Monday Poems: "Counting Towards Sleep" -- by Nance Van Winckel

From my four corners the grey cranes appear
   and, as if wingless, march off like old
   soldiers, their rifle-beaks bobbing up the walls
   high into the blue shadows of sleep.

I add up the simple sadnesses of their leaving.
   Beneath each of us the earth's deep fires
   breathe in, then burn brighter with every sudden
   rift, ever little addition fo gritty fuel.

And now I sink down upon it all: the fallen birds,
   our warm pallet of earth. And soon the stream
    lies down through me. Rattling and spewing, it sends
   rocks tumbling. Wild lilies break loose, travel.

There is too much everywhere
   not to observe.
Far into morning, sheep
   on every finger--Dorsetts
   and Corriedales--my hand
   is a meadow.

*     *     *     *     *

Nance Van Winckel has published five books of poetry, including After a Spell (1998), which received the Washington State Governor's Award for Poetry, and her most recent work, No Starling (2007). She has also published three short story collections.

Van Winckel has received two National Endowments for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize and The Midland Authors Award. She has served as the Poet in Residence at the University of Montana and the University of North DAkota. She currently teaches in the MFA in writing programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Spokane, WA.

Monday Poems: "In Perpetual Spring" -- by Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.


Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.


* * * * *


Amy Gerstler has been described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the best poets in the nation." She has published multiple books of poetry and her collection Dearest Creature (2009) was named a New York Times notable book of the year. The above poem is found in her collection Bitter Angel (1990). 


Gerstler lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars program and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Barry Lopez

Why do we need storytellers? is this week's question. And who is better qualified to answer that particular question than Barry Lopez?

For 40 years Lopez has traveled the world, seeking out storytellers in nearly 70 countries and writing about his experiences for publications such as National Geographic, Outside, The Georgia Review, and The Paris Review, and publishing award-winning books such as Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men. His most recent book is Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, a reader's dictionary of regional landscape terms, which he edited with Debra Gwartney.

During this week's program, Lopez talks about the roles and responsibilities of storytellers, and the "spiritual interior" of words. He also has some advice for readers.

Find out more about Barry Lopez and listen to the program, on the radio or online.

• Thursday, April 12 at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, April 12 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Online, anytime at MTPR.org
• Via the MTPR podcast

Monday Poems: "The Vegetables" -- by James McMichael

The Artichoke

She bore only the heart,   

Worked at the stem with her   

Fingers, pulling it to her,   

And into her, like a cord.

She would sustain him,   

Would cover his heart.   

The hairy needles

And the bigger leaves,

These she licked into shape,   

Tipping each with its point.   

He is the mud-flower,

The thorny hugger.

The Asparagus

She sent packs of great beasts to pass

Over him, trailing belly-fur and dust,   

Bending their nostrils to his frail spear.   

This was to toughen him. For what?   

Stupidly, like a squirrel, standing up,   

Looking here and there, looking to all sides,

He is cut down and taken away.

She can smell him steaming, his crowns   

Already tender, his spine giving in.

Now he is threatening to wither terribly,   

And slip from the water altogether,

And billow through the kitchen like prayer.

The Cauliflower

Her words clot in his head.

He presses himself to remember   

And feels the skin peel back,

The skull bleach, crack, fall away.

All that's left of him is the brain,

Its tissue knotting up to shade him,   

The pain of its light pulsing

How to move, how to move.

Herbs

Before fog leaves the scrub-oak

Or the grasses of the downland,

Take dragonwort under the black alder,   

Take cockspur grass and henbane,   

The belladonna, the deadly nightshade.   

Free them as you would a spider's web,   

Singing over them: Out, little wen,

                            Out, little wen.

Sing this into the mouth of the woman.

Corn

I am the corn quail.   

What I do is quick.   

You will know only   

The muffled clucking,   

The scurry, the first   

Shiver of feathers   

And I will be up,   

I will be in your

Head with no way out,   

Wings beating at the   

Air behind your eyes.

Celery

The hope with   

water is that it

will conceal nothing,

that a clearness

will follow upon it   

like the clearness   

after much rain,

or the clearness   

where the air   

reaches to the river

and touches it,

where the rain   

falls from the trees   

into the river.

Bell Pepper

To find enough rooms for the gathering   

The walls go on alone not waiting   

For corners but thinking of sleeves

And how the wind fills them and the snow   

Fills them and how cold it is without   

Fires when there are not enough rooms.

Potatoes

It had been growing in her like vegetables.   

She was going into the ground where it could   

Do better, where she could have potatoes.

They would be small and easily mistaken   

For stones. It would fall to her to   

Sort them out, persuade them to stay

Close to her, comforting her, letting her   

Wear them on her body, in her hair,   

Helping her hold always very still.

*     *     *     *     *

James McMichael is emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Capacity (2006), a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; Each in a Place Apart (1994); The Lover's Familiar (1978); Four Good Things (1980); and The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (1996), in which the above poem appears. He has received multiple awards, including the 2007 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, the Arthur O. Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America.

