Kevin Rabas Curates Ks. Poetry for PoetryBay

Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, assisted by Michael Pelletier, has curated Kansas poems for the

online magazine PoetryBay, connected with Long Island Quarterly. The special section is "A Snapshot of Kansas Poetry." The introduction to the project, “The News, Not Just from Kansas But All the World,” by Pelletier, begins with a quotation from my similar print project of almost 40 years ago: 

      “’Biologists have a technique of plotting a given amount of land and recording every member of a species within it during a specific length of time,’ begins Denise Low’s preface to 30 Kansas Poets (1979). She continues, calling that collection of poems ‘more a record of what is occurring within the perimeters of the state … than an attempt to define or categorize ‘Kansas’ poetry.’ We follow Low here in offering a small sample — perhaps more akin to a snapshot than a record — of contemporary Kansas poetry.

     “As with Low’s collection, it was not possible to include the work of every member of the species writing in Kansas today, though Low herself, a former Poet Laureate of Kansas, is included. Two other former Poets Laureate, as well as the current Poet Laureate, are also represented.”

 The poets are: Brian Daldorph, Adam Jameson J.T. Knoll, Denise Low, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Al Ortolani, Jared Schmitz, Joe Toth, Wyatt Townley, M.R. Pelletier, and Kevin Rabas.  These include Rabas, 3 former Kansas poets laureate (Low, Mirriam-Goldberg, Townley), a librarian, students, teachers of creative writing, and an electric company employee.

Here is one of my own selections from “A Snapshot of Kansas Poetry.” It is from my forthcoming collection

Shadow Light, which has won the 2018 Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Award:

Too Many Green Leaves

Each tree shuffles a deck of cards

one suit each

     gingkoes for hearts

     maples for clubs.

My mother gambles for a last child.

One spring day I am born.

     Oak leaves are broken diamonds.

I turn ten yours old.

     I press scarlet leaves in wax paper

            flatten them with a hot iron.

I turn sixty.      

Each sawtooth

leaf edge

sharpens.

     Hackberries are spades.

Kevin Rabas Finds Lasting Moments in New Prose & Poetry Collection

The summer of 1968, I worked as a temporary postal employee in Emporia, Kansas, my hometown. Fellow workers despised me as a college-student temp, and so I spent my breaks alone, reading poetry in a nearby park. I had once played with the city band in the park's gazebo, and already it showed evidence of change--fresh paint and new benches. Cicadas chorused around me. Dazzle-blue sky patchworked the elms. Solitude was alive. Kevin Rabas catches this sweet taste of small-town life in his new book Songs for my Father: A Collection of Poems and Stories (Meadowlark Press, 2016). The book is authentically regional; it busts stereotypes. For example, golf courses are a natural fit for places where land is cheap, and every Kansas town over 1000 souls has a course. Rabas celebrates the intersection of natural forces—grass fires, here—with golf in this poem:

 

Prairie Hills Course

Hank Jones hauls by the bucketfuls

the black pock-marked eggs, the golf balls

that made it out of the range and into the prairie

and were rolled over by flames, when the country course

was windswept at the edge by fire, a fringe

of late June red and yellow, fire as high as Hank’s waist.

Here, Rabas select images and fragments of narrative to witness this odd, vivid moment. The single sentences sweeps through like a wind gust. Colors are elements of nature as well as gravity, distance, three-dimensional existence. Rabas describes “fire” in terms of human scale, without sentimentality—yet the import is clear. Big skies relegate humans to minor roles.

“Autoshop, Twilight,” “John North Ford—Emporia,” “’67 Mustang Fastback": more artifacts of the historic past occur in well tuned poems and prose. Rabas is a jazz percussionist and writes about music with heart and in-depth knowledge. The book brings back not nostalgia, but rather it restores some memories of perfect beauty. Yes

terday on the street I saw a 1979 AMC AMX in original olive green, mint condition, still a striking muscle car. This book will delight those familiar with the grasslands setting as much as the sight of a forgotten, perfect car. Others are also welcome.

 http://www.meadowlark-books.com/p/songs-for-my-father.html

Talk, Drink, Eat: Writers Conference Poem by Kevin Rabas

I heard Kevin Rabas read this poem about what really goes on at writers' conferences--indeed, many conferences. As AWP board member and former conference chair, I have seen the hard work staffs and organizers put into conferences. First-rate programming is the first step, and the second step is to make sure the bartenders are ready for sober and less sober writers who spend long hours congregating. Despite warnings the bar in Chicago ran out of some essential supplies, for example. People who use words for a living love to talk--no surprise. Talk, Drink, Eat. This poem, from Kevin's forthcoming book Sonny Kenner's Red Guitar (Coal City 2013) is about one writer group's expedition out of the conference hotel to find local flavor:

When the Writers Gather and Drive

 

                                   AWP Austin, for Amy Sage Webb

  

Amy, a foodie, says she knows about this great place

 outside of Austin, and we gather around my car

in the Hilton parking garage, which is lit like a cave.

