John Moritz 1946-2007

Services are pending for John Moritz--poet, editor, publisher, reading series sponsor. Former editor of Tansy Press, Moritz was himself a fine poet with tuned ear and eye. He sponsored a reading series in the 1980s that brought Tom Raworth, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaeser, and others to Lawrence. For each reading he published a broadside. His Tansy in the 1970s brought important texts into the world, including works of Ken Irby. He entered into the world of text as a practitioner, admirer, midwife, responder.

He was smart and funny. I remember him and wife Sharon consoling me after a divorce. I remember great meals and parties at his house. He leaves me much to think about.

http://www2.ljworld.com/obits/2007/dec/16/john_moritz_iii/

Dear Friends of Poetry:
If you live in the Lawrence area, you can hear Ken Irby read at 7 pm tonight, Dec. 14, at 6 Gallery, 716 1/2 Mass. St. He has been an inspiration to me for decades and a dear friend. He urges us to look more closely at how we perceive and remember experience, both individually and collectively. He is an archeaologist of words. His recent book Studies is available from First Intensity Press, edited by Lee Chapman http://www.firstintensity.com/

Happy holidays, Denise Low

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT 9: KEN IRBY

Photo by Denise Low, 1997

Kenneth Lee Irby (1936 - )

Ken Irby is a Kansas poet who practices projective verse, a form based on physical acts of speechmaking rather than British poetics. Charles Olson of Black Mountain College (1930s-1950s) taught that a line should be the length of a breath. In poetry like Irby’s, the words match human consciousness rather than creating a facsimile of reality. This “open field” style may suggest prose of William Faulkner or James Joyce more than Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Irby was not a student at Black Mountain, but he has had contacts with Black Mountain poets throughout his career. This direction in American writing connects to experimental forms now loosely called “Language” poetry.
Ed Dorn, a former visiting professor at the University of Kansas, was a student of Olson and close friend of Irby. In this elegy, written at Dorn’s death, Irby displaces his emotional grief with an image of farm animals in a bare pasture. The title’s season is near solstice, the darkest, most mysterious time of year, and also a time when losses are most sharply seen.
This poem begins with the animals viewed at a distance, as though they are almost beyond sight. The narrator sees them skewed by the distance—and also perhaps by grief—so that they appear to be performing on hind legs, “a real dog and pony show.” Irby sets this familiar term amongst the more bizarre appearances of the domestic animals. Just when it seems he might explain himself and the soundless “musicians at the window,” he changes direction. He shifts from visual images to sounds—the rhyme between “cray” and “they.” The second section also shifts from animals to plants: “hedge apples” (or osage oranges) at pasture boundary and “night winter cray bushes.” Rather than resolve the poem with a resounding click, he opens it up to new questions.

[For Ed Dorn –2 Apr 1929 – 10 Dec 1999]

in the far back pasture animals have lined up in lament
dog goat pony horse and beyond them
a cow in its astronomical agility
a real dog and pony show
giving tribute back on their hind legs
musicians at the window
lacking the cock his call
the show of the world

along the fence rows in with the hedge apples
the night winter cray bushes are in bloom.
the cray? what are they?
that is their rhyme

Education: Kenneth Irby, born in Bowie, Texas, was raised in Ft. Scott, Kansas. He received an A.M. from Harvard University and M.L.S. from the University of California-Berkeley.
Career: Irby is an English professor at the University of Kansas. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He has awards from the Fund for Poetry and the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry. His books include: Studies (First Intensity Press 2001), Ridge to Ridge (Other Wind Press 2001), Call Steps (Station Hill Press 1992), A Set (Tansy 1983), Orexis (Station Hill Press 1981), Catalpa (Tansy 1972), To Max Douglas (Tansy 1971).
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© 2007 Denise Low, AAPP9. © Kenneth Irby “[For Ed Dorn]” from Studies: Cuts, Shots Takes, 2001. © 2007 Denise Low photo. A downloadable version is available from http://www.kansaspoets.com/

Virtual Trip to Nigeria Over

Thanks to all who emailed and expressed sympathy for my hijacked email account. All is set aright. Denise Low

Kansas Poet May Williams Ward Describes Carry A. Nation

Lana Myers in Newton, Kansas, is working on a book about Kansas poet May Williams Ward. She sent this quotation from Ward about meeting Carry Nation in 1901 at a fraternity house in Lawrence. This is from unpublished manuscript in the Wichita State University collections:

• She was a large tall woman but had a rather motherly look when not engaged in one of her tirades. She had her hatchet in one hand and a Bible in the other, part of the time, but laid them both down on a table to walk up determinedly to two boys who were coming in the door just starting to douse their cigarettes. She snatched them from the boys’ mouths and held them up and out as if vermin, while she talked about their harmfulness and sinfulness. She told the girls that it would injure our children-to-be if we should dare to smoke, and we should even not marry a man who smoked, for heredity’s sake. . . . At one point, looking tired, she sat down momentarily and asked for a drink of water. "Nothing stronger, mind you," she said, almost with a twinkle.

