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

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

Recent Poetry Book: Dan Jaffe and William Sheldon

Recent books of interest are Dan Jaffe's On the Way to the Polls: Poems (City Light Publishing PO Box 6911, Leawood KS 66206, $16) and Bill Sheldon's Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill Press Chapbook Series #5, 340 N. Fountain, Suite 1, Wichita KS 67208, jjenkinson2@cox.net, $5.00).

Jaffe presents a collection of politically suggestive poems. His intense lyrics demand attention to local and national politics, but always with attention to the personal. A beggar on the street has a face that is a “wince.” Carjackers walk the streets. Jaffe takes his readers through infernos of poverty, racism, classism, and sexism. This is not a poetry of ornamentation, but rather of reality and survival while surrounded by insanity. This is an essential guidebook to the 21st century.

Sheldon's chapbook consists of 12 central poems that first apeared in Midwest Quarterly (summer 2008). (Stephen Meats continues to do an amazing job as poetry editor for MQ.) Sheldon is one of the most poignant and powerful of the grasslands poets. His previous book Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley 2002), was a KC Star Noteworthy Book. This is a sophisticated writer, who honed his craft with Albert Goldbarth, and he is the subject of an Ad Astra poetry broadside (posted on this blog). This new book is not to be missed.

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”