,
the ones I still can't see but know are there.

And yet, as one must if he is truly to own his home place, Vinz is able to travel, imaginatively and in fact, as he does in the "Tour Guide" section of the book, to the British Isles and mainland Europe. Travel is a mirror which allows us to see ourselves "and whatever else we can only begin to imagine."

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POEMS

You can read poems by Mark Vinz here, here, here, and here.

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REVIEWS

From Pamela Sund's review of Long Distance in High Plains Reader, February 23, 2006:

"Movement, in three sections of Mark Vinz's newest collection of poems, is the interplay between life-roads more traveled and Frost's 'less traveled' road. The familiar wide roads of love, labor, father and motherhood, family history, and genealogy of place form a cohesive neighborhood of subjects from which the poet, as lone traveler, creates poems that harbor nostalgia for ordered, respectful human relations. These true-to-prairie-life landscape works stand as testaments to Plains folk character and fortitude.... In a short tender work, Vinz describes the planting of lilacs on the Plains:

When they came West, the women brought them -
gifts, perhaps, from mothers to daughters
they knew they'd never see again -
for beauty's sake, a piece of home
... a shady place to nurture children
... reminders of what's lost or hidden
... of all that couldn't be cut down.

These lines serve as a metaphor for the poet's own work. Practicing in the West, a rather barren place according to some, the poet plants hardy works in collections like Long Distance, works that nurture, that beautify, that will last."

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From Dave Wood's column in the River Falls Journal:

"Vinz isn't Miltonic. His topics come from close at hand. He considers stuff that we all see, but brings it closer and in doing so fulfills Robert Penn Warren's stricture that literature broaden and deepen the reader's understanding of life.... Gee, I went and blew an entire column on Mark Vinz. What better way to do it?"

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From an unsigned review in Area Woman magazine, June-July 20-06:

"Mark Vinz talks to us of family, landscape, work, memory, travel, and kitchens in his new collection.... Vinz is one of us, eloquently reminding us of the beauty of the Midwest, the dignity of work and the inevitability of our family's impact.... Long Distance is another gift which leaves "us startled to share what we thought was ours alone."

BIO-NOTE: MARK VINZ

Mark Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, attended the Universities of Kansas and New Mexico, and since 1968 has taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he also served as the first coordinator of the university's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and he is the author of six chapbook collections of poems as well as the full length collections Climbing the Stairs, Mixed Blessings, Late Night Calls (prose poems), Minnesota Gothic, and Affinities (the last two in collaboration with photographer Wayne Gudmundson). He edited the poetry journal Dacotah Territory during the 70s and since then has been editor for Dacotah Territory Press, which has published a number of short collections by writers in the region. He is also the co-editor of several anthologies, including Common Ground: A Gathering of Poems on Rural Life; Beyond Borders: New Writing from Manitoba, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas; Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest; Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest; The Party Train: An Anthology of North American Prose Poetry; and The Talking of Hands: Unpublished Writing by New Rivers Press Authors.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, he has also won the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices competition, Milkweed Editions’ "Seeing Double" competition, six Pen Syndicated Fiction awards, and three Minnesota Book Awards. In the spring of 2005, Larry Woiwode named him an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.

HOW IT SEEMS TO ME

Phil Hey, How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2004. $12.50 plus $2.50 s&h.

"These poems are so good, so bready!"

- Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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"I have waited a long time for this book by Phil Hey. Fortunately, in the process, I've been privileged to read some of these poems in their unpublished stage. I hesitate to use that old cliche of endorsement writers, "authentic voice," but, by all the Gods of poetry, if this isn't an authentic voice, we're never going to find one. In these poems, Phil Hey offers his unconditional and uncompromising Midwestern sensibility without limiting the work in any way that could be described as 'regional.' I highly recommend this work."

- James Autry author of Love and Profit and Life After Mississippi

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"Philip Hey distills thirty-plus years of life in poems that take flight at every moment's crossroad in order to preserve the hard daily lives of men and women who are living scant but like the farmer's wife who buys day lilies with egg money, learn to flower in the midst of such neglect. Often writing with humor, sometimes with irony but always with unflinching directness, Hey builds a scaffolding to carry us through the trials of being human. Entangling us by immersion in sensual particulars, poems in How It Seems to Me show how pleasure is derived from the physical world by a carpenter who cuts red cedar just for the smell of it, or the workman who holds drill bits to the light to admire silver. To counter human isolation, Hey celebrates moments of communion on the back porch with his grandfather to exchange a few last moments with the sun, or sitting at a diner's Chromecraft table immersed in the smell of fried fish. Deeply rooted in place, poems describe the auction of a farm where a whole life is parceled out a dollar at a time, playing pool at Sharkeys, a game of horse with an aging basketball star, and men working in engine shops who take the time to do it right. Hey's poems are messengers of shadow, but also messengers of light when he depicts men surrounded by fuel pumps and carburetors in a used car parts shop as they drink beer and smoke cigars or old men who work concrete, dip snuff and are happy. Showing us that we must Pray for the things of this world, this impressive collection of living, glowing poems teach our hearts to persevere."

