Ruth McLaughlin's memoir, 'Bound Like Grass'

Stories that unfurl in remote corners of eastern Montana tend to be heartbreaking, and Bound Like Grass, by Ruth McLaughlin, is no exception. But McLaughlin does not wallow. Rather, she explores the influences that made her family what it turned out to be and comes to conclusions that can illuminate the emotional landscape of any family.

Bound Like Grass is an engaging story that encompasses three generations: the idealistic homesteader grandparents, the hard-working parents, and the children who grew up, moved away and never returned. Mary Clearman Blew, author of Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place has this to say about McLaughlin's memoir:

"In this beautifully written but stark account of one ranching family's ties to the land, Ruth McLaughlin refutes the romantic myths that have distorted our view of the agrarian past. I wept as I read Bound Like Grass, out of sympathy but also in admiration of the strength and clarity of vision Ruth brings to these pages."

Tune in Thursday, April 21, for The Write Question, at 6:30 (Yellowstone Public Radio) or 7:30 (Montana Public Radio) to hear Ruth McLaughlin talk about her family and her book. She'll also read from one of the chapters.

Get more information about Ruth McLaughlin and listen online.

Germaine White talks about 'Bull Trout's Gift'

“We were wealthy from the water,” Mitch Smallsalmon says, and like all the tribal elders, he speaks to our understanding of the natural world and the consequences of change. In Bull Trout's Gift: A Salish Story About The Value of Reciprocity, the wisdom of the elders is passed on to the young as the story of the Jocko River, the home of the bull trout, unfolds for a group of schoolchildren on a field trip.

The Jocko River flows through the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana. For thousands of years the Salish and Pend d’Oreille Indians lived along its banks, finding food and medicine in its plants and fish, and in the game hunted on its floodplain. Readers of this story will learn, along with the students of Ms. Howlett’s class, about the history and culture of the river and its meaning in Native life, tradition, and religion. They will also discover the scientific background and social importance behind the Tribes’ efforts to restore the bull trout to its home waters.

Beautifully illustrated and narrated in the tradition of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes, this account of conservation as the legacy of one generation to the next is about being good to the land that has been good to us. Bull Trout’s Gift is steeped in the culture, history, and science that our children must know if they hope to transform past wisdom into future good.

During this week's program, Germaine White will talk about Bull Trout's Gift, and the field journal, and the interactive DVD that make up the Bull Trout Education Project's set of materials designed for grade school students. White is the Information and Education Specialist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Natural Resources Department.

Hear the program at 6:30 p.m. (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 p.m. (MTPR.org). Or, click through to the Montana Public Radio Web site to listen online or sign up for The Write Question podcast.

Monday Poems: "Toward the Winter Solstice" -- by Timothy Steele

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

* * * * *

This poem appears in Timothy Steele’s most recent book of poems, Toward the Winter Solstice. His earlier poems are collected in Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 and The Color Wheel. He has also published two volumes of literary criticism focusing on the lost arts of prosody and versification.

Much of Steele's poetry is written in traditional verse, using meter and rhyme, and so has been credited with contributing to the New Formalism movement in poetry.

Steele's work has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Literary Award for Poetry, among other awards. He lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.

A Conversation about a few Good Books by Writers in the West

During this week's program, Chérie Newman, Barbara Theroux, and Zed talk about recently published books by writers from the West. Here's a list of the books they discuss during the progam, plus a few more:

FICTION for Young Readers:

Hangman's Gold, by Sneed B Collard

Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I, by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis

The Apothecary, by Maile Meloy

FICTION for Adults:

Lamb, by Bonnie Nadzam

Habibi, by Craig Thompson

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel, By Charles Yu

The Richest Hill on Earth, by Richard Wheeler

NONFICTION:

The Sourtoe Cocktail Club: The Yukon Odyssey of a Father and Son in Search of a Mummified Human Toe ... and Everything Else, by Ron Franscell

All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (or Casinos), by Catherine C. Robbins

Hand Raised: Barns of Montana, by Christine Brown, Chere Jiusto, and Tom Ferris

Bull Trout's Gift: A Salish Story about the Value of Reciprocity, by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes

Raptors of the West: Captured in Photographs, by Kate Davis, Rob Palmer, and Nick Dunlop

Time of our lives: A conversation about America; Who we are, where we've been, and where we need to go now, to recapture the ... , by Tom Brokaw

West of 98, edited by Russell Rowland and Lynn Stegner

POETRY

Rust Fish, a poetry collection by Maya Jewell Zeller

Our Blood Remembers: Poems, by Lois Red Elk

You'll find most of these books at Fact & Fiction in Missoula, or at your local independent bookseller.