WILLIAM C. KLOEFKORN 1932 -

In 1972, Windflower Press published William Kloefkorn’s first book Alvin Turner as Farmer, which became a regional best seller. The publisher, Ted Kooser, later became U.S. Poet Laureate, and Kloefkorn became lifetime poet laureate for Nebraska in 1982.

Kloefkorn’s verse, written in vernacular language, celebrates Great Plains life. He is one of the first writers, along with Kooser and others, to define a Midwestern voice. Born, raised, and educated in Kansas, he often writes about rural life with understated wit.Kloefkorn is especially a storyteller.

In this poem about Kansas character Carry Nation, he tells history from a young person’s point of view. Contrasts invigorate the story: the “full-fleshed” photograph breaks the wallpaper pattern. Mrs. Wilma Hunt sermonizes about morality as she destroys life. The devil appears, but then is set aside for Kool-Aid. The poet’s dead-pan delivery suggests a third presence: the open-eared listener who observes details, judges a tad, and chuckles at the absurd human condition—like an adult reader.

LTL

Carry A. Nation came into our house and filled it
With her meagerness. She was hung full-fleshed
Against the flowered wallpaper of our living-room,
And Mrs. Wilma Hunt, who brought her, gave each
Of us a little wooden hatchet. “John Barleycorn
Is the Devil,” Mrs. Wilma Hunt said. And
by dropping worms head-
First into alcohol she taught us
To hate him. “Now let me tell
You,” she said, “about the LTL….”

She taught us the Loyal
Temperance Legion song, all of it, then killed
Another worm and served refreshments. Our house
Had never been so full. There were all of us, with
Carry on the wall-
Paper: Kool-Aid, Cookies, Song,
Something-New-to-Hate
And several dead worms
Curled in alcohol.

Education: William Kloefkorn, was born in Attica, Kansas. He received a BA 1954 in English from Emporia State University and then served in the U.S. Marines. In 1956 he taught high school in Ellinwood, then returned to ESU for the MA (1958).
Career: Nebraska named Kloefkorn the State Poet, the equivalent of state poet laureate. He taught at Wichita State from 1958-1962 and Nebraska Wesleyan University from 1962 to 1997. He is active as a writer and performer of poetry. His books—over two dozen—include poetry, fiction, memoir, fiction, and children’s literature.
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© 2007 Denise Low, AAPP8. © 1974 William C. Kloefkorn, “LTL.” © 2002 Nathan Lambrecht, photograph.
A downloadable version is available for non-commercial use from www.kansaspoets.com

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #7

Gloria Vando (1936 - )

Gloria Vando Hickok has enriched the Kansas City area literary community since moving to Johnson County in 1980. She founded Helicon Nine, a nationally recognized women’s arts magazine, which then became a press, Helicon Nine Editions. In addition, she and her husband Bill Hickok co-founded The Writers Place, a literary arts center in Kansas City, Missouri. This poet combines such service with writing award-winning books.

Vando is a Nuyorican: a person of Puerto Rican heritage born in New York City. She layers this cultural perspective through her verses. Most of her poems begin with autobiographical moments, which then expand into global perspectives.

Narrative is a strong element in all of Vando’s works, and also history. She regales her readers with dramatic stories set in Sarajevo, Vietnam, Korea, San Juan, New York, and Kansas City. She personalizes political comment by adding emotional reactions to factual events. She also tells her own larger-than-life stories in well wrought verse.

“Orphans” is one of these stories. The fourteen-line poem follows an unrhymed sonnet pattern. The first eight lines set up the situation—death of a loveless parent—and then the poem shifts to the mother’s advice about grief. Acorns and wind are familiar images to Midwestern readers, and here these natural forces suggest wholeness. The last two lines are the sonnet’s couplet, with the surprising final chord—acceptance of “luck.” The mother empowers her orphaned (or fatherless) daughter by framing her within a larger cosmos.

ORPHANS

When my father died, leaving me
distraught for never having known
him as father, as friend,
for never having known myself

as child of one whose eyes and mouth
and temperament were mine, my mother
cautioned me, told me not to mourn
what I perceived as loss: you and I

are daughters of the wind, she said,
you and I are fathers of our souls,
sprouting intact like seedlings
from two wind-borne acorns.

We thrive on luck, she said,
there is no father’s love in that.

Education: Vando was born in New York City and lived in Amsterdam and Paris. She received a BA from Texas A and I College and pursued graduate studies at Southampton College, Long Island.

Career: Vando’s Promesas: Geography of the Impossible (1993) was a Walt Whitman finalist and won the Thorpe Menn Book Award. Shadows and Supposes (2002) won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and was named Best Poetry Book of 2003 by the Latino Hall of Fame.
_________________________________________________________________________________________© 2007 Denise Low, AAPP7. © 1993 “Orphans,” Gloria Vando, from Promeses, Arte Público Press.
A downloadable version is available for non-commercial use from www.kansaspoets.com

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #6

JONATHAN HOLDEN (1941 - )

Jonathan Holden, first Kansas poet laureate, has lived in Manhattan, Kansas, since 1978. He is distinguished professor at Kansas State University. I first met Holden when I taught at K-State briefly in the 1970s, and he was generous to many poets and students. He has influenced the direction of American poetry—through essays and example—by insisting that informal, domestic moments are high art.

Holden is passionate about poetry, both as critic and poem-maker. His brilliance manifests in his performances as well as writings. He can quote entire poems by major American and British poets for hours. He masters fields of knowledge—mathematics, tennis, U.S. politics, Bach—and finds ways to use them in everyday situations.

This poem, about apparently ordinary sights, comments upon instinctive knowledge. It mimics the perfect balance that baseball players and sparrows both must practice in order to survive. The lines shift in rhythm, to imitate birds totter and regain balance. Holden uses a passel of rich descriptive verbs, like “pirouette” and “stab,” to describe reflexive movements of the birds and players. These contrast to hesitations—reflection and philosophy—in the poem. Instinct keeps us alive, even when in the dark of night.

NIGHT GAME

These infielders are definite

as sparrows at work.

Split that seed with one peck

or starve.

There is no minor league

for birds. There is

exactly one way

to pirouette into a double play

perfectly. The birds

don’t dare reflect on what

they do, each hop, each stab and

scramble through the air into the

catch of the sycamore’s

top twigs

is a necessity,

absolute. To stay alive

out in the field, you must be

an authority on parabolas

and fear philosophy.

Education: Holden grew up in rural Morristown, New Jersey, described in his memoirs Guns & Boyhood in America and Mama’s Boys. His college degrees, all in English, are from Oberlin (BA 1963), San Francisco State College (MA 1970), and University of Colorado (PhD1974).

Career: This poet has published twenty books of poetry, essays, memoirs, and a novel. Knowing is his most current book of poetry (University of Arkansas Press 2000). He is poet-in-residence and University Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University. He has won awards from the National Arts Endowment, University of Missouri Press, the Associated Writing Programs, and others. Midwest Quarterly devoted the summer 2007 issue to him. His website is www.jonathanholden.com .

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© 2007 Denise Low, AAPP6. © 1997 “Night Game,” Jonathan Holden, from Ur-Math, State St. Press © 2005 photo by Greg German. A downloadable version is available for non-commercial use from www.kansaspoets.com

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #5

JO McDOUGALL (1935 - )

Jo McDougall was born and raised in Arkansas, where she received an MFA under the legendary teacher and editor Miller Williams. She was director of the creative writing program at Pittsburg State University 1987-1998, and currently she resides in Leawood, Kansas.

McDougall brings a Southern sensibility to her writings about the great open Kansas landscape—her work is more narrative, perhaps, and her humor is direct. But the influence of the grasslands is strong in her spare language, use of sharp visual images, and themes of endurance. She is a committed realist. Some of her poems, for me, recall Grant Wood’s paintings like “American Gothic,” but with humor.

Time creates a vivid dimension within McDougall’s Midwestern settings, through the agent of memory. McDougall writes: “Memory is the poet’s calico landscape of the imagination, recalled from the advantage of maturity.” In her poetics, memory appears as flashbacks, obsessive replays, time travel, sustained observations, and reflections. Ironically, McDougall’s survivors’ humor and honest insights construct a natural theology.

In “Blessing,” McDougall creates a story with selected details. The Kansas setting is alluded to with the presence of wind, storm, and sun. The small town intimacy with neighbors is suggested by the narrator’s nosiness. How long was the narrator watching in order to see all these details, including hidden panties? The last line opens the scene to larger questions.

BLESSING

My neighbor hangs out the morning wash

and a storm dances up.

She strips the line,

the children’s pajamas with the purple ducks,

her husband’s shorts,

the panties she had hidden under a sheet.

When the sun comes out

she comes back

with the panties and the sheets, the shorts and the pajamas.

This is my ritual, not hers.

May her husband never stop drinking and buy her a dryer.

Education: McDougall graduated from DeWitt High School. She received an A.A. from Stephens College, BA from University of Arkansas (1957) and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville (1985).

Career: This poet worked has published five books of poetry from BookMark Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City; University of Arkansas Press; and most recently Autumn House Press. Her work has been adapted for film (Emerson County Shaping Dream), theater, music, and artist’s book. Inquiries about the film or books can be directed to mailto:jomcdougall@sbcglobal.net?.

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© 2007 Denise Low, AAPP5. © Jo MacDougall, “Blessing,” from Towns Facing Railroads rpt. with permission of U. of Arkansas Press

© Denise Low, photo
A downloadable version is available for non-commercial use from www.kansaspoets.com