We can’t get the child’s seat out, and so Amy volunteers

 to sit in it. I have on my first pair of roper cowboy boots

 since I was 12, and I floor it, unintentionally, and we barrel

 out of the Hilton parking garage and into the purple Texas night,

 four writers looking for fine food on the outskirts of town,

 down and around lots of curves and rises and falls in the road,

 Amy, perched like a baby bird, in my toddler’s child seat.

 Like a scene from Wonder Boys, movie of writers and their cars;

 Grady Trip’s trunk holds a dead dog, a tuba, and a set of suitcases perfectly,

 just like in the ad. Although I’m driving, Amy is in the lead, saying,

 “Go left here. Now straight through the next two lights. Now right.”

 Bart is in the backseat with Amy, and he says, “There are almost no

 families with siblings who are writers. The Bronte Sisters,

 the Brothers Grimm, they are the exceptions. We’re alone

 in our families.” “But we’re all brothers and sisters here,” someone says,

 and Jeffrey tilts his ballcap back, and I step a little harder on the pedal,

 and we scale a series of small curves. Like a rollercoaster climbing, we make our way

 up the mountain and to the restaurant that looks like a cabin from the outside.

 Inside, it’s finer than the Ritz, and we take shots in the entrance,

 using my disposable camera, pulled from a pocket and snapped into light.

 This is the life you never hear of, the once a year gathering of the birds,

 of the tribe. There are a bunch of us, say 8000. But we live all over

 the country, and there seem to be no two in one town, people who choose paper

 over television, legal pad and quick pen script over that email or Facebook

 you’re just dying to write, people who watch and write down what

 the neighbors do and do not do, who record the town, in secret, for about 35K a year,

 and sink into ecstasy when a small press picks up what they have written

 and prints it, and it stays in print, in a few libraries and in the homes of friends,

 decades after the writer passes, a record, a sketch of that time, traced and retraced

 until it almost takes on paint, the way revision works. Someone spent a lifetime

 writing and rewriting a moment, a scene depicting your life, and that someone

 is speeding down curves, in a loaded car, full of wine and fine food, the best meal

 they may ever have had, and that is the way of it, once a year, when the writers gather,

 Webb in the coxswain spot, giving directions, as the car sways and rumbles, writes

 its way into the oncoming night.

 

Kevin Rabas co-directs the creative writing program at Emporia State University and is co-editor of Flint Hills Review. He has two books of poetry, Bird’s Horn and Other Poems (Coal City Review Press) and Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano (Woodley Press), a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award Winner. He is a winner of the Langston Hughes award for poetry. "When the Writers Gather and Drive" reprinted with permission of the author. It was first published in Blue Island Review.

WRITING NEWS: EVENTS NOV. 30-DEC. 4, 2010

• Nov. 30  Reading by Kevin Rabas and Cheryl Unruh, Lawrence Public Library and co-sponsored by The Raven Book Store. Poet and jazz musician Kevin Rabas co-directs the creative writing program at Emporia State University and is co-editor of Flint Hills Review. His second book of poetry, Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, was chosen as a 2009 Kansas Notable Book. Award-winning author Unruh’s essays on subjects that Kansans know and love—nature and landscape, weather, seasons, small towns and fond memories of childhood—have been collected into a book, also titled Flyover People. If you too appreciate “life on the ground in a rectangular state,” you will enjoy this book. Unruh is originally from Pawnee Rock, graduated from KU, and now lives in Emporia.
• Dec. 1 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde panel, Johnson County Library, KC, 9875 87th St., 7pm with Robert Butler, film critic for KC Star; Jennifer Phegley, University of Missouri-Kansas City; Robert Trussell, theater critic for KC Star; and Ann Volin, Rockhurst University. Moderator John Mark Eberhart
• Dec. 2 Holiday Big Tent Reading Megan Kaminski (poet), Kelsey Murrell (playwright), Kevin Frost (playwright), Alexis Smith (poet). 7 pm at the Raven Bookstore. See: www.ravenbookstore.com/
• DEC. 3 Dec. 3 Imagination & Place anthology release and reading, Writer's Place in Kansas City, 7 pm Independent arts group since 1999 presents third anthology: Imagination & Place: Seasonings. The theme is spices of life in relation to place. These spices may be herbal or chemical; they may evoke time and cycles. www.imaginationandplace.org & www.writersplace.org
• DEC. 4 Poetry reading by Serina Hearn & Denise Low. 6 pm. Contact deniselow9@hotmail.com for details. Hearn and Low release new books by Woodley Memorial Press of Washburn University. Hearn’s Atlas of Our Birth, a KC Star Notable Book, is her second book. Low’ Ghost Stories of the New West gathers poetry about heritage and frontier history. Here is a poem by Serina Allison Hearn:

 ANGEL

I found her impaled
In midnight’s grey bandages
of mortality,
a garden
pitchfork emerges
from her head,
carpenter nails pounded in deep
paralyze her wings, arms;
and a saw blade -
that miracle of technology
forty-fives below the heart:
keeps her from singing the world anew
as the great Roman road of progress
continues to pave over the memories
of the fallen; their ancient wisdom,
customs, landscapes shattered,
a butterfly, under the hammer
of construction.