Listen To The Program

Monday Poems: "Millennium Sutra" -- by Anne Waldman

what learned?
what trigger what reflection?


thus have I heard


This was something I dreamt waking
that the earth could
be scorched galactic cinder
frozen in orbit
about a gone sun


apocalyptic tongue'd preachers
line the mall
with glib glow & twitch
so that you sign on, sign on


give dollars,
& all around children begging
cranium resolve! cranium resolve!


& homeless in the streets
a bed for the night, will work, a bed...


vote apocalyptic
& you will get your war


thus have I heard


rain forests stripped & bare
no trove there
but all you could ever need—
a slump, a dress, a new life,
     tales to be greedy by—
is accessed on a poison machine


what need we trees?
they grow in the brain


thus have I heard


*     *     *     *     *


Anne Waldman, along with Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of the famous Summer Writing Program.


Waldman is associated with the Beat poets and is an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has published over 40 books of poetry, including: Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (2004), and Dark Arcana / Afterimage or Glow (2003), with photographs by Patti Smith. The above poem can be found in her collection In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2003.

The following article, written by TWQ producer Chérie Newman, was originally published in the Billings Gazette.

Ed Kemmick showed up in Montana, in 1973, as a “citified teenager” who quickly developed a strong romantic desire: “I wanted not merely to live in Montana,” he writes in retrospect, “but to live out, in my own small way, the story of Montana as constructed by A.B. Guthrie.”

Emulating Boone Caudill — the central character in Guthrie’s famous novel, “The Big Sky” — turned out to be impractical. But Kemmick’s career in journalism has allowed him to experience another type of adventure. For 30 years he has written stories about Montana’s real-life characters. Now, some of those stories are available in a new book, “The Big Sky, By and By: True Tales, Real People and Strange Times in the Heart of Montana.”

Kemmick’s “real people” live in out-of-the-way places like Molt, Alzada, Fishtail, Culbertson and Fromberg. They also live in population centers like Billings, Livingston, Miles City and Butte. A few began life in Montana. Most did not. They range from the bizarre (a petrified man) to the saintly (a woman who makes the choice to care for her violent and cruel father during his old age). They are the flamboyant friends of Evel Knievel and a man from Fort Smith who has ridden motorcycles around the world — the long way — four times. They run the Dirty Shame Saloon, the Stoneville Saloon, a cowboy museum or a junks hop that has become a Chinese cultural museum. One woman “used to be the madam at the Wild Horse Pavilion and now she’s working as a greeter at the new Wal-Mart.” One man “used to eat a teaspoon full of arsenic every day to keep from dying.” They are black and brown and white and red. Musicians: Kostas, Dobro Dick, Roy Young, The Hogback Five.

At the end of each story, you will likely wonder what happened next. Did Jeff Hansen’s doctors find the right drugs to treat his inoperable brain tumor? Did the Bar Diamond Ranch sell? Was Johnnie Thomas able to finish writing the story of her husband’s life before she died?

Kemmick’s relationship with Montana began when he was an 18-year-old “intoxicated by the grandeur of Guthrie’s vision” of Big Sky Country in the mid-1800s. With this book, however, a mature, clear-eyed journalist claims a place on the list of writers who are replacing Montana’s worn-out romantic myths with the truth: Every sort of person lives in Montana.

Here’s hoping Ed Kemmick will write about many more of them.

Chérie Newman is a freelance writer from Missoula, where she produces a weekly literary program for public radio.

Copyright 2011 The Billings Gazette. All rights reserved.

Maile Meloy's new novel for middle readers, 'The Apothecary'

Even if you are not attracted to the fantasy genre, you may be happily surprised  by Maile Meloy's latest book. In a review of The Apothecary for the New York Times, (skeptic) Krystyna Poray Goddu wrote: "...the book, with its intricately constructed plot, well-paced suspense, credibly rendered fantastical elements, thoughtfully drawn characters and authentically detailed settings, satisfies on all levels. Even for a reader predisposed against the genre."

The story begins in Los Angeles, in 1952, when 14-year-old Janie Scott moves with her parents to London, England. There, she meets a mysterious apothecary and becomes fascinated by his son, Benjamin Burrows -- a 14-year-old boy who isn't afraid to stand up to authority and who dreams of becoming a spy.

