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.