Sweatervestboy

For the month of January 2021, I'm going to be taking part in Tupelo Press' 30/30 Project. 

Essentially, it's a generative project that challenges a new group of poets each month to generate 30 poems in 30 days, all as a means of raising funds to support Tupelo Press, a a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press that publishes some of the best contemporary poetry around. I encourage you to check out their catalogue of books and roster of amazing writers.

For the project, each poet reaches out to folks we know and asks if you are willing to support the 30/30 challenge and Tupelo Press with a small donation. I'd be thrilled if any of you would be open to sponsoring my participation in the project. Visit the donation page for more details about this tax deductible gift.  

As an added incentive, if you donate to Tupelo Press and would like me to try and draft a poem for/about/in conversation with you, I'd love to try. Years ago I wrote postcard poems along these lines and they were some of my favorite experiences as a writer. Drop me a message by email or through my twitter DMs @sweatervestboy. 

The drafts posted are all works in progress that stay available for the month of the project, but then they are taken down and archived so the writers can have time to revise them and be able to submit them for publication. 

Again, I'm excited about finishing off my sabbatical writing with this project, to see what new work emerges. And I'm excited to be able to, along with other poets, support a great poetry press. Let me know if I can answer any questions. Thanks for considering a small (or large!) donation. if you're on twitter, you can also follow @tupelopress30/30.

Thanks, 

The first of a two part post. 

The first, a year end review of poems I wrote that have made their way into the world, a delayed miracle in some cases and a sudden surprise in others. 

The second, forthcoming, a list of poetry collections purchased (and some actually read) this past year. I’ll humble brag about more things later. 

Poems Published in 2020

“Proposed Amendments to the Definition of Mend.” Ruminate Magazine 57 (Fall 2020): 19.

“Christmas Plainsong, or Several Near Apologies to My Son.” Okay Donkey 21 Dec. 2021.

“Consolation 3: Owed to the Grackles.” Rathalla Review Fall 2020: 33. 

“Fiat Lux, in Advent.” The Curator Magazine 10 Dec. 2020. 

"Hey, Down There, I Am a Middle Aged Idiot with Questionable Eyesight" Hobart 1 July 2020. 

“Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear.” Final Exam: Poems about Teachers and Their Students. J . Barry Koops, ed. Brooks Street Books, 2020. 160.

“Noblesse Oblige.” Local Culture 2.2 (Sept. 2020): 37-8.

“I Am Sorry to Report” felt funny, clever when it was written. Now it feels entirely too dark, but still appropriate for the beginning of final grading season. 

This is the third video reading I’ve posted from Local Talent. Other include:

Local Talent (title poem)

Phoenix

Also, check out this first installment of a conversation about the collection with my friend and colleage Mark Willhardt.

More poems to come in the days ahead.

The second in a series of video readings of poems from Local Talent.

This poem about scattering a father’s ashes was originally published by the good folks at Everyday Poems. 

For more about the book and to purchase a copy, visit the book page here on my tumblr. Or shop on indiebound or bookshop.

The first in a series of video readings from Local Talent, beginning with the title poem.

A version of the poem was published at Books & Culture a few years back.

For more about the book and to purchase a copy, visit the book page here on my tumblr. Or shop on indiebound or bookshop.

Monet’s Water Lilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon

poisons the air like fallout,

I come again to see

the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light

the eye like the eye of faith believes.

The seen, the known

 dissolve in iridescence, become

illusive flesh of light

that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that world

each of us has lost.

Here is the shadow of its joy.

Robert Hayden

As I was googling today to find a particular poem online, I was sad to discover that poet John Knoepfle died this past November. As you can read in any of the  27 books of poetry he published during a long life of writing and teaching, John was a wonderfully witty, deeply humble and unfailingly kind poet. I first discovered his work in an undergraduate course on Illinois poetry, finding his Poems from the Sangamon to be revelatory, a book that offered me a way to see the landscape of my own life through poetic eyes. 

(photo from Illinois Times)

His elegant short lines deftly folded into them centuries of history, both natural and human, that shaped and haunted the Midwest. From him, I learned about the Tamaroa and Kickapoo peoples. Way before I discovered the work of Wendell Berry, John (and other Midwestern writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucia Getsi, and on and on) helped me think and write my way more deeply into and out of the place I knew best. 

John also was a very generous and skilled poetry teacher. During the year I took off after my undergrad, I took two writing courses with him. I’ll never forget his reading one of my poems backwards during a workshop. “There you go,” he said, “Now the poem is full of all the surprises you’d taken out of it.”

We kept in touch for a number of years, and I still have on a bulletin board a post card of this little unpublished poem of his:

bowl

love is like a bowl so when you break it glue it together if it won't hold water fill it with apples

— John Knoepfle

You can read much more of John’s work at this website built for him a number of years back. And read a lovely tribute article written in spring 2019 about John and his wife Peg. 

Here’s a poem I wrote For John back some 20 years ago. I’m still learning the lesson the poem talks about trying to learn, which means John, who has become a part of this place, is still teaching me how. 

For John

mounds timbers points

green island savannas

a language of prairies

— John Knoepfle, “east in mclean county”

We talked over words,

inside them, about twisted

roots, articulate land,

but I could have better

listened—again—

to the lilted languages

and tindered skies

caught tight and taut

in your memory’s

frugal, generous eye.

Look—again—my foot

keeps time under my

chair, taking steps

in place, in place,

in places I go through

when—instead—like you

I should dance the dirt

down deep with measured

steps, and stay.

Each week in ENGL 310: Advanced Poetry Writing at Monmouth College,  writers choose a poems from different kinds of sources. For the first week, they chose one of a dozen or so recent issues of Poetry, contributing a single poem to the class anthology. The discussions of the poems and poets--their subjects, voices, craft--weave into and out of the students writers’ own work. I’m learning about new poets and and new poems already. Next week: individual poems from recently published collections.  

Week One: Mini Anthology from recent issues of Poetry Magazine

Miranda: Once I Had an Acceptance Speech by Anthony Anaxagorou

Teri: My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work by Tiana Clark

Connor:  !katya! by Chrissy Williams

Gunnar: Bear by Reginald Gibbons

Morgan: Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs by torrin a. greathouse

Lexis: IInfinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies by Tarfiah Faizullah

Owen: Nostalgia by Chase Berggrun

Serena: Runaway by Jorie Graham

Shweta: Krishna by Meena Alexander

Nathan: Let’s Make the Water Turn Black by Sandra Simonds

Kenzie: Dictionary of Owl by Mary Meriam

This past Friday, I got my copy of poet Brett Foster’s posthumous collection Extravagant Rescuses, just a few days after copies of my own new collection arrived.

Having them both on my desk made me feel connected again to the conversations that poured out of Brett and are laced through his poems—scholarly, tangential, earnestly doubting, earnestly believing, self-effacing. When I go on the road with my own book, I am going to carry Brett’s work along, including The Garbage Eater, his 2011 collection. Of course you can see here that there’s a significant absence between one book and the next.

I will have to listen for that signature voice in the lines of the poems themselves.

The new collection begins with a candid, generous introduction by Jeffrey Galbraith, poet, scholar, and Brett’s colleague and lifelong friend. You can read Jeff’s own poems in his collection Painstaker.

A poem coming out in the latest issue of Windhover, first in a series of Lenten poems collected over the past few years. If you don’t know Windhover and it’s diligent, generous editor, Nate Hansen, I suggest you check them out by subscribing and/or visiting their table at this years #AWP19..

​Lenten Failure I

My forehead appears clean

here in the bar where the beer

could not be cheaper and the 50 cent

rums & cokes double up and down

in the darkening room. Elton John

tells everybody this is my song

though he's wrong again. My song

is a lament I missed when I skipped

services tonight. My song is a vocative

cry, Kyrie, that always dwells behind

the cave walls of my teeth and weighs

down my rum-sweet tongue. My song

has almost never been Hosanna, Elton John,

(by now AC/DC). Look--in the mirror.

When I scrub my face, can you see

the shade, Christe eleison, there, dust,

An intense, good week of reading and discussing Terrance Hayes’ latest book with Contemporary American Poetry students here at Monmouth College.

Here’s one of the poems in the collection: 

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison”] 

BY TERRANCE HAYES

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone. I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold While your better selves watch from the bleachers. I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow- Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls. I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

This was a number of years back. Bless the wild and brilliant Dave Harrity for posting it on the late lamented ThisIsAntler.

I followed all the expert advice: at the moon’s perigee

I rowed myself deep into the night and anchored even

deeper in the Pacific’s heart. Beneath the earth’s umbra,

I stopped believing in blood as a season of the moon,

trained the iphone lens on the western blue and waited

for moonset. I woke all but covered in worry and sea foam.

Small black and white birds called out a nonsense verse

in an island dialect. My boat listed, half-full of blooded water.

I had been lulled into dreams of Illinois autumn wher  hunters

and harvesters take the moon as a serious version of gospel,

where we stalk dinner through crackled fields of corn wide

as seascapes. I flailed for my phone, for oars and, finding nothing

in my hands, filled them with red ocean and swam into the sky.