Wednesday, 1:30 p.m.
"We can wait for the crowd to change...." Phil Hey said. Between readers, students were coming in, students were going out. The room was crowded and the change-over took a few minutes.
Phil Hey teaches at Briar Cliff University, too; are you starting to see the pattern here - Briar Cliff... Briar Cliff... Phil is the author of several books of poetry, most recently his new and selected poems, How It Seems to Me, which I published. If you take that to mean I like his poetry, you're damn right I do.
"If I've forgotten you, I haven't forgotten you in my heart...." Phil read.
Of his poem "No School Today," he said: "Sometimes you just get handed a poem.
"This is a wonderful time in America for baseball," he said. "Go Sox!"
"One of the painful things about coming here - driving through the country and seeing all the abandoned places...."
"One of those signs: If you're so smart, why ain't you rich...."
"Rural writers rarely have huge aspirations. They want to be honest and good and do a day's work for a day's pay...."
"... if you know Iowa, you don't need any more description than that...."
"... eating a tomato you can't buy in a store...."
"I can't give you the life you have to grow yourself...."
"I love it how, when I'm doing something, I see how it's like something else...."
"When you played against him, it was a good bet that most of what you'd do was watch...."
"Gotta do another baseball poem...."
Between poems: "What am I looking for?"
"One of the nice things about a public reading - you never know what difference you're going to make...."
"If it isn't a special place, there's no special place...."
What the woman said who ran a cafe and let people make their own change and put what they owed in a bowl by the door: "They trusted me with the food, I trusted them with the money...."
"So there it is, you see what I mean...."
"We live in such a rich land here...."
"I like to live in a part of the country where growing takes a rest...."
"He was gonna stand in the middle of the field and tell the corn to come to him...."
"That corn should have had the good sense to come when it was called...."
"Whenever a poem comes to me like that, it's a little bit like the flu - you have to suffer through it...."
"It was wonderful to listen to Bill Kloefkorn again. I never get tired of it...."
"The whole cloth, the straight dope, the horse's mouth...."
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