Just before Benjamin's father is kidnapped, he gives Janie and Benjamin an ancient book, The Pharmacopoeia, insisting that they must keep it safe -- no matter what. It turns out that Russian spies want the book and will do anything to get it. Using the recipes for transformative elixirs they find in the book's pages, Janie and Benjamin stay one step ahead of the bad guys as they embark on a dangerous mission to save the apothecary and prevent impending nuclear disaster.

During this week's program, Maile Meloy will talk about where she got the idea for The Apothecary, her first novel for middle readers (she's the author of two adult novels and two story collections). She'll also read from the book and talk a little about her writing process.

You can hear the program on the radio or online:

• Thursday, December 8 at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, December 8 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Online, anytime at MTPR.org
• Via the MTPR podcast

Monday Poems: "Deer Meat" -- by Patrick Todd

Thick frost on the trees
and crusted snow,
Sara hears Phil's boots

squeak on the ice
outside the bedroom window
She blows out

the kerosene lamp and lets her
sweater fall soft as a dust of feathers
to the floor      Phil slams

open the tailgate and lifts five logs
from the pickup     Back and forth, squeal of
hi boots, thud of the logs

on the back porch
Under blankets and a great
puffed quilt, Sara

waits, half dozing in their big
warm bed     One more chore before the night
is out, Phil saws the left

front flank and leg loose in
the wood shed     White moon above the roof,
the skinned three-legged deer hangs

upside down and headless
in the dark     The tarp, once
soaked in blood,

freezes in the cold
Cold the oil-black pine
board floor

*     *      *      *     *

Patrick Todd, a former creative writing university professor,  lives and writes in Missoula, Montana.

His poem "Deer Meat" can be found in his fourth book of poetry, A Farm Under Poplars.

Michael Czarnecki and the Montana Poets Series

This week on The Write Question, Chérie Newman talks with Michael Czarnecki, a poet and publisher. Although he lives in central New York State -- nowhere hear the West -- Czarnecki's company, Foothills Publishing, publishes collections of poetry written by Montana poets.

The first six books in the Montana Poets Series were published in 2010 and included collections by Roger Dunsmore, Jenni Fallein, David Thomas, Jennifer Greene, John Holbrook, and Cedar Brant. The next six books will be released in 2012. Czarnecki names four of those poets during the second half of the program. He also talks about his transition from sales rep for a winery to full-time poet and "encourager" and reads from his collection, Never Stop Asking for Poems.

Listen on the radio Thursday evening at 6:30 (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 (MTPR.org), sign up for the TWQ podcast, or listen online from the MTPR Web site.

Monday Poems: "Pieta" by Veronica Golos

What of the farm mother, her soldier son, shattered.
She hides her shuddering inside the closet, rubs the coat
and boots he’ll never need again—his body of cut-off-stems.

Before, in his childlife sleep, his legs flung open, sometimes
she couldn’t even look he was so beautiful, although she didn’t 

have then,
and doesn’t have now, the word—

She’s speared through—
that smell in his room
his blind left eye,
three limbs sawed away
his shit staining
the white sheets—

the Wal-Mart sheets she buys and buys…

you see he had been
so crisp, so cut-line, so formal in the uniform,
as if he had been pressed somehow
inside &

her with her deep knowledge of ironing,
of pressing herself,
had recognized it in him, you know,
and saw beauty in it, yes,
in the sharp crease, it was clean and clear, that work
of hands and
the message that work carried,
that someone had done this for him.

She rolls him on his side, and removes, four times daily,
the sheets from his bed, daily, brushes her fingers
against his white tee shirt lightly (its short arms flap, there is nothing to hold)
finding muscle there in his still-strong back,
and the back of his head that little scar

from the day he fell off the tractor, when she thought yes I could kill
I could kill his father, yes for this, oh—

Her memory is a sharpened thing.

where where are his arms and his leg

she wants to lift him, she wants to smother him, she wants to finger all the edges
of his wounds, she wants him back, she wants him to die. All her words, the ones

she could say on some spring day    the sun’s out    the rye is up

stuck
somewhere below the solar plexus of her
those beauty words    sun    grass    rain    horse    earth
gone—

only he remains

*     *     *     *     *

Veronica Golos is the multiple-award-winning author of five books of poetry and one book of criticism. Her 2011 book Vocabulary of Silence, in which the above poem appears, won a New Mexico Book Award for poetry. 

In addition to being a poet, she is also an activist for social justice and peace. She currently lives in the mountains outside of Taos, New Mexico.