- Vivian Shipley author of Gleanings, Winner of the Connecticut Poetry Prize

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"These poems bring the ordinary world so thoroughly in accord with the thinking, feeling human mind that it is impossible to tell where one starts and the other ends. Hey respects things in themselves and depicts them with language of perfect simplicity and accuracy. Yet in his hands conversations overheard, places discovered on the road, found objects, and the events of everyday life become gifts and graces, occasions for a finely-tuned emotional and intellectual response and an uncommon depth and wisdom. Like the short-wave radio buff in one of the poems, Hey traverses the subtleties of the bands with an ear of perfect pitch. The result is absolute clarity, no static."

- Jeanne Emmons, author of Rootbound, winner of the Minnesota Voices Award

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POEMS

You can read poems by Phil Hey here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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REVIEWS

"Enthusiastically recommended reading, How It Seems To Me is a collection showcasing 76 of Phil Hey's very special poems celebrating hard lives, small joys, and memorable landscapes." - Midwest Book Review

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You can read Ann Stapleton's review of How It Seems To Me at New Pages here.

BIO-NOTE: PHIL HEY

Phil Hey has been writing and teaching at Briar Cliff University since 1969, and he is now a professor in the English/Writing Department. He received a B.A. in English at Monmouth College in 1964 and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1966. He also studied creative writing under Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992 he won Briar Cliff's Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, and in 1998 he was given the Literacy Award for college English teachers by the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts.

Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, Phil is the author of six collections of poetry including In Plain Sight, Reorganizing the Stars, Plain Label Poems, A Change of Clothes, Ballads & Songs. His poem "Route 39 south of Pittsville" won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine. He has also received a dozen commissions for poems, most recently from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque.

As an editor, Phil has co-edited the Iowa Poets series with Zachary Pearce of Pterodactyl Press, including Michael Carey's The Noise the Earth Makes , Ann Struthers' Stoneboat, and James Hearst's posthumous A Country Man. He also edits for Celestial Light Press and The Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff's national prize-winning magazine of writing and art. He assisted Michael Carey in the editing of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets (Loess Hills Books).

THE BIG BOOK OF BEN ZEN

Tom Montag, The Big Book of Ben Zen. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2003. $12.50 plus $2.50 s&h.

from the prologue:
To say there is nothing new under the sun is nothing new. To speak simply without being simple-minded is not simple. You cannot speak the truth from inside the truth.

Ben is an alien, a foreigner, an outsider. He stands outside our usual truths, speaks simply of what he sees. He is a teacher not afraid to talk of God but he is not an angel. He is not afraid to laugh, nor to be laughed at. He is not afraid to fall.

Where he comes from we do not know.

We are told he is Chinese. He is well-traveled: not only Mongolia, Tibet, and India, Central Asia and the Middle East, but also Australia, Patagonia, northern Canda. Bowling in Wisconsin.

We are told Ben is Chinese. He appears well-read: not only the Chinese poets and Basho, but also Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, western science and the Sermon on the Mount.

If the threads are removed from the cloth, what are we left with? How much context can be stripped away before an observation disappears? When the mutually-contradictory are equally true, are we paralyzed? It is at this pooint that Ben speaks.

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About Ben Zen: An Interview With the Poet

Q. Who is this Ben Zen?

A. You know as much as I do, I'm afraid. The evidence of the poems is all we have.

Q. He is a teacher?

A. We are all teachers, Ben would say, and we are all students.

Q. Is he a wandering monk?

A. He is a wanderer, yes. He is a wonderer, too. He may be a monk.

Q. Are you as religious or philosophical as these poems make you sound?

A. No. I am not the holy man; Ben is. I am the poet reporting what I hear. Some say poets are radios picking up whatever rides the ether. The gift of these poems was offered; the sin would be refusing them.

Q. You are not Buddhist, then?

A. No. I should be, I suppose, if I'm going to publish a book with "Zen" in the title. However, I do not know enough to say I am a Buddhist. I am a seeker. I listen, I try to learn. I do think the middle western farmer and the Buddhist monk would find much to talk of; and I think each would understand the other's silences.

Q. Why do you call these things poems?

A. I don't know what else you'd call them. I am, after all, a poet; you'd expect that what I produce would be called poems, yes?

Q. Will there be more of them in the future?

A. I don't know. I don't think so. Ben has wandered off to another place, it seems. It's possible he'll come back, but I don't expect it. It is the nature of gift to be given, it cannot be ordered like an appetizer.

Q. If you had to identify one of them as closest to what these poems attempt, which might it be?

A. It might be:

You can't always go
To the cave of a thousand Buddhas,
Ben says, and you can never
Come back the same.

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POEMS

You can read some of the Ben Zen poems here, here, here, and here.

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INTERVIEW

Tom Montag was interviewed about Ben Zen and The Big Book at Slow Reads.

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REVIEWS

The Big Book of Ben Zen was reviewed by Peter Stephens of Slow Reads here and by Sima Rabinowitz of New Pages here.

BIO-NOTE: TOM MONTAG

Tom Montag of Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middlewestern poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew: Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middlewest, "Vagabond In the Middle." He has taught courses in Advanced Composition and Creative Nonfiction for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November, 2004. In February, 2005, he was a Tom McGrath Visiting Writer at Minnesota State University in Moorhead. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. He will be reading at the Beloit Public Library on April 22 and at the University of Wisconsin-Stout on April 27. He will also read at the Wisconsin Writer's Conference in Baraboo this June and will make a presentation there on "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics." In September he will present "Writing Poetry Successfully: 99 Propositions" for the annual convention of the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.