JEFF TIGCHELAAR PUBLISHES DEBUT COLLECTION

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/

DENISE LOW INTERVIEWS KS. POET LAUREATE WYATT TOWNLEY

The Kansas Humanities Council announced Wyatt Townley as the fourth Poet Laureate of Kansas on May 2. She will serve a two-year term as advocate for literary arts across the state. Her most recent book of poetry, The Afterlives of Trees (Woodley, 2012), won a Kansas Notable Book Award. Townley is a yoga teacher and dancer as well as a poet. She is author of Kansas City Ballet: The First Fifty Years (Kansas City Star Books, 2007). Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2009-11, interviews Townley about poetry and how it relates to yoga and dance.

Denise Low: Yoga, dance, and poetry all fit organic forms into set order. In what way(s) do you see your poems like dance steps or poses?

Wyatt Townley: Steps and poses.... Neither. I’m anti-pose. But dance and yoga come into play all the time in my poetry. The problems in composition are similar. What is inevitable and organic that flows from the last motion—or word—to the next one? That’s a very basic place to start. In poetry, just as in choreography, the next word must be born out of the word before it. There’s an inevitability there—which is not the same as predictability—that creates flow and motion. From another angle, dancers and yogis are always seeking to move beyond the edges of the body into space. The poem, too, has to get off the page. It can’t just lie there. Its instincts are kinetic.
Denise Low: How is verse different from art forms that use the body?
Wyatt Townley: Books last longer than bodies. When I was a kid, I thought that poetry and dance were at opposite ends of the spectrum—poetry arguably the most refined of the verbal arts, dance arguably the most refined of the nonverbal. Pursuing them both felt like straddling two worlds, doing the splits! I don’t think that anymore. The body is a poem, writing itself with every breath. And poems affect us physically, a la Dickinson’s crown chakra opening: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” These days I’m interested in big-picture connections, not small-picture distinctions.
Denise Low: Your poetry manipulates space in so many ways. In "Skeleton Key," for example, you write "Insert the tailbone/into the sky/turn slowly, unlocking." Are you thinking spatially as you compose?
Wyatt Townley: Partly. For me the poem itself comes out of a sense of spaciousness, something—somewhere—bigger. And as poets we’re trying to translate that expansion to the page—through compression! Another paradox. Part of what we are doing in yoga is expanding time and space. We’re exploring the space between things—between breaths, between heartbeats, between vertebrae, between the eyebrows, and so on. By retraining the breath and slowing it down, we find we can also cover more territory with it; so we get both more time (slower) and more space (deeper). The same thing happens in the poem, through the use of breath and white space—all the little choices one makes down the page in terms of placement, rhythm, sound, punctuation, enjambment, stanza break—either slowing down or speeding up time. So as poets we’re exploring the use of time in terms of space, just as dancers do. The book-length poem I’m working on now, called “Rewriting the Body,” runs with this idea.
Denise Low: How does the sky influence your sense of space?
Wyatt Townley: We think of the sky as above us, but of course we’re in the sky and the sky’s in us. We breathe it in and out, and rearrange it with every step. This is still revelatory to me. I’ve always been fascinated by space, as so many of us Kansans are, with our great view of the stars. My dad was an amateur astronomer and would spend hours setting up his telescope so he could help us understand where we are. I’m still working on that! But you’re right—and I’d never really thought of it in this way—space is a big theme for me, from personal space in and around the body all the way out to the cosmos, micro to macro.
Denise Low: Paul Muldoon has a lovely essay about the moment before a poem comes into being. What is that moment, that tipping point, for you?
Wyatt Townley: It’s an intriguing question, but I’m going to give a practical answer. For me the poem starts with a decision to sit down, the old “Apply the seat of the pants to the chair.” Maybe that’s the distinction between poetry and dance: the poet’s gotta sit down, the dancer’s gotta stand up. It’s a good mix.
Denise Low: Here is one of my favorite poems from The Afterlives of Trees (Woodley):

Tracks by Wyatt Townley

 Follow the children who follow the creek.

Their bright clothes fold into trees

and they’re gone. How you’ve grown—

too slow to keep up, too dogged

to turn back. Forget the list in your pocket.

