AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #19

BARRY BARNES (1960 - )

Here is a poet who performs poetry as well as he writes poetry. I first heard him read at a poetry slam fifteen years ago, and I was impressed with how much substance he put into his spoken word creations. He reads and performs often in northeast Kansas, often in support of good causes like Art Togeau and the Langston Hughes Literary Awards.
To hear Barry Barnes, attend a performance August 1st 6pm-8pm at the Union Pacific Railroad Depot, 402 N. 2nd St. Also appearing are the Bopaphonics, Zydeco Tougeau, Matt Fowler, and myself. You can download spoken word and music at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=186910480

Barnes draws on the poetic tradition and enlivens it each time he performs. At a recent performance, I heard Barnes recite from memory a number of poems by Langston Hughes, Robert Burns, and Shakespeare. This writer also appears on spoken word recordings that improvise on Hughes’s poetry. He writes about very contemporary themes, like Hughes, yet at the same time and on the same stage, he reaches back to previous centuries.
“Kicked to the Curb” is a rarity in American English verse: a successful social protest poem. The straightforward dialect is made powerful by parallel yet varied comments. This is not a simple anti-war poem—the poet lists some plausible reasons for the conflict in the second stanza. The costs of war, nonetheless, are clear. A political poem shares qualities with narrative poetry: embedded within these images is a storyline. Finally, this is a moral comment that protests the treatment of returning veterans, especially those with war wounds. The title has shock-effect, or hyperbole (exaggeration) to move readers to action.

KICKED TO THE CURB

An army of amputees
return from overseas.
Traumatic brain injuries:
can’t hear, can’t think, can’t speak, can’t see.
post traumatic stress syndrome
can’t concentrate, can’t eat, can’t sleep.
Unexplained disorders and diseases
and what for?
What is the reason for this war?

Revenge for 9-11.
To free Iraqis.
War on terror.
Cheap oil.

When all our soldiers finally come home
will they be forgotten and kicked to the curb?


Education: Barry Barnes is a life-long resident of Lawrence, where he attended public schools.
Career: This poet’s book of poetry, We Sleep in a Burning House, is from Mammoth Publications (2008, http://www.mammothpublications.com/ ). He adapted poetry of Langston Hughes to musical form for Plain and Simple Truth (Chameleon Productions 2007). He appears with the Bopaphonics on these Chameleon spoken-word productions: Let America Be America Again (2006), Channeling Langston (2005), P-Bop (2004). Super Cow is another ensemble CD. His poems appear in the compilation Kaw! Kaw! Kaw! (Gonk Monster and Chameleon Productions 2000). Barnes produced CDs: Blue in a Red State (with Stacey Fox 2003) and Straight Out of Kansas (2005). He works for Hallmark in Lawrence. See http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=186910480 .
____________________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP19 © 2008 Barry Barnes, “Kicked to the Curb.” © 2007 Charles Goff III, photograph.

Writer's Digest Interview with Denise Low: Link

Hi, I'm drawing your attention to the blog of Robert Brewer, Poetic Asides, which is a great resource for writers. He has discussion topics like how to write a biography for editors and other practical advice. He honored me with a request for an interview, which is here:

http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Exclusive+Interview+With+Poet+Laureate+Denise+Low.aspx

Here is a sample of the interview:
"So, what it's like being a State Poet Laureate.......?
"Being poet laureate has helped me in so many ways. I can now articulate more clearly how my role as a poet is community-based. All poets are advocates for the arts. All poets work with a centuries-old tradition of wisdom. We add our own pieces to that tradition, from our time, and that great river keeps flowing forward. As a poet laureate, I have become more excited about younger poets and their upcoming roles of spokespersons for their generations. All poets are revolutionaries, creating “it” new each morning."

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #18: DIANE GLANCY (1941 - )

Diane Glancy is the new Ad Astra Poetry Project selection. If you live in the Kansas City area, you may want to see her and Patricia Lawson read their poetry on Tuesday, July 15, at the Johnson County Central Resource Library, 7 pm. The library is at 9875 W. 87th St., Overland Park, Kansas. Her recent book Asylum in the Grasslands (University of Arizona Press) is a finalist for the William Rockhill Nelson Awards.

Diane Glancy, of Prairie Village, Kansas, has German/English and Cherokee heritage. She writes about her family, American Indian histories, and the Midwest. Her novel Pushing the Bear is one of the best known accounts of the Trail of Tears. Her novel Stone Heart is about Sacajawea.
She often blends experimental forms with strong storytelling elements. “Indian Summer,” for example, tells the story of a farm break-up, but also it suggests the season’s changes and historic changes. She uses a pastiche of images to suggest the process of time.
The images—farmhouse, leaves, bugs, cornfields, dress, tools, and barn—appear on a fictitious country road. The narrator drives by them and sees an “open sea” and finally the “white iceberg” barn. The barn’s isolation is highlighted by the comparison to ice, and also the narrator is alone within time and “migrating daily.”

INDIAN SUMMER

There’s a farm auction up the road.
Wind has its bid in for the leaves.
Already bugs flurry the headlights
between cornfields at night.
If this world were permanent,
I could dance full as the squaw dress
on the clothesline.
I would not see winter
in the square of white yard-light on the wall.
But something tugs at me.
The world is at a loss and I am part of it
migrating daily.
Everything is up for grabs
like a box of farm tools broken open.
I hear the spirits often in the garden
and along the shore of corn.
I know this place is not mine.
I hear them up the road again.
This world is a horizon, an open sea.
Behind the house, the white iceberg of the barn.

Education: B.A. in English, University of Missouri, 1964; M.A., Central State University, 1983; M.F.A., University of Iowa Writers Workshop, 1988.
Career: Diane Glancy has written over 20 books of poetry from Michigan State, Salt, University of Arizona and other presses; over 20 books of prose; plus a number of plays produced and published. She is professor of English at Macalester College, where she is taking sabbatical/early retirement. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lannan foundation, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, and others.
________________________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP18 © 2007 Diane Glancy,”Indian Summer” in Asylum in the Grasslands (University of Arizona Press). © 2005 Denise Low, photograph.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #17

GORDON PARKS (1912 - 2006)


Gordon Parks, a native of Ft. Scott, Kansas, is best known as a photographer and filmmaker, but he also wrote books of poetry. In an interview he claimed he liked writing poetry best, but making a living directed his energies to other fields. Like Parks, many arts practitioners find writing poetry helps them to learn techniques that adapt to other uses. Parks was adept at screenwriting, fiction, memoir, essays, and narrative photography as well as poetry. He published 20 books.

The poem “The Funeral” shows Parks’ ability to compress a story into a few strong images. Homecoming is an archetypal situation, like the biblical Prodigal Son’s return. With three imaginative—or “leaping” (to use Robert Bly’s term)— comparisons, the poet shows the shift from childhood perspective to adulthood. The “mountains,” “raging rivers,” and “wide roads” the narrator knew as a boy have become “hills,” “streams,” and “a crooked path of dust.” Like a sonnet, this poem pivots near the end, to the true drama of mortality. The narrator contemplates not only his childhood home, but also the final home, a resting place in a cemetery. The depiction of his father as a “giant” and the weight of the coffin imply a larger story about character. The mythic father kept his exaggerated status to both the child and the man who narrates this. This appears to be an autobiographical poem, but even when the facts and intent are autobiographical, the artifice of verse makes the narrator into a somewhat fictionalized character who speaks directly to readers through carefully chosen words.

THE FUNERAL

After many snows I was home again.
Time had whittled down to mere hills the great mountains
of my childhood.
Raging rivers I once swam trickled now like gentle streams
and the wide road curving on to China or Kansas City
or perhaps Calcutta
had withered to a crooked path of dust
ending abruptly at the county burial ground.
Only the giant that was my father remained the same.
A hundred strong men strained beneath his coffin
when they bore him to his grave.

Education: Gordon Parks attended public schools in Ft. Scott, Kansas, and Minneapolis.
Career: Parks' writing credits include The Learning Tree (1963). Collections of poetry (some with photographs) are: A Poet and His Camera (Viking 1968), Whispers of Intimate Things (Viking 1971), In Love (Lippincott 1971), Moments Without Proper Names (Viking 1975), Arias of Silence (Bulfinch Press 1994), Glimpses Toward Infinity (Little, Brown 1996), A Star for Noon: An Homage to Women in Images, Poetry and Music (Bulfinch 2000), Eyes with Winged Thoughts (Atria 2006). The Gordon Parks Center is http://gordonparkscenter.org/
__________________________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP17 © 2008 Gordon Parks Foundation “The Funeral.”

Moments from the Great Bend Poetry Rendezvous Sponsored by Chariton Review, June 20-22

George Martin and Bob Joy read together, left

Denise Low enjoys the Barton County Arts Center setting, above, left

Kyle of Pueblo, Col., reads at the open mic

Mary Wharff Comments on Caryn Goldberg's Poem "Spring Song"

From an email to Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg:

"I wanted to let you know what had really struck me in your poem -- and yay, that gave me a chance to go back and be with it again this morning. What I think I love is that it is, really, a "being" poem, a life poem. Completely human. Why do we keep asking? That last line is so startling and right, right, right on the money. So it really gets me in my heart, after truly delighting my head, and my writer soul -- like I barely can finish it because observations and the words you choose make me want to write. Seeing the space but not figuring in the space -- precise and incredible way of describing that just woke up disorientation. "wet as fire" -- man, things like this thrill me and I get almost breathless with wanting to try it myself. In the second stanza, I enjoyed wings and thunderheads, but was really grabbed when that led to a crashing car, a lamp post, slivering bark .... what did wake the narrator? I really like that you include the car, move into the human world. Third stanza, here, your word choice especially grabs me. insects ... like breath! birds LOOSEN the sky! Wowee -- how'd you do that? Then again, you go human, kisses stop. And then, oh, those cracked stones, a long time! And I just wasn't expecting where that stanzas goes -- to the minutae, to the "this is all it really is" .... And maybe that's what wakes us up most often, who knows. I just love it Caryn, and have printed it out and will keep it forever as something to aspire to. Thanks for the inspiration! Mary"

WHY POETRY MATTERS: Reprinted from the Chronicle Review

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i42/42b01601.htm
From the issue dated June 27, 2008
Why Poetry Matters
By JAY PARINI
Poetry doesn't matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.
In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands.
In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult." That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century — or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.
Yet poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers. I've always known that myself, having read and written poems for at least four decades. Every morning I begin the day with a book of poems open at the breakfast table. I read a poem, perhaps two. I think about the poetry. I often make notes in my journal. The reading of the poem informs my day, adds brightness to my step, creates shades of feeling that formerly had been unavailable to me. In many cases, I remember lines, whole passages, that float in my head all day — snatches of song, as it were. I firmly believe my life would be infinitely poorer without poetry, its music, its deep wisdom.
One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I was in Morocco recently, and a devout Muslim mentioned to me that the Prophet Muhammad, in his book of sayings, the Hadith, had said as much. But the Koran also teaches, I was told, that poets are dangerous, and that decent people should avoid them. That reminded me of Plato, who wished to ban all poets from his ideal republic because he thought they were liars. Reality, for Plato, was an intense, perfect world of ideas. The material world represents reflections of that ideal, always imperfect. Artistic representations of nature were thus at several removes from the ideal, hence suspicious.
But Plato also had other worries about poets. In the Republic, he complained that they tend to whip up the emotions of readers in unhelpful ways. They stir feelings of "lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure." Poetry "feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up," he said, while only the "hymns of the gods and praises of famous men" are worthy of readers. The law and reason are far better.
Although Plato didn't quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.
Teachers and professors have long considered poetry a useful part of the curriculum, and one of the last places where poetry remains a central part of the culture is the classroom. To a degree, poets have been "domesticated" by the academic village, welcomed into its grove. Frost was among the first poets to get a big welcome on the campus, and he taught at Amherst College for much of his life, with stints elsewhere. He spent his last decades crisscrossing the country, appearing at colleges, reading and lecturing to large audiences. He believed firmly in poetry as a means of shaping minds in important ways.
In "Education by Poetry," one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far as to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, "you don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you." Those are very large claims.
Poets do make large claims, and they are usually a bit exaggerated. In his "Defense of Poetry," Shelley famously wrote: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." I prefer the twist on that offered by a later poet, George Oppen, who wrote: "Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world."
I don't especially want poets to make laws or rule the world. For the most part, they would perform very badly in those public ways. The world of the poet is largely an interior world of the intellect and the emotions — where we mostly live, in fact. And poetry bolsters that interior realm. In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become "so violent," both physically and spiritually. He succinctly defined poetry as "a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives."
The pressure of reality is indeed fierce, and yet poetry supplies a kind of counterpressure, pushing back against external forces that would overwhelm and obliterate the individual. Poets give a voice to the world in ways previously unacknowledged. We listen to the still, small voice of poetry when we read a poem, and that voice stands in ferocious contrast to the clamor in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society's explosions.
I always define poetry for my students as a language adequate to our experience — to our full experience, taking into account the interior valleys, the peaks, the broad plains. It gives voice to tiny thoughts, to what the Scottish poet and scholar Alastair Reid, in a lovely poem, calls "Oddments Inklings Omens Moments." One does not hope for poetry to change the world. Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for Yeats that "poetry makes nothing happen." That is, it doesn't shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn't usually send masses into the streets to protest a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.
Language defines us as human beings. We speak, therefore we exist. We have the miraculous ability to gesture in words, to make statements and requests, to express our feelings, to construct arguments, to draw conclusions. Poetic language matters because it is precise and concrete, and draws us closer to the material world. In Nature, Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called "spiritual." He puts forward three principles worth considering:
"Words are signs of natural facts."
"Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts."
"Nature is the symbol of the spirit."
Those statements formed a platform of sorts for the Transcendental movement, which studied nature closely for signs of spiritual life. The principles remain worthy of reflection. At some level, words suggest natural facts: "rock," "river," "bird," "cloud." The leap comes in the second statement, which posits a spiritual world. One can, I think, leap beyond conventional notions of spirituality here and acknowledge a deep interior world wherein each of us lives, no matter what our religious persuasion. I think of a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." The mind has those heights and depths, and few have not sensed them, stood in awe of their terrifying majesty. That is the spiritual realm, which one can extend in any direction. Nature becomes, at last, Emerson's "symbol of the spirit," and poetry itself embodies that nature. It is part of it. It mirrors the vast interior world, populates it with images and phrases, provides a basis for the reality of individual lives.
I could not live without poetry, which has helped me to live my existence more concretely, more deeply. It has shaped my thinking. It has enlivened my spirit. It has offered me ways to endure my life (I'm rephrasing Dr. Johnson here), even to enjoy it.
Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published in April by Yale University Press.
http://chronicle.comSection: The Chronicle ReviewVolume 54, Issue 42, Page B16

Judith Roitman publishes No Face with First Intensity Press

Judith Roitman's first full-length book selects from her chapbooks Diamond Notebooks (nominative press collective) and Slippage (Potes & Poets); in addition she adds another hundred or so pages. This is a generous collection of almost 200 pages.

Her inventiveness is apparent in every piece, as well as leaps--not just from conscious to subconscious in the Robert Bly sense, but leaps as in the sense of reality colliding in too-real, too-unexpected combinations. She is an original.

Here is "Tunnel" (p. 158):

You enter into it but it's somewhere else.
I don't know how you live in your body.
I don't know who lives in your body.
There's too much music.
You can't get away from it.

I like how the pronoun "you" slides between determinate and indeterminate. Is this the impersonal "one," as in "you know"? Or is this a second person she addresses? Or the reader, you?

No easy answers with this poet. And another oddity: the book will be for sale on the Target website. Has Lee Chapman of First Intensity signed a deal with Target? Mass distribution?
I never know what to expect next.

Here are blurbs from the back cover:

"With a mind opening up to anything and everything, Judith Roitman records the living facts of direct personal experience as they happen. She does this with the discipline of straightforward, simple language, '... although the temptation is always to hold onto something ... but still the refusal to change anything, not even one word, as when the mind has stopped noticing that it notices prematurely...' Even when they are framed by the memory or narrative, events or words are allowed the seemingly absurd juxtapositions of different levels of interconnectedness. A brilliant collection"--Janet Rodney.

"Roitman's distinct and elegant line runs through a large variety of forms, breaking now at close intervals, now at deep breaths, now at the margin, now at the period. The line disappears altogether, into white space that is equally distinct, leaving the words in array. Then this unbroken space becomes a matrix for the whole. The result is a poetry of ongoing spiritual awakening, continual without progression; a redemption from the 'false hope set up by grammar' whereby one is not so much blessed as nonplussed. Which is enough"--Cyrus Console.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #16 CARYN MIRRIAM-GOLDBERG (1959- )

One of the most active poets in Kansas is Lawrencian Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. She conducts writing workshops and readings across the state. She teaches poetry to journal keepers, songwriters, lower-income youth and adults, and cancer survivors. As a professor in a low-residency college, she reaches students across the nation. Further, she is a founder of the transformative language arts curriculum, which promotes spoken and sung language as “a tool for personal and community transformation.” She has a global perspective on poem-making.

Mirriam-Goldberg’s verse plumbs the depths of consciousness. In “Spring Song” she situates the poem between waking and dream states. The poem also hovers between night and day; between winter and summer; and between imagination and reality. Sky, gravity, trees, birds, and stones are elements of nature—and so also are moments like sudden waking from a dream and love. The ending image of a stone, solid yet carrying an internal crack for years, is yet another paradox. What seems solid may shatter at any moment. This is fertile ground for the poet.

SPRING SONG

What it is to wake at night not watered down
in overdrawn voices from the day, to see the space
and not figure in the space, to fall backwards
in a dream and realize it’s a dream?

What waits, wet as fire, on the end of the line?
The rushing of wings, the billowing of thunderheads,
the crashing of car into lamp post, the slivering of bark
from tree, the waking suddenly for no reason?

Meanwhile, insects reproduce themselves like breath,
birds loosen the sky with flight,
stratus clouds streak across the moon,
kisses stop, and stones break apart
so easily that it’s clear they’ve been cracked inside
for a long time. Each life a transference of water.
Each act just a way to move light around.

Even knowing this, why can’t the heart stop asking?

Education: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg was raised in Brooklyn and Manalapan, New Jersey. She came to the Midwest to attend the University of Missouri (B.A. History, 1985) and the University of Kansas (M.A. in Creative Writing 1988 and Ph.D. in English, 1992).

Career: Mirriam-Goldberg’s books of poetry are Lot’s Wife (Woodley 2000); Animals in the House (Woodley 2004) and Reading the Body (Mammoth 2004). Since 1996 she has been a professor at Goddard College in Vermont, working with the Individualized MA program. She founded and coordinated the Transformative Language Arts conference and Goddard’s degree emphasis. She also has written books for teenagers, Write Where You Are and a biography of Sandra Cisneros. Her blog is carynmirriamgoldberg@blogspot.com. Her website is http://www.writewhereyouare.org/ .
______________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP16 © 2006, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg “Spring Song,” Animals in the House, Woodley.

In Memoriam Dallas Wiebe (1930-2008)

Lee Chapman of First Intensity Press has brought to my attention the passing of Dallas Wiebe, born and raised in Newton, Kansas. I recall conversations with him during this 1988 Kansas writers conference in Wichita, as well as a few other meetings in the years after that. I took these photographs of Wiebe and his wife Virginia in 1988. The obituary in the Cincinnati paper is at this link: http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080512/NEWS0104/805120329/1060/COL02

Wiebe founded the Cincinnati Poetry Review and edited the first twenty-four issues; he also founded and anchored the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati. I remember the devotion of his students and colleagues. Most of all, though, I remember Wiebe's ingenious, profoundly ironic--even twisted--writings, mostly published by Burning Deck Press. "Night Flight to Stockholm" is about a careerist writer who has sacrificed his quota of body parts to win the ultimate literary prize; all that remains of his body is a torso (Going to the Mountain, Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1988).

Wiebe and I once talked about the way some small Kansas towns have developed an industry for caring for terminally ill folks--insurance form experts, health care, and so forth. This is background for the story "Elegy," where an assisted care facility is "Howdy Doody Villa." Doug Bolling in American Book Review wrote of this book: "Wiebe takes us beyond Joycean, modernist pieties into a somewhat different game, one in which the text works to liberate us from both our bondings to the general culture and our more or less uncritical, undeconstructed, moiling around in high culture (literary), heavy-handedness. The effort succeeds for the most part because of the fine balance of the style, the modulations of irony and intensity, and the sheer inventiveness" (July-Aug. 1989).

Wiebe's best known book of poetry is the chapbook The Kansas Poems (Cincinnati Poetry Review Press, 1987; reprinted in No 5, 2006). He also published Skyblue's Essays (Providence, Burning Deck Press, 1995); Skyblue the Badass (a novel, New York: Doubleday-Paris Review Editions, 1969); The Transparent Eye-Ball (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1982); Our Asian Journey (Waterloo, Ontario: mlr Editions Canada, 1997); The Vox Populi Street Stories; and On the Cross (poems, Cascadia Press, 2005). In 2004 he began a series of self-published chapbooks: The Saying of Abraham Nofziger: A Guide for the Perplexed (2004); The Nofziger Letters (with Pamela Baillargeon, 2005); The Nofziger Letters II (2006); and The Sayings of Abraham Nofziger II: An Enchiridion for the Pious (2007).

Wiebe included Christmas letters with his mailings of these last chapbooks, and his last one, 2007, included this comment:

I'm currently in my old age, aet.77, learning a new trick. I've become an expert in deterioration. It's not exactly an exciting pastime. But it's attractive and inviting because it requires no equipment, no guidebooks, no effort and no cost, except when you have to go to see a doctor. You can practice it anytime and all the time. You just sit around and do it. It's something to do in your old age when your activities are so restricted. It's the easiest skill I've ever learned. I encourage you to give it a try. As Abraham Nofziger says, "Old age and deterioration are figments of the mind that one day become real."

Photographs copyright Denise Low, 2008