MWPH BOOKS

KARL GARTUNG, NOW THAT MEMORY HAS BECOME SO IMPORTANT

Karl Gartung, Now That Memory Has Become So Important. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2008. $13.50 + $2.50 s&h.

Karl's Preface to Now That Memory:
I grew up in Liberal, Kansas, a place and a contradiction. My father and mother were descendants of pioneer farm families. The clouds of the dust-bowl and the Great Depression, then the sometimes violent aftermath of WWII were real in my childhood. Dad was a veteran of the Pacific Campaign, and Mother was a legal secretary and community volunteer. He wanted a ‘traditional’ marriage and she wanted a career. These desires became an intractable conflict. They were divorced when I was ten years old. Even so, neither of them could or would leave Liberal. Each of them loved the place. With their deaths, no Gartung lives in Liberal, only remains. Their memory is carried only by a few old friends and family, on my mother’s side. The name Gartung itself has vacated the premises, except on some stones.

In Kansas they call the squared or rectangled spiral in the fields in cultivation or harvest ‘rounds’, one for each circuit, ending in the middle. A square is not a circle, but is a round (in agriculture or family or politics or religion) to a rough center. I cannot seem to square words to ideals to ‘things as they exist.’ That model would to be strictly visual, or mathematical, and I couldn’t find a center. So the squared circle. The center does not hold, and not quite as Yeats had it, it is serial. The point here is as physical as a field, an illusive center tilled toward, but never to a lasting resolution. Each field leads to another, worked and reworked, for various purposes in successive seasons, from tillage to harvest. And recurrent, year to year. The objective is more than visual. We must become open to the intimate physical knowledge of the terrain, open to a life (and to remembered lives), open to attention itself.

BIO NOTE: KARL GARTUNG

Karl Gartung was born in Liberal, Kansas in 1947. He received a B.A. from Hastings College, in Nebraska, in 1969. He married artist Anne Kingsbury f in 1970.

In 1976 he was hired to run a small press bookstore (Boox, Inc.) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Gartung says this was the beginning of his serious apprenticeship to contemporary literature. In 1970 he was a co-founder, with Karl Young and Anne Kingsbury, of Woodland Pattern Book Center. At Woodland Pattern he has been involved in the planning and presentation of hundreds of poetry readings, music performances, art and book exhibits. He felt that these activities were as centrally artistic as writing or publishing could have been. This was (and is) really his education. Keenly aware of his late start, he would say "we can’t share what we know, so we must share what we are learning." He came to realize that something like Woodland Pattern was an improbable and tenuous possibility, depending as it did on luck, energy and ardent management by Anne. When some desired activity was impossible to accomplish on a very tight budget, he would console himself, thinking that if it were not for good management, it would be impossible to sustain Woodland Pattern as an alternative.

To that end, in order to provide regular benefits and the income necessary to see the Book Center through inevitable funding droughts, he took a day job as a truck driver at what has become UPS Cartage Services. He calls this his deal with the devil. He thought it would leave time and energy for writing and book center work, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. An hourly worker can, when all is said and done, be considered a disposable form of property. After several layoffs, Gartung helped organize his workplace into the Teamsters Union in 1993, and has served as a union steward from the ratification of the first contract to the present. This necessary though difficult work became a major distraction in his life as a writer, though it finally ensured his job and the jobs of his fellow drivers and restored some dignity. He credits the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a venerable organization for union reform, with much of the credit for this success. Representing others on the job became a new and satisfying field of work, leading inevitably to more writing.

TOM MONTAG, THE IDEA OF THE LOCAL & OTHER ESSAYS

Tom Montag, The Idea of the Local & Other Essays. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2007. $17.95 + $2.50 s&h.

The Idea of the Local is a collection of essays which continues Montag's exploration of place and places, of people in place and of ghosts on the landscape. Whether it is his home he is writing about, or the broader middlewestern vista, whether it is the island of Cozumel or the wild waters of Canada, he pays patient attention to where he is and where we are, believing that however much we might shape a place we are also shaped by it. These essays examine the ways our places make us who we are. Some of the pieces have appeared in magazines such as Bellowing Ark, Journal of Unconventional History, New Stone Circle, North Dakota Quarterly, qarrtsiluni, and Rosebud; some have been posted at the author's blog, The Middlewesterner. In both cases, again and again, Montag has meditated on the meaning of place for us, on our relation to our various habitations, and has tried to ascertain how a community or a landscape gets its claws into us. Writing these essays has helped him come to broadened awareness, he says, and he hopes reading the essays will help his readers achieve a similar understanding of the places they claim.

BIO-NOTE: TOM MONTAG (2)

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.

PETER'S STORY: GROWING UP IN MILWAUKEE'S THIRD WARD DURING THE 1920s & 1930s

Peter Pizzino & Tom Montag, Peter's Story: Growing Up in Milwaukee's Third Ward during the 1920s & 1930s. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2007. $16.95 + $2.50 s&h.

