An Iowan by birth, from Wisconsin by choice, and middlewestern to his core, poet and essayist Tom Montag wonders how, in the face of the farmer's silence, any farm-boy ever comes to speech, much less to poetry. Montag's sensibility was marked early on by the directness of experience in his farm childhood and by the longing which comes of watching the far horizon.
Montag is the author of Curlew: Home (2001), a memoir about growing up on that Iowa farm, as well as Kissing Poetry's Sister (2002), essays about writing and being a writer. Among his more than twenty books and chapbooks of poetry are Middle Ground (1982), The Sweet Bite of Morning (2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (2004). With Peter Pizzino, Montag recently co-authored Peter's Story: Growing Up in Milwaukee's Third Ward during the 1920s & 1930s (2007).
Montag's Curlew: Home memoir contains vivid prose about his Iowa farm childhood during the 1950s, interspersed with a journal of the trip he made back to his hometown in October, 2000. While Curlew: Home tells his story and that of his family, Montag says it also represents the lives of many other middlewestern farm people who have no one to speak for them. Donna Seaman at Booklist magazine called it a "companionable and reverent memoir" and said "Montag's prose is thoughtful and unhurried, opening out into moments of beauty and wry humor, echoing in its quiet rhythms and low-key observations the gentle roll of the rich midwestern landscape he loves.... He celebrates the country's most overlooked and underestimated region and movingly portrays his hardworking and loving parents." Curlew: Home was read on Iowa Public Radio in 2002.
Of the poems in The Big Book of Ben Zen, Montag has observed that "this Ben fellow teaches us to see in new ways and to consider possibilities we hadn't counted upon. Ben would be a little monk with an ancient wisdom who wanders the modern world and says things that sound like poems." In an interview at slow reads he noted that "the middlewestern farmer and the Buddhist monk would find much to talk of and I think each would understand the other's silences."
Denise Hill of newpages.com wrote of the poems in The Sweet Bite of Morning: "I was able to visualize a literal blossoming, as the poems moved from observations of snow shifting across roadways and fields, to the warmth of spring, the emergence of new life, and on to the intense clear blue sky heat of summer. Montag provides an incredible journey across time and season that any true Midwesterner can actually feel in their skin.... Montag's strength in this work is his brevity and concise use of language, with a special ability to create strong and lasting images through his choice of details."
Writing of Kissing Poetry's Sister, Jessica Powers at newpages.com noted: "Tom Montag has a gentle style.... You get the sense as you read this that here is a wise man - not a perfect man, but a good man - and he is letting us into his house and his life for a few moments each day so we can experience the richness that is his.... I look forward to reading whatever Montag writes in the future."
Montag's current long-term prose project, Vagabond In the Middle, is an exploration of what makes us middlewestern. Of this investigation Montag says: "Who are we and what are the middlewestern emblems common across our area, I want to ask. Landscape, environment, people, and history all factor into the definition of the middlewest, all shape what we've become. In coming to understanding, I expect to mix interview and personal experience, history and geology, essay and journal entry and meditation. I'll walk, I'll drive, I'll listen, I'll read, I'll listen some more, I'll watch. Always I will be looking for the true stories that tell us what is it that makes us who we are. I will burrow into the life of several middlewestern communities to find the stuff each is made of; I will record that, then compare the communities to determine what they hold in common, what they keep as difference. There will necessarily be a peeling back of the surface sheen of the landscape to see what pulses beneath."
In the 1970s, Montag edited and published Margins: A Review of Little Magazines and Small Press Books. Along with Mary Montag, he edited and published the Wisconsin Poets Calendar for 1982, 1983, and 1984.
Montag was one of two runners-up for Wisconsin Poet Laureate in 2004. His poem "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain" has been permanently incorporated into the design of the Midwest Express Convention Center in Milwaukee. The author is a member of the Board of Directors at the Wisconsin Center for the Book.
Montag is regularly a Visiting Writer at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, teaching Creative Nonfiction to students in the school's writing major.
Montag retired from a career in the printing industry in 2002. He and Mary, his wife of more than thirty years, have lived in Fairwater, Wisconsin, since 1976. The couple has two daughters, Jenifer and Jessica, of whom they are immensely proud.