See what you’ve missed. Deep in the woods

the wind erases the way you came. All paths

lead here. Beside you the tracks of a wild turkey,
 
and earlier, a raccoon retracing its steps.
There a deer paused, perfect disguise,

and here we all are, leaving ourselves

behind. We fold into trees and are gone.
     (copyright Wyatt Townley, reprinted with permission)

More information about Wyatt Townley and the poet laureate program: http://kansashumanities.org/programs/poet-laureate-of-kansas/

Matt Porubsky Reading with Eric McHenry, Denise Low, Bill Sheldon, Brian Daldorph

& Kevin Rabas, Dennis Etzel Jr,Jason Wesco, Mary Stone Dockery and Jeff Tigchelaar
Reading Friday, November 4th 5:30-7ish pm to celebrate the new book by Matt, at Blue Panet Cafe Nov. 4, Topeka
Blue Planet Café 

The Three Times in My Life when I’ve Read William Stafford’s ‘Key of C – An Interlude For Marvin’ from Kansas Poems

We were on the road between our homes
speaking only of each other, instances and secrets.
You read to me on the way,
your voice elliptical in turns
and surroundings of stanzas and statements.
I saw the poem first through your voice:
all of them telling their futures,
their secrets to come to hold them fast to time.
I had to cry for their fates.
It seemed like our moment was in theirs,
the uncertainty of our timelines placed to sight.
She was born sometime later.
I had forgotten the poem as time travelled us
toward embraces of three.
I stumbled upon it and was stopped like a short breath.
I saw the poem through the both of you,
close by on the bed, in your light and sighing
moment of arms and nothing but that.
I had to cry for you and them
in the gathered instant of gathered fortune,
knowing how tightly you would always hold her.
The sun shined setting through
the windshield of the locomotive.
The air-conditioning and my shaded safety-glasses glinted it away.
I found the book of poems in my bag and read the poem again.
I was sure of my emotions in my surroundings of reflecting steel,
ballast black from loose oil and a co-worker stranger beside me.
But still, behind my glasses I had to cry for the poem.
The gentle giving. The gentle giving.
I put the book away and turned from the stranger,
bent to reach for a bottle of water from the ice bucket,
not offering one to him.
The poem swirled into me as cold water.

Matthew Porubsky’s first book of poetry, voyeur poems, published by Coal City Press, was the winner of the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award in 2006. His second book of poetry, Fire Mobile (The Pregnancy Sonnets,) is  from Woodley Memorial Press. He lives in Topeka where he works as a freight conductor for the Union Pacific Railroad.!
Links to articles about Fire Mobile (The Pregnancy Sonnets):
http://carynmirriamgoldberg.wordpress.com/tag/matt-porubsky/
http://www.lawrence.com/news/2011/oct/07/mans-eye-view-poet-matthew-porubsky-releases-colle/

****Denise Low and Catherine Anderson read Friday, Nov. 12, 8 pm The Writers Place of Kansas City. Low will read from her new book Ghost Stories of the New West: From Einstein’s Brain to Geronimo’s Boots.


****Woodley Memorial Press of Washburn University publishes Ghost Stories of the New West, by Denise Low. Prose and poetry about disembodied spirits who still inhabit the frontier. Low, 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate, is an award-winning writer with a sense of history and deep geography. Available at the Raven, Jayhawk Ink, and Prairie Lights, as well as Amazon.com. ISBN 978-0-9817334-9-4

For the Maiden Aunts and Bachelor Uncles

For an uncle called Big Miller
killed by Lenape Indians in Ohio.
For Lenape uncles killed by Big Miller.

For Cherokee aunts killed by Jackson’s soldiers.
For soldiers drowned by Water Monsters—
the antlered giant fish in deep rivers.

For the cowboy Edwin who died of typhoid.
He lost his chance to gamble, brawl, sin,
and be redeemed.

For the nameless toddler great-uncle
who tipped the boiling coffee pot
and scalded himself to death.

For Great-Aunt Annie who passed
amid a great rush of breath
taking also her sister’s Christian faith.

For those dead from snakebite, pox,
frostbite, horse kick, stampede, cholera
gunshot, grass fire, and bad water.

For their sunken burials on grassy hillsides.
Dawn sunlight erases chiseled names
and embellishments of marble wild roses.

Lindsey Martin-Bowen Publishes STANDING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

This is a new Woodley Press publication, available at this link: http://www.washburn.edu/reference/woodley-press/Reviews/standingedge.htm

From Martin-Bowen's new book, here is another perspective on the state with glaciated, wooded hills in the east and high plains in the west--and human drama at every mile in between.


The Soul of Kansas Might be a Scream

You hear it late at night when the moon
becomes a sliver in someone’s dream,
and ripples in the lake settle
into streams lined with algae and bass.
It might come from John Brown’s ghost
or the specter haunting the WPA castle at Coronado Heights.
It could be wails from Bob Elliot, who died in a wreck
on the red trail winding down from the peak.

Perhaps it’s the lonely moan of a locomotive
over plains where fires break through nights.
Maybe the shriek emanates from the cemetery
edged by yuccas where the snow never stays,
or from the western ridge where wolves cry
and geese wing through wide, blood-red skies.