The book launch for Jeff Tigchelaar’s
first book, Certain Streets at an
Uncertain Hour, will be June 19, 2015, 7 p.m.at The Raven Book Store, 6 E
7th St, Lawrence, Kansas. Do not miss this fine poet if you are in the area!
I first met Jeff Tigchelaar when he won
the prestigious Langston Hughes literary award for poetry in 2010. As a judge,
I saw a good sampling of his writings. At the presentation, I asked about his name,
which I could not spell worth a darn—it is Dutch for “tile-layer.” This
demystified the name even if it created more questions about Dutch triplings of
consonants and doublings of the same vowel. Tigchelaar, born and raised in
Michigan, is a former newspaper reporter, editor, and stay-at-home dad. After
residing in Lawrence, Kansas, he is moving with his family to West Virginia
(2015).
His writing is deceptively simple with
sophisticated line breaks that tilt his ideas one way and then another. He can
begin with ordinary moments, like take-off on a runway, and subvert the normalcy
into surreal images. “Fly Frontier,” below, reframes flight and creates further
drama, as though the passenger carrier were a space “capsule.” Then he shifts
to the bizarre image of a “yawping wolf,” an ordinary logo, perhaps, but seen
in context of a death-defying flight, it adds a sinister tone. Tigchelaar keeps
pushing the nightmarish quality of the experience as the plane is “drastically
tilting” and the “slide” wing could lead straight to disaster. The narrator
sidesteps the drop into an abyss at the end with an adroit shift to the
conditional, the what-if. He finds “light” at the end of “darkness.” For another
day, the poet and the reader both escape mortality. The title, the “New
Frontier” of John F. Kennedy as well as the “Final Frontier” of Star Trek, resonates with layers of
cultural suggestions.
Fly Frontier
I’m in a manmade
capsule hurtling through the sky
so if I die I probably
deserve it.
It’s early
and still dark, but
Kansas City
is all lit up. There’s
a yawping
wolf outside my window
painted on the wingtip,
eyes closed, muzzle up,
how whimsical.
No, how foreboding. And
why is it so
choppy? God, we’ve only
just taken off. Now we’re
drastically tilting
and the plane wing
looks like a slide.
If this were a dream, I’d
step out
and plunge into the
darkness of a Monday
and fall until everything
was light.
© 2015 Jeff Tigchelaar,
reprinted with permission
Full disclosure—I blurbed this book, and
I’m happy Eric McHenry, Jim Daniels, and Wyatt Townley joined me in support of
this fine writer. My comments were: “Jeff Tigchelaar speaks directly to his
readers about politics, moral choices, and the beauty he finds in an imperfect world.
This debut collection shows a poet ready to suggest solutions. Join him as he
makes a difference.” Yes, Tigchelaar is a poet with lots of layers working at
once. Woodley Press of Topeka published Certain
Streets at an Uncertain Hour, available online for $12.00 and at the Raven
Bookstore in Lawrence.
Tigchelaar blogs for XYZ Topeka Magazine and publishes poetry
widely. His poems have been published in Kansas, Canada, Germany, and Wales, as
well as on bar coasters. Journal publications include Pleiades, Coal City Review, Flint Hills Review, Flyway, Fugue, Rhino, North
American Review and The Laurel Review, and anthologies such as Best New Poets 2011, Verse Daily, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation
with William Stafford, and New Poetry
from the Midwest. His work received a fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.
His poem “One Way of Looking at Thirteen Blackbirds” was reviewed at www.cellpoems.org. More information is at his website, http://jefftigchelaar.weebly.com/ and
http://www.kansaspoets.com/ks_poets/tigchelaar_jeff.htm
His blog Stay-at-Home Pop Culture, is published by XYZ Magazine in Topeka http://xyztopeka.com/xyz-blogs/stay-at-home-pop-culture-up-and-away/
""Jo
McDougall has inspired readers with her work for more than 30 years. Her
collected poems, In the Home of the Famous Dead, presents all her books, from
1983 through 2010. McDougall,
a 20-year resident of the Kansas City area, now resides in Arkansas. Both
places recur in the writings. Each poem is an essential lesson about how to
find joy in this beautiful but blemished existence. 