Part memoir and part social history, Peter's Story recollects Peter Pizzino's youth in Milwaukee and takes the reader to Milwaukee's Italian community in the Third Ward during the 1920s and 1930s. Peter was abandoned by his mother when he was three-and-a-half years old and was raised by a strict and sometimes violent father. He was leader of a bunch of young "Third Ward hoodlums," stole chickens to feed families in the neighborhood when he was eight years old, and worked at whatever he could find – cleaning horse stalls, making sausages, learning to cook. He collected envelopes for the padrones, hauled alcohol from Lafayette, Indiana, and Thunder Bay, Ontario. He drove hi-jacked furs and booze from New York to Chicago and chauffeured the bosses to their meetings in Chicago and New York. He hunted down those who had broken the code of honor, returning them to Milwaukee to face a harsh kind of justice. Peter was always small for his age, but quick, and he lived more in his first eighteen years than most of us live in a lifetime. Peter's Story is the story of those years.

For many years, Peter - who still lives in the Milwaukee area - operated Baywood Tailors in Shorewood and Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, establishing a reputation as a fine tailor and employing some hundreds of people in custom sewing and alterations. He closed his store and retired for health reasons in 1999.

Peter's Story is Peter's first publication. His collaborator, Tom Montag, first met Peter in November, 2003, while teaching a workshop in "Writing Memoir" at the Northshore Library in Glendale, Wisconsin. Peter was one of fifteen or sixteen students but stood out immediately, Montag says.

"Peter had come into the room with the friend who'd driven him to the library and he took his place at the table," Montag says. "When I looked over at him, it was as if a nimbus enveloped him; he seemed almost as if he were an angel. He sat at the table and smiled. I don't usually see halos around people, so I was intrigued. I walked over and introduced myself. 'And who are you?' I asked him.

'I'm Peter,' he said."

Peter was attending the seminar on writing memoir because he wanted to tell his life story, and he was struggling with how to do it. He thought perhaps the seminar would help him see his way clear. Montag ended up co-authoring Peter's Story with him because Peter was having health problems - his eyesight was failing him; his hearing was poor; his heart liked to play tricks.

"At the very beginning of our relationship," Montag says, "I had hoped Peter could write his own story and put the bits of memory into chronological order on his own. He tried, but wasn't very successful at it. Because he was nearly blind, writing was difficult for him, and the pages were nearly impossible for me to read. And because he is essentially an oral story-teller and not a writer, the narratives were cramped and crooked and didn't have the flair of his telling, nor the color of his inflection. Peter is Italian and, you might say, he talks with his hands."

"Eventually (and reluctantly)," Montag continues, "I realized that if Peter's Story was going to be told as it deserved to be, Peter needed more than my advice. And while I really didn't need another project at that point, his was a story worth telling. So I interviewed him at length about his life."

"Peter's memories came as little stories, scenes or vignettes," Montag recalls. "It was clear that this was not going to be autobiography with a straight-ahead push. There would be starts and stops and overlaps. My task was to transcribe Peter's remembering so that it would be both engaging and accurate. I wanted to retain the sound of Peter's voice in the telling, yet I had to make the prose readable on the page. I massaged the oral narratives so that they'd work on the page; I arranged and re-arranged the discrete elements trying to create a coherent whole, an arc of greater meaning. Because so much went on in such a short time during his early years and because there was overlap in his telling, I was not been able to fashion an exact chronological version of Peter's life, but stayed with the chronology to the extent that I was able. This version of Peter's story is as accurate as it is humanly possible to make it and, where the actual chronology may vary, I think this doesn't distort the truth of Peter's life. This is not fictionalized memoir, but a telling as true as we could make it."

"You may wonder why I did not worry that Peter was just making this stuff up," Montag says. "I did consider that, early on. Yet there has been such an internal consistency in his telling that I am convinced this is indeed Peter's story, to the best that he can remember it. He may not have been aware of it (or maybe he was), but I laid little traps for him. I would say, 'You remember when you told me about such and such; tell me more about that.' And he would recount the incident, and it was the same story, and he might give me additional details I didn't have. I might ask him a question I already knew the answer to, and he gave me the same answer several months later. Sometimes in telling an entirely different incident, he'd make passing reference to another event and frame it the same way and highlight the same details as I had already heard. If I have been conned, I have been conned by a master. I am convinced that, to the extent it is humanly possible, this is Peter's life as he remembers it."

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BACKSTORY ABOUT PETER'S STORY

Read about Peter's Story here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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BIO-NOTE: PETER PIZZINO & TOM MONTAG

For many years, Peter Pizzino - who still lives in the Milwaukee area - operated Baywood Tailors in Shorewood and Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, establishing a reputation as a fine tailor and employing some hundreds of people in custom sewing and alterations. He closed his store and retired for health reasons in 1999.

Tom Montag is a Wisconsin poet and essayist and the author of a memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm, Curlew: Home (2001), a collection of poems called The Big Book of Ben Zen (2004), the recently released collection of essays, The Idea of the Local (2007), and several other books.

Peter's Story is Pizzino's first publication and Montag's first collaboration of this sort. The authors' partnership was established in late 2003, and came to fruition after four years of working together on the true story of Pizzino's early years.

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?"

*

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.