Ed Kemmick captures Montana characters (in print)

Shortly after Ed Kemmick moved from Minneapolis to Missoula to attend The University of Montana, he and a friend from New York fell under the spell of A.B. Gutherie's novel, The Big Sky.

"We wanted to be Boone Caudill and his friends Jim Deakins and Dick Summers," Kemmick writes. "In the afternoon, after our classes were over, we'd leave our dorm rooms in Duniway Hall and tramp up Hellgate Canyon. We'd build a fire in a swale not far from the river and sit there drinking quart bottles of Lucky Lager, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and palavering in our best imitation of our new heroes, larding our speech with 'I reckon,' 'this child' and 'I'm thinkin.'" They decided to live outside like their heroes, to camp out under the stars, to live on their own, "answerable to no one ... "

Fortunately for us (readers), that plan did not work out. Instead, Kemmick became a journalist and began to write about real, living Montana characters, folks like Dobro Dick, the cowboy and wandering musician who nudged Kemmick into putting together a collection of his stories -- which he did. That collection is titled, The Big Sky, By and By: True Tales, Real People and Strange Times in the Heart of Montana.

About the book, Russell Rowland (author of In Open Spaces and The Watershed Years) writes: "Ed Kemmick has an uncanny knack for finding interesting people and bringing them to life with words."

Hear Ed Kemmick talk about and read from The Big Sky, By and By Thursday evening at 6:30 (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 (MTPR.org).

Click here to find out more about Kemmick, access links to his Web site and a review of the book, and listen to the program online.

Monday Poems: "Around Us" -- by Marvin Bell

We need some pines to assuage the darkness 
when it blankets the mind,

we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly

as a plane's wing, and a worn bed of 

needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,

and a blur or two of a wild thing

that sees and is not seen. We need these things

between appointments, after work,

and, if we keep them, then someone someday,

lying down after a walk

and supper, with the fire hole wet down,

the whole night sky set at a particular

time, without numbers or hours, will cause

a little sound of thanks--a zipper or a snap—

to close round the moment and the thought

of whatever good we did.

*     *     *     *     *


Marvin Bell is a poet and teacher. He has taught at Oregon State 
University, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, the University of Hawaii, 
and the University of Washington. He currently teaches in the 
writing program at Pacific University in Oregon. 


He has published nearly 20 books of poetry, 
including Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things That Have
Been in the Fire (1984), Vertigo: The Living Dead Man 
Poems (2011), and Rampant (2004), in which 
the above poem appears. He served as the first 
poet laureate of the State of Iowa. His has also been 
awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts 
fellowships, a Fulbright Award, and was a finalist 
for the National Book Award. He currently lives in Port 
Townsend, Washington.

The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen

Living on faith: A review of The Man Who Quit Money
by Chérie Newman

From the April 16, 2012 issue of High Country News

The title grabs your attention: The Man Who Quit Money. Intrigued, you open the book and read: "In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings -- thirty dollars -- laid it inside a phone booth, and walked away." He must have been on drugs or a nutcase, you think. But no, you discover, reading on: Daniel Suelo, a 39-year-old, well-educated and apparently rational man, had simply decided to act on his belief that he'd be taken care of if he followed the advice of St. Francis of Assisi: "If we embrace holy poverty very closely, the world will come to us and will feed us abundantly."

More than a decade before Suelo's life-changing decision, Mark Sundeen, the book's author, worked with him briefly in Moab, Utah. When Sundeen heard about Suelo's moneyless lifestyle, he was struck by the different paths they'd chosen. Intrigued, he tracked down his former co-worker, who was still living in the Moab area. The two men renewed their acquaintance by going dumpster diving, picking melons from an abandoned garden, and digging wild onions. It didn't take long to "harvest" enough food to last several days and pack it off to Suelo's residence: a cave situated on public lands located "a two-hour walk from pavement." Illumination inside it came from burning cotton cords floating in glass jars filled with vegetable oil, and the cooking was done on a ventilated "number-ten chili can." Living permanently on public land is illegal, and once, after Suelo was caught, he unsuccessfully argued his case before a judge. He paid his fine with hours of community service, and then settled into a smaller, more isolated cave.

Suelo has many strong opinions about capitalism and religion, which he expresses freely on his blog, accessing the Internet via a public library computer. Hostile readers have called him lazy, a freeloader, and worse. But Sundeen keeps a cool head as he weaves facts, timelines and anecdotes into a fascinating story, researching everything from Suelo's grade-school years to the history of banking. What he discovered about the defining moment in Suelo's life will give readers a lot to think about. Ultimately, Suelo decided, our attachment to money is about our fear of death: "Money perpetuated the fantasy of immortal earthly life, the illusion that we could determine the future." Sundeen concludes that, despite his critics, Suelo is still a productive citizen, a sort of "freelance philosopher." He just doesn't receive -- or want -- a paycheck.
_______________________________________________________________

Listen to Mark Sundeen talk about and read from The Man Who Quit Money.