AAPP Contest 3 Winners: Robert Day, Kevin Rabas, Kiesa Kay, Diane Wahto

Teal Hunting with Two Old Uncles
by
Robert Day, author of The Last Cattle Drive and We Should Have Come by Water, a chapbook of poetry

September’s never cold enough for ducks and whiskey.
I shoot in Tee-shirt and moccasins
as green wings hustle from pond to pond
in the yellow morning.

My uncles miss chances, drinking
on the bench deep in the blind
swapping stories about Cheyenne Bottoms
and Snow Geese bigger than the moon.

In the afternoon I work shirtless, laying
strips of sod on the blind’s roof,
careful as my mother tiling her kitchen counter.
My uncles sit on campstools whacking at wasps
with rolled up Ducks Unlimited.

That evening I shot two limits: Blue wings
came in low over the decoys. I dropped
a lone Cinnamon at sundown. My uncles
napped on their bench, twitching.
like old hunting dogs loaded with dreams.
#
Eden or Lucas, Kansas
by
Kevin Rabas, author of Bird’s Horn (Coal City Review Press) and End of the Set (Woodley)
as told by my uncle, Charles Keller, who gives tours of the place
“You know where I live? I live right next door to the Garden of Eden.
Up the way’s Paradise, and you go down about a half a mile and you
end up in Hell Crick.” --My grandmother, Bertha (Keller) Rabas

Your father’s mother’s people lived not far
from where old Dinsmoor lies now.
Your grandmother
fed old Dinsmoor’s badgers gingersnaps
Sunday mornings while Dinsmoor mixed cement.

Some called it sacrilege,
some sacrament.
But Dinsmoor was 64,
and figured the Lord
would forgive,
knowing he had so few
flexible years left to live.
Already he was stiffening.

Evenings, before turning in,
Dinsmoor worked
backyard aloe balm
into the cracks in his hands,
fearing his fingers just might crumble
under his wife’s pillow during the night.

He’d spent his whole life
planning the place,
the cabin stacked and mortared
using concrete logs,
the ziggurat for his body
and the body of his wife,
the shed, the garage, the planter,
and Eden above.

Every year,
while Dinsmoor built out back,
we had to borrow
just to put the wheat
back into the ground.

I thought what he built
would last forever.
However, at the start of autumn
when it rains
you can see the faces
of Dinsmoor’s statues
erode so slowly
it pricks your own skin
to watch.

No one knows
how to mix the mortar,
no one learned the secret,
so the arms are falling off of Cain,
the legs off Abel,
the breasts of their wives
are crumbling, Adam’s cane is crooked,
Eve’s hair has fallen,
and the snake’s in need
of complete repair.
#

Gardner Lake Firefighters
by
Kiesa Kay

Our volunteers couldn’t afford a fire truck.
Instead, we had a fire Beetle –
an orange VW beetle with blazing red lights
on top. Mr. Reed, the fire chief,
would leap into that Beetle and zoom
to the rescue, sirens blaring.
The one hose didn’t work too well, so sometimes
neighbors would form bucket brigades
from the lake to the house aflame.
Once when the lake was frozen six inches deep,
some guys threw snowballs at a burning house
while the other guys tried to crack the ice.
Once when a house hadn’t burned too much,
but its owner really needed some money,
the firefighters got together and tore down the porch
before the insurance adjuster got there.
#
The Man Who Never Saw the Light of Day
by
Diane Wahto

Early morning he dresses in the kitchen
while his wife brews coffee on the stove
and packs his lunch pail, spreading mayonnaise
across white bread, filling the red thermos.
The girl sits in the corner at the table.
She is six and what he calls work, she calls fear.
He puts his hard hat on and his light
and walks in the dark to the mine.
In the evening the girl waits on the steps
watching until his dirt-black face gleams
through the dusk. He is always out of sorts,
raving about what it means to be a man,
to pour his sweat and blood into this family.
The woman keeps her head down and doesn’t answer.
Late at night, her harsh voice penetrates the walls.

Now on spring days my father and I
walk around a town so small
it takes us less than an hour to cross it.
On the west side, we pass a monolith
of eroding concrete and steel,
remains of a worked-out mine.
I knew it was a mistake, your ma and me,
after six weeks, but you were on the way by then.
His voice goes funny and dry.
I catch a whiff of rust,
the seductive decay of long-extracted ore.
#