Category: Poems

My Muse

~ plainswriter ~ 1 Comment

When I think about the idea of “muse,” it is easy for me to name mine: Amy, my wife. It might sound “cheesy” to say, perhaps (so traditional), that my spouse, to whom I have been married for 12 years, is my muse. Still. She is not my muse in the primary sense that she inspires me to write (although I’ve written my share of pieces that were inspired by her).

When I state that she is my muse, I mean that she is my primary audience member. Better yet, she is my audience. Whenever I’m constructing or revising a story, a poem, an essay, I’m wondering, what would Amy think? (WWAT?) I could care less what anyone else thinks of my work as long as she enjoys it, is moved by it. I write for and because of her. And I hope my work communicates to her at some level or levels.

She became my muse when we started dating over 14 years ago, and through my work in various genres, I would periodically show her my drafts. Not first drafts of stories, anyway, but often first drafts of poems. And I valued (and still value) her viewpoint above all others because she is untainted by years of literary study via writing workshops and literature seminars. Not that I don’t value those, because I do. The former helped me as writer consider the implications of my choices (from craft and technique angles), and the latter plunged me as a writer into the world of the literary critic, discovering even deeper truths and issues.

But she is not a poet, not a fiction writer, not a writer of creative nonfiction. She is a reader, a close and careful reader, someone who possesses a no-nonsense attitude about reading and writing. She reads a story for story, for characters who are rich, complex. She reads a poem for the directness and precision of its language and imagery. She reads an essay for the way that a writer shares his or her insights, his or her discoveries. She is intelligent, well-read, compassionate, and a good listener. All qualities of a great audience member, all qualities of a great spouse.

I vividly recall her in the passenger seat of our 2004 Impala to South Dakota on our way to and to my dissertation defense. 200-some pages of my short-story collection on her lap. I knew I would have the final revisions and suggested edits by my committee, but I would also have the edits and questions of Amy, which I valued just as much, if not more. I was more anxious about her reading the collection (regularly sneaking glances as she read and marked edits and comments) than what my committee would say. I wondered what she thought as she read each story. I worried what she thought.

A final point to close with. During my MFA time, during the first years of our marriage, and when I was primarily a poet, I took several fiction seminars, too. The stories I wrote were bad, so bad. Amy dutifully read them, and I remember that at a certain point, she said something along the lines of, “For a while, I think I was the better prose writer than you are, but you’ve really grown.” In those early years there was a steady growth that I sensed but couldn’t quite articulate. She was able to discern and acknowledge that growth. Her statement was an inspiration then, and it has inspired me (but really she has inspired me) to improve as a writer, and even more so to improve as a person, her grateful husband.

Why I Write Poetry

~ plainswriter ~ 4 Comments

Note: this piece originally began 5 years ago, and I reworked it over the last summer.  Enjoy.

Poetry on the Northern Prairie

Bill Holm stood tall, probably six-foot-six. With a bulging stomach, white hair, and a white beard, he looked the part of Santa Claus. And his voice—deep and resonant to the point that any poem he read sounded great—made it impossible for me to fall asleep in his “Poetry” class. It was strictly a “literature” course, so there were daily readings from Donald Hall’s To Read a Poem (a textbook I still own), two exams, two explication papers, and two poem recitations given in front of the class.

All of this happened the fall of my junior year at Southwest Minnesota State University. On Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 3:30 to 4:45, I sat expectantly as Bill read aloud poems by poets I’d never heard of before: Wallace Stevens, Robert Bly, James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost (beyond “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken”), among many I could name.

I write these two statements unashamedly: he made poetry come alive; he made me into a poet.

*          *          *

The reading assignment for one class in early October had been Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” along with some other poems, none of which I remember. I followed the opening lines of the poem as Bill recited in his rich baritone, “Let us go, then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” He continued reading, but those opening lines knocked the wind out of me. Eliot’s simile seemed against the “rules” (due to my limited knowledge of and exposure to poetry). My awe left me only one thought: “Maybe I could try writing poetry again.”

At that point in time, I was searching. I was halfway through my program as a vocal music major with a recently added music education track. For the latter I possessed zero enthusiasm—the decision had been one encouraged by parents and my-then girlfriend.

Yet I had always enjoyed poetry—what little I’d read in my small high school English program. I had received A’s on my creative writing assignments in high school. And so during Bill’s class and after it was over, I scribbled lines, attempted to write poems, inspired as much by him and his readings as by the poems and poets themselves.

*          *          *

Four years later when I was enrolled in the MFA program at Minnesota State University Moorhead, Bill gave a reading at Zandbroz Variety in Fargo. I arrived early to the downtown storefront bookstore on a chilly mid-December night, hoping to talk to him. I was able to catch him before the reading, and I thanked him for his influence and his instruction. I told him about my pursuit of being a poet, a writer. Bill smiled and then laughed. “Well, now you’ve ruined your life,” he said.

After the reading he signed my copy of The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere, still my favorite book of his. In blue ink he wrote, “May this make you a little homesick for the southwest.” That was the last time I saw him.

*          *          *

Bill collapsed at the airport in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on February 24, 2009, and died the next day from complications due to pneumonia. He was 65. As a man who owned no computer or TV, he left behind a house full of books and music, including a dozen of his own, half of which I’ve read. More significant to me is my personal connection with him, and the way both he and the content of the class altered my career trajectory.

I wouldn’t have dropped the music education track that semester and added a second major: Literature/Creative Writing. I wouldn’t have completed an MFA. And I wouldn’t have gone on for a PhD with a specialization in Creative Writing if it hadn’t been for Bill’s instruction, his encouragement, and his own books that I read with great joy.

*          *          *

In the bottom drawer of my office’s filing cabinet, in the very back slot, is a blue hanging folder labelled “Pre-Workshop Poetry,” the phrase referring to poems I wrote before I took any undergraduate creative writing classes. In there are poems I drafted that fall. Here are a few lines from one of the attempts: “The sun has just gone down / and the western sky is orangish-red. / To the east it is already getting dark.”

Strangely, 16 years later, I can look in that small stack of poems I wrote while I was absorbing the work of so many great poets, and I see the motifs and subjects that many of my published poems contain: travel, the landscape, the rural areas, evening.

Bill taught me not to be ashamed of where I came from. He taught me that there was poetry in the prairies of Southwestern Minnesota. He taught me to love the region and the people themselves. And now, I can confidently draft, revise, and publish poems set and inspired by this region, offering no apologies, and desiring to give none.

I am, at heart, a prairie poet.

Mourning

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Hospitality

–in Memoriam, Charlotte M. Hill (1926-2012)

When I got the call from Mom,
saying you were in hospice,
it was as I expected
and hoped, for I wanted you
to suffer no longer, your body
already wracked beyond
medications’ or surgery’s
extensive but finite reach,
only divine healing a real
possibility.

Maybe some had prayed
for that those last months,
weeks, and days, and I did too,
but ceased from prayers for healing,
instead requesting God’s peace,
the only one we cannot fathom,
the only one that cannot be broken.

Yet when I spoke to you
(after Mom said you couldn’t speak),
you did just that–words your way
of showing love, conversation
your gift, however strained.
You said I made you proud.
I said, I love you.  You said the same.

And now, your struggle done,
I imagine you serving at the table
of the Lord.  Even though none will lack
anything, you’ll still ask everyone
(once, twice, three times) if they
have enough–not from lack of faith–
but because you want all
to hunger and thirst no more.