David Mogen, author of 'Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories"

When David Mogen was eight years old, he looked up from his Roy Rogers comic book and told his father that he wished they lived in the West. He dad snorted and asked, "Where the hell do you think we are?"

Where they were was 35 miles north of Highway 2, in the small town of Whitewater, Montana.

Young Mogen's confusion about "The West" in which he lived and "The West' he saw in movies, TV, and comic books, as well as the stories he read in library books, turned into his career as an English professor at Colorado State University. During that career (from which he recently retired), he published four scholarly books and two anthologies exploring literature and the frontier mentality. Now, he's written a memoir that includes stories about his parents and grandparents through a homesteader-rancher-myth-of-the-west lens.

Hear a few of those stories, find out what the word "honyocker" means, and ponder the connection between cyberpunk science fiction and the western frontier.

Monday Poems: "Thanksgiving" -- by Kenn Nesbitt

Thanksgiving last year we had turkey.
On Christmas we cooked up a ham.
For New Years we all ate beef jerky.
On Valentines Day we had Spam.


Saint Patrick's Day dinner was hot dogs.
On April Fool's Day, pepperoni.
Memorial Day we ate beef logs.
The Fourth of July, old baloney.


Our Labor Day dinner was haggis.
Columbus Day dinner was tripe.
On All Hallows Eve, steaming head cheese.
For Veteran's Day roasted snipe.


If our meals persist in declining,
we'll soon be consuming whale blubber.
Continue the way we've been dining,
the main course will be tire rubber.


Perhaps we'll eat barbecued sneakers,
or sandwiches made out of dust.
We'll grind up the glass of old beakers,
and season it lightly with rust.


We'll boil our dirty old sweatsocks,
and stew them until they congeal,
then stir in some broken alarm clocks,
and ladle it up as a meal.


But please don't infer I'm complaining,
about the bad meals I'm reliving.
I just thought it needed explaining,
why I'm giving such thanks for Thanksgiving.


*     *     *     *     *

Kenn Nesbitt has published 11 books of humorous poetry for children. He visits over 50 schools every year with his "stand-up comedy, poetry-writing assembly programs."


In addition to "Thanksgiving," Nesbitt has written a handful of poems about the holiday, including "A Mother Goose Thanksgiving," all of which can be found at his website.  


His most recent publication, My Hippo has the Hiccups, includes poems titled "My Robot's Misbehaving," "A Fish in a Spaceship," and "I Taught my Cat to Clean my Room" and is accompanied by an audio CD of poetry and humor. Nesbitt grew up in California and currently lives with his family in Spokane, WA.

Manuel Muñoz's novel 'What You See in the Dark'

TWQ producer Chérie Newman's review of What You See in the Dark, by Manuel Muñoz was published in the September 4, 2001 edition of High Country News.

What You See in the Dark: A Novel
Manuel Muñoz
272 pages, hardcover: $23.95.
Algonquin Books, 2011.

It's 1959, and the shiny façade of America's white culture is beginning to tarnish. Schools are being desegregated and black people are starting to march in the streets of the South. There's an "unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans" in California nightclubs. Young men "of a certain type" are migrating to San Francisco. And Alfred Hitchcock is about to inflict moral mayhem on the movie industry, and on his viewers, by filming the murder of a naked woman in a shower.

Hitchcock ("The Director)" wanders into Manuel Muñoz's novel, What You See in the Dark, in Bakersfield, Calif., seeking a motel location for his new movie, Psycho. And Muñoz crafts his hybrid story, an artful blend of fiction and history, around the making of that famous film. "He (Hitchcock) was in the midst of doing something extraordinary and uncanny with some actresses, finessing their star wattage and burnishing it into a singular, almost iconic image."

Analogous to "The Director" and "The Actress" (Janet Leigh) are two ordinary people. Teresa Garza and Dan Watson are small-town lovers. She wants to be a famous singer; he directs her nightclub debut. Their relationship ends with her brutal murder: "The stairwell up to her apartment had a side wall smeared in blood. ..."
Muñoz's skillful use of second-person point-of-view in the opening and final chapters gives the story a cinematic feel -- you can almost hear the soundtrack as Candy, Teresa's co-worker, searches for her: "She's there, that girl. You looked for her among the faces surrounding the bathroom mirrors, but she was nowhere to be found. But you know she's there. ..." Candy also judges: She can't imagine how "that skinny brown girl who lived above the bowling alley" managed to snag "the most handsome man in town." The rest of the novel is told from a third-person point of view. It's an unusual approach, but the shift works.

With his debut novel, Muñoz knits a complex web of storylines into one smooth narrative, pulling the reader through backstory, action and multiple perspectives with the subtlety of a literary master -- or even a film director.

James Lee Burke, Kevin Canty, and Robin Troy

This week we break format to feature a live broadcast with James Lee Burke and Kevin Canty (unless you're listening to YPR -- more about that below).

Burke and Canty will join TWQ producer Chérie Newman in the MTPR broadcast studio for a conversation about the importance of literature and public support for programs like The Write Question.

Listen live at 7:30 over the Montana Public Radio network (MTPR.org).

If you're in Yellowstone Public Radio country, this week's program features Robin Troy, author of the "quiet" novel Liberty Lanes.

In a world full of ramped-up, fast-paced fiction, it's nice to find a quiet story, a story about people like you and me, folks who have trouble deciding what something means and sometimes say the wrong thing. But, at least in this case, quiet doesn't mean boring.

The characters in Troy's novel, Liberty Lanes, are a group of elderly bowlers. But they do not slide into the box of stereotypes about aging without a fight. Nay, they are too busy living life to its fullest for that nonsense. They have romantic flings, gossip, and meet up for lively bowling sessions three times each week.

Debra Magpie Earling (author of Perma Red) writes, "Liberty Lanes is a transcendent story about the power of love and friendship. A tender and moving tale, a joy to read."

Hear Robin Troy talk about and read from  Liberty Lanes on Yellowstone Public Radio Thursday evening at 6:30.

Monday Poems: "Naming the Cataracts" by Madeline DeFrees

If my doctors had told me, You have stars in your eyes,
the line more than a metaphor of
young love; or if seeing stars meant something other
than being knocked out cold,
how could the feelings of old age be hurt by a diagnosis
of cataracts? Language is everything.
I know that I saw stars whenever I
walked into the sun, or when oncoming cars
blinded me with headlights.

                                           How often I'm drawn into
danger by mirage. Bold asterisks of color
eclipse the blurred street names, transform the landscape.
In books, I find names worthy of a poet.
I ask my surgeon the proper term for my singular pair
of cataracts. He kindly spares me senile
although I'm 83 and the shoe fits.
Must I dissemble, sweeten
the pill with euphemism, and say I suffer from

senior cataracts? Nuclear cortical, my doctor says,
sending me off to global war and regions
of the brain that make me nervous. I toy with metaphoric
names that please the mind's
eye and tame my disorder: Snowflake... Snowstorm, I try.
Then Sunflower... Perhaps Glassblower's
Cataract. I substitute Cuneiform
from Persia: ancient rock inscriptions. Or those of
Babylon on brick and stone, a secret

                                                         code, made-to-order
for Scorpios, Cuneiform; white opaque, wedgelike,
sometimes called Arrowhead, ranged in
spokes around the cortex border. One left: Spindle
to get a handle on the matter. Starlight
again in my eyes because Spindle's tied to those
of us who spin -- that eight-legged
spider whose spinnerets veil my eye and bar
light from the lens.

*     *     *     *     *

Madeline DeFrees is the author of two chapbooks, two nonfiction books and eight poetry collections, including Blue Dusk, which won the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Spectral Waves, which won the 2007 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. "Naming the Cataracts" is in the latter collection.

DeFrees, who will turn 91 this month, has lived most of her life in Oregon and Washington. She served the Catholic church as a nun for 37 years, from 1936 to 1973, after which she taught at the Holy Names College, the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts until she retired to Seattle in 1985. 


DeFrees has continued to hold residencies and teach at low-residency programs in the Pacific Northwest and lectured at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (Whidbey Writers Workshop) in January 2009. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.

Rick Craig begins a new mystery series

Raising a child is challenging, under any circumstances. But when parenting includes high-altitude hazards, a dead body, and trained assassins, it takes a skilled and savvy man to keep his child safe.

In Rick Craig's new novel, The Last Mountains, that man is Park Service climbing ranger Tom Hadley. As he goes into the summer of 2002, all he wants is to become a better father and reassemble the life that fell apart when a brain injury ended his promising Himalayan mountaineering career. But murder pulls him into a web of terrorists, American agents and political intrigue as the country moves toward war. Tom foils an apparent assassination attempt on the Vice President, but it may be his son -- the only one who can identify the killer from the mountain -- who is really in danger.

With high adventure, stunning landscapes, sharply drawn characters and a fast-moving plot, The Last Mountains launches an exciting new mystery series.

Hear Rick Craig talk about the book and read from it during this week's program.

Thursday evening:
6:30 Yellowstone Public Radio (YPRadio.org)
7:30 Montana Public Radio (MTPR.org)

Anytime:
Online archive
Podcast delivered to your computer or mobile device

Monday Poems: "The Gold Book" -- by Karen Volkman

It told the story of a runaway rose

that fled trellises, hedges, and the safety

of the master's shack for a life of abandon

in a town down the mountain, till the repressed

one-armed giantess packed her shears

and went to hunt.  You recall the rest

only in shreds--the long travails of the giantess,

dark windy nights, a loud tavern where soldiers

bounced the blithe rose on their knees 

and called it Betty.  The inevitably violent end.

But what happened to that clarity of detail

you once knew?  The thin book sported toothmarks

and a child's hieroglyphics, pages frayed

and smudged at the edge from too much turning.

You think the vanished facts of the story

must take their place in the continuing

erasures of your life:  forgotten knowledge

and grammars, lost love, sensations and responses,

all heaped democratic in some dank

chaotic attic, with the occasional tantalizing

reminders to bait you, the way you remember,

years later, forgotten dreams at stoplights.

Or how as a child, carried drowsing from the car

by your father, you felt the prickly, solemn

pressure of a father's chest, and for the first time

felt yourself feeling, as if from a distance, and knew 

you were somehow more than what was held.

Now you wonder that all you've forgotten

is already greater than what you contain,

a life conducted under skies

blunt and inexpressive as a giant's wrist.

Songs rise from the tavern to the valley

where vengeance waits, a fate shown

by the simple absence of a rowdy rose,

who at this moment carves initials in a table,

laughing, careless, as you struggle to picture

the specific, lurid end.  Did the giantess

use the shears?  Which arm was missing?

*     *     *     *     *

Karen Volkman is Associate Professor of poetry at the University of Montana -- Missoula. Her first book, Crash's Law, in which the above poem appears, was selected for the National Poetry Series. 

Her second book, Spar, received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2002 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent collection, Nomina, was published by BOA Editions in Spring 2008. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

Melanie Rae Thon's story collection speaks for those who can't

Reading Melanie Rae Thon's stories is like watching a series of movies through a glittery, gossamer curtain -- an experience both disturbing and thrilling. Disturbing because most of her characters are throwaway kids. Thrilling because of Thon's startling ability to become each one of her people, to move inside the bodies and minds of the dispossessed, to give them voices and color. One homeless child speaks for all: "I'm your worst fear. But not the worst thing that can happen."

In This Light moves with a fearless grace: an intoxicated woman hits and abandons a Native American man on a desolate Montana road; a grieving slave murders the white baby she nurses and loves; two throwaway kids dance in the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree in a stranger's house, as "all the angels hanging from the branches opened their glass mouths, stunned." Thon's searing prose reveals that the radiant heat inside us all is the hope and hunger for love.
 
During this week's program, Thon talks about her creative process and reads from the her collection of stories, In This Light. She also reads her lyrical essay called, "Five Reasons to Tell a Story in 2011."

Tune in Thursday evening at 6:30 (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 (MTPR.org). Or sign up for the TWQ podcast.


Find out more about Melanie Rae Thon and listen to the program online.

Monday Poems: "Scary Movies" -- by Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,   

and I keep expecting some enormous   

black-and-white B-movie Cyclops   

to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean   

and drag me from my kitchen   

to the deep cave that flickered   

into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless   

between my older brothers, pumped up   

on candy and horror—that cave,

the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,   

I can smell their stench as clearly

as the bacon fat from breakfast. This   

is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is   

that helps you get up in the morning

and actually leave the house

on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform

is cruising his panel truck

of packages through your neighborhood.   

I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine—

Hi, I’m not here—

the morning of her funeral,   

the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,

and I feel as afraid as I was

after all those vampire movies   

when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,

unable to get up

even to pee because the undead   

were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare

foot out there in the unprotected air   

they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me   

under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older   

I would know better, and now   

they’re dead, and I’m older,   

and I know better.

*     *     *     *     *

Poet and novelist Kim Addonizio lives and works in Oakland, CA. She has been awarded two NEA fellowships as well as a Pushcart Prize for poetry and essay. 

"Scary Movies" can be found in her 2004 collection What is This Thing Called Love. Her most recent poetry collection is Lucifer at the Starlite (2009).