The Middlewesterner

INTERVIEW WITH THE POET LAUREATE COMMISSION
& APPEARANCE OF A POSSIBLE CONSOLATION PRIZE
 
I interviewed with Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Commission yesterday, as expected.
 
"How did it go?" you might ask.
 
"Very well, thank you," I would say.
 
I think I did a good interview. "Charmed them," as our friend Pearl Mt. Castle might put it. Yet I wasn't a mouse in the corner during the interviews with the other two finalists, who may have "charmed them" even more than I did.
 
When Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, chair of the Poet Laureate Commission, called me to set up this interview, I had my choice of time slots - first, second, or third. I chose the third slot, because I wanted the interviewers to have a clear sense of the other candidates when they were weighing my answers to their questions.
 
Questions came in fairly orderly fashion from the circle gathered round me. Some were questions I expected - "Why did you apply for the position?" Some were questions I didn't expect - "How do you think appointment as Poet Laureate might affect your writing and your career?" I hadn't thought about that very much, actually, thinking more about the work the Poet Laureate would need to be doing.
 
It was a comfortable interview, in the sense that I had six interested people focused on me for an hour, listening to my every word. How we do long for this kind of attention as writers, and how seldom we find it!
 
One member of the commission is the current Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort, who has served these past four years. She noted that if I were appointed, I could put the letters Poet Laureate Of Wisconsin after my name, P.L.O.W. "which spells plow." She knew that would warm a farm boy's heart.
 
At the end of the interview, they gave me a long-stemