Poet Bill Sheldon publishes "What I Know Today" online with Coop: Poetry Cooperative

The Kansas group poetry site, 150 Kansas Poets, has revamped and is now Coop, 

March is my month to curate, and here is this week's poem by William Sheldon of Hutchinson. He is a Mammoth Publications author, website:

https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/what-i-know-today-n/

What I Know Today

The opposite of life is…
Well, death’s opposite is hunger
“Love and death,” the poet
says, “love and death.” Horsetail
clouds framed by a window tease
dying leaves, red in setting sun.
 Bah.
All preamble to my saying again,
how much I love this graveyard
we tread daily. Let me walk thigh-
deep in the river, sit under winter’s
red skies.  We can be friends, but dirt
is my only lover.  We will lie together,
rise in each other’s clothes.

Here are submission guidelines for this now national cooperative poetry project: Theme: “I’m Speaking: Renewal and Change.”  We hope poems that respond to this theme are far-seeing and diverse. We welcome feminist work.  We welcome anti-racist work.  We hope to support many communities by sharing voices from varied experiences.  Work need not be overtly political, and may speak to either renewal or change in its themes. In a time of pandemic, global warming, attacks on truth, and the pillars of democracy, change may feel both necessary and terrifying; we look for poems that help navigate challenging times.

Quality: Please send us your strongest work aiming for the most powerful poems you can write.  We prefer imagistic poems that surprise and challenge.  We look for poems that move us.  We want lines we can quote.  Poems to recite.  Poems to hold close to our hearts.

Submission: Send us no more than five poems and a 50-word third person bio note in a single Word or RTF document to KSPoetryCoop at gmail.com.  Your single document must be formatted in this way: Your name at top left of the document (not in the header) followed by your email address, a list of the titles of the poems included in the document (also flush left), bionote, and then the poems exactly as you hope they will be printed.  In your bio note of no more than fifty words, feel free to include hyperlinks to your appropriate websites or books.  Please include italics as usual for magazines and books.  Please do not use page breaks but instead just leave about 4-5 lines between poems.

Here is the story of Coop from their website: "This site owes its inception to Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg who started the site as part of her duties as Kansas Poet Laureate with the intention of collecting poems to celebrate the state sesquicentennial. By 2013 Mirriam-Goldberg had created a site where a community of poets curated poems to speak to themes vital to many of us in and beyond Kansas and the heartland. The site changes themes periodically while collecting and publishing the poems from the previous theme. This evolution has lead us to the current name, The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative.

Laura Lee Washburn has worked as Editor-in-Chief or Chief Curator since 2020, after serving as a help to Mirriam-Goldberg’s site management.  In 2020, Laura Lee Washburn was joined by Katelyn Roth and Morgan O.H. McCune as additional site managers and editors.  Throughout the coming months, Poetry Cooperative will continue the tradition of monthly rotating ed

2011 TOP 12 BOOKS OF POETRY & MORE!

I've read the 10 best NY Times book list, the local paper Lawrence Journal World's best 2011 list, and no poetry is included. I'm listing my own 2011 poetry favorites, based on books I have received this year. I'm including a few anthologies and related prose books. I know I am excluding some wonderful books, but mostly I don't have access to them. I have champagne tastes in poetry and a Kool-Aid budget. I will be nominating some of these for the National Book Critics Circle awards, as a member (see their website for more information about nomination processes by board members and also members-at-large). I do regular reviews of poetry for print and electronic media as well as this blog--please send books if you would like to be considered in 2012.

2011 Denise Low DOZEN BEST BOOKS OF POETRY, alphabetical order

1. Water Puppets by Quan Barry (Perihelion), winner of the 2010 AWP Donald Hall poetry award. I picked this up at the public library and loved the language.  http://poems.com/feature.php?date=15255
2. Mackinac Suite by James J. Bogan, Jr. (The Full Court Press). This writer always takes me with him on his trips.
3. Preparing to Leave by Stephen Bunch (The Lives You Touch Press) http://thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Bunch.html
4. Things Come On: An Amneoir by Joseph Harrington (Wesleyan University Press). This book changed how I think about language and about memory. Julia Kristeva writes about how poets lead innovation by word tinkering. This book is amazing. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/03/review-of-things-come-on-amneoir-by.html     
5. Domande Personali by William J. Harris (Leconte). Italian bilingual edition that sings, sings.  http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/04/wm-j-harris-publishes-domande.html       
6. Glamour by Jonathan Holden (Mammoth Publications). Jonathan is such a good poet that he can make math and science lyrical. He's 1st poet laureate of Kansas.  http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/03/mammoth-publications-presents-glamour.html     
7. Carry Catastrophe by Megan Kaminski's (Grey Book Press) . This poet is a comer. Watch for her full-length book coming from Coconut Books. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/01/so-many-good-new-books-like-megan.html      
8. Pretend the World by Kathryn Kysar (Holy Cow! Press). This Minneapolis poet shines even in the crowded heaves of the Minnesota arts scene. http://www.kathrynkysar.com/page1/page2/PretendWorld.html
9. PoDoom by Jim McCrary (Hank’s Original Loose Gravel Press). McCrary hones social critique to a high art.  http://wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-coming-soon.html
10. Rain Comes Riding by William Sheldon (Mammoth Publications). This Great Plains poet combines Goldbarthian awareness of syntax with compelling narratives of place. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-10-27T10:27:00-05:00&max-results=7
11. The Afterlives of Trees by Wyatt Townley (Woodley). Terrific images ornament all the poems.  http://wyatttownley.com/the-afterlives-of-trees.html
12. Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge (Red Hen). Smart, funny, sad. First rate poetry and a handbook of poetic form. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/12/favorite-book-of-2011-william.html

POETRY ANTHOLOGIES
Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke (University of Arizona Press) 
Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, edited by Caryn Mirriam Goldberg. You will be surprised how many poets of merit come from this crossroads state. http://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/readings/  
The Best American Poetry 2011 guest edited by Kevin Young, series editor David Lehman (Scribner). Topeka poet Kevin Young continues to excel in curating as well as his own writing—see also his own Dear Darkness (Knopf 2008).
An Endless Skyway: Poetry From the State Poets Laureate edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Low and Walter Bargen (Ice Cube Books). 38 or so states have poets laureate. Here’s a sampling of some of the diversity, beautifully produced by Iowa’s Ice Cube Books. http://www.icecubepress.com/2011-books/an-endless-skyway
The Penguin Anthology of  20^th Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove  (Penguin). Thank you to courageous Rita Dove for shifting the center of gravity to include more real gritty American life in these selections.
PROSE ABOUT POETRY
Robert Duncan: The H.D. Book, edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman (University of California Press). Amazing discussion of how poetry enters our lives through memorable people and events. Thank you to Ken Irby for this gift!
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr (Harper). Orr is always provocative if not always right.
Also a word for: Natural Theologies: Essays About Literature of the New Middle West by Denise Low. I appreciate Greg Kuzma and Nebraska's The Backwaters Press for taking a gamble on this first book about contemporary grasslands literature. http://www.thebackwaterspress.org/our-authors/denise-low/   

Mammoth Publications releases Bill Sheldon's RAIN COMES RIDING

Idyll

 The dog’s ashes work their way
deeper into the garden’s soil.
This season I walk alone,
The dirt road winding
Into darkening sky.
The horses no longer
come when called, and the wind
keens, “Winter is coming on.”
The rising moon rattles the dry grass,
and below, the dead
continue their long work.

To order email mammothpubs@hotmail.com $12 postpaid. RAIN COMES RIDING details poet William Sheldon’s passion for the Great Plains. People loom against the horizon—his family, neighbors, runaways, working men, and also the people who lived in this place before, whose scattered flint tools remain still unchanged. He is a poet who embraces fully the contradictions of simulated realities existing, fragmented, in a timeless universe of flint and bluestem grass. Sheldon is a skilled, smart writer who has much to tell his readers about how to live with good conscience.  This second book of the poet shows him creating a new genre of ballad. William Sheldon lives in Hutchinson, Ks., where he teaches. His book Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley), was named a 2002 Kansas City Star’s Noteworthy Book. He has an MFA from Wichita St. Univ.

Many poets of estimable value are called to mind by Bill Sheldon’s book: Kansas poets certainly (William Stafford, Steven Hind, Harley Elliot, Denise Low), and other-state poets with a knowing eye for the land, from the severe poems of Robinson Jeffers, to the more clement naturalism of Mary Oliver, to the savvy, stringent explorations of Wendell Berry.  How can one read Sheldon’s “Red” and not think of the poems of Phil Levine, their similar understanding of manual labor and the lives invested in that work?  I could go on in this vein, but… Sheldon is finally a practitioner of his own voice and vision—albeit one that takes its place happily in a community of other poets—and Rain Comes Riding, steeped in history and family, in an intimacy of place and sometimes a wry sense of humor, is the rich record of a career in which the world and the word have been lovingly wedded.” Albert Goldbarth, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #25

William Robert Sheldon (1962 -)

William Sheldon was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and moved from Montana to Kansas at the age of five. His father was an English professor at Emporia State University, so he has grown up with regional literary works, as well as immersion in this place’s culture. Sheldon excels at the spare, emphatic stories of the western dialect. His poems show that wisdom is the ultimate use of words, not momentary amusement. Each poem suggests, through character and metaphor, a method of understanding the larger world.

For example, blind Uncle Walt in “A Kind of Seeing” hears—or otherwise senses—a rattler while the narrator bales hay. Uncle Walt carries a stock cane instead of a white cane, and he uses it as a teaching tool. The blind man’s feat of hearing a snake, though, is not the remarkable event of the poem. When the narrator wants to kill the venomous serpent, Uncle Walt says, “There’s worse than snakes,” and he lets the animal leave in peace. The nephew learns danger is the natural order of this cosmos, including the unspoken realm of human interactions. Yet revenge is not the appropriate response. Here Sheldon expounds a natural theology, based on lessons that arise in nature.

A KIND OF SEEING

Uncle Walt walked
the old Crook place
blinder than a rock,
swinging his stock cane
with spiteful accuracy
on the old cow
when she crowded
my lugging of the grain.
Or halted me with it
at the waist
“Watch that wire”
before I felt its metal bite.
Once he hooked me
ass-end over appetite
from a half stack of bales,
and before my wind was back,
lifted coils
gently from the straw
and slid the diamondback
off into the whispering grass.
And to my “Kill it,”
his dusty voice,
“There’s worse than snakes.”

Education: M.F.A. Wichita State University (Creative Writing 2006); M.A. and B.S. in English, Emporia State University English (1986, 1984); A.A. Dodge City Community College (1982).
Career: He has worked as a carpenter’s assistant, stage coach driver, bus station attendant, and journalist; for the last 17 years he has taught at Hutchinson Community College. His books are Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley 2002, Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book) and Into Distant Grass (chapbook Midwest Quarterly, 2008). He received a Kansas Arts Commission fellowship.
____________________________________________________________________________________________© 2008 Denise Low, AAPP 25 © 2002 William Sheldon “A Kind of Seeing”