Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Saturday, May 10, 2008
Poetry is like ...
Part of the value of the La Crosse Public Library National Poetry Month contest is that it forms community, said William Stobb, associate professor of English at Viterbo University.
“(Poetry) tends to be such an intensely private pursuit,” Stobb said. “For the library to have this contest ... gives you one of those islands of community in what is a pretty solitary enterprise.”
Stobb judged 148 entries from 87 people in the contest, which was held for the first time this year. Entries came from as far away as Iraq, and from people ages 18 to 90. A reading by the winners was held last week.
Poets have other venues to gather as a community in La Crosse, too.
Stobb helps organize a reading series at the Pump House six months out of the year.
And on Monday, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse class will have a reading and release party for the literary magazine Steam Ticket from 5 to 7 p.m. at UW-L’s Cartwright Center in the Ward Room.
Today, Real Time explores poetry through three local poets.
Poetry can be a sensual rush like skydiving or naked waterskiing, said Matthew Cashion, assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
At other times, it can be like a bedtime story heard in the dark by a voice that seems like yours, he said.
Cashion, 40, teaches a class at UW-L in which students produce Steam Ticket, a literary magazine that receives submissions from around the country. (www.steamticket.org)
“A poet first is a sensualist,” Cashion said. “There can be intellectual poems and idea poems and political poems, but to make those affective, I think first you have to communicate to the reader through your
senses.”
An Hour After Breakfast
(originally published in The Sun magazine)
He says, “I know your tricks old woman.
You’re trying to starve me.”
Because he has forgotten that he has eaten.
But this morning, like every morning
for sixty years, she has oven-warmed
his plate before loading it with bacon,
fried eggs (skillet-flipped so yokes won’t bruise),
and slow-cooked hominy grits
gotten from farmer friends.
She has refilled his coffee cup
and stood over him in prayer:
“Bless us oh Lord, for these are thy gifts….”
Every morning for sixty years
she has prepared this morning meal,
preferring cereal, or nothing, for herself.
Now, still seated at the scene,
with bits of egg on his face,
he insists she is trying to murder him.
To prove her love, she has started snapping
polaroids. “Here,” she says. “This is you
one hour ago eating breakfast.”
He sobs so hard his belly shakes.
The sight makes her sob too.
She knows, had he been himself
he would have thought to say, “Why,
this looks just like yesterday.”
Had he, for one second, been himself,
he would have said “Why,
that’s not me at all.”
A poet Cashion recommends: Sharon Olds
William Stobb compares poetry to physics.
Sometimes a poem reaches for the cosmic scale, said Stobb, associate professor of English at Viterbo University. And sometimes a poem goes inside of us, reaching for the sub-atomic realm.
“Poetry can go infinitely inward and infinitely outward, finding levels of life at every spot,” he said.
Stobb, 38, helps organize a Pump House reading series and said he relates to people who have difficulty with poetry.
“Of every 10 poems I read, eight or nine of them go by me with just a mild ripple on my EKG,” he said. “It can be very hard to feel touched by a poem because it’s such a precious, specific thing.”
His book “Nervous Systems” (Penguin 2007) includes this poem:
Poem in the Food Chain
Happens I get a mile down
some single track and worry:
no one knows I’m hiking.
Trail skirts constant blind rustling in
knee-high thistle.
Flies slap my head then circle.
Seven bears per mile square: who
said that? Brother? Store clerk?
Hold still
one minute.
Breathe.
Sunlight in a clearing thirty yards left —
I’m certain it’s the river.
Up from the ground a slim bark chip flutters
under my chin.
I flinch.
Its wings open blue.
A poet Stobb recommends: A.R. Ammons
One reason Lynne Burgess Valiquette writes poetry is to pray.
“Most of my poetry is in response to the natural world,” she said. “If you can define prayer as paying attention, then a poem is a prayer.”
Burgess Valiquette, 60, won the first La Crosse Public Library National Poetry Month Contest with this poem:
Squirrel Prayer
It is there at the feeder
small paws turning a sunflower
seed, cracking into its meat.
Tail arches and curls,
shaking the winter sun
that shines on its silver fur
oblivious
to the small pine squirrel trapped
inside the feeder, eyes closed
behind the glass. Cracked corn
encircling its still body.
When I tramp out to remove
the corpse, the sky
has softened into gray,
and it is snowing silently.
Squirrels and chickadees retreat
to the bare maples to watch.
But the body is gone.
Was it sleeping, then,
a kind hibernation buried
in what sustains it? Did
it scramble up the impossible glass
and pop open the feeder lid?
There is nothing to do
but funnel in more seeds,
check the latch
follow the path inside.
The gray squirrel is the first
to return to winter feeding.
And, sitting by the woodstove
coffee steaming, I try
to pay better attention.
A poet Burgess Valiquette recommends: Ted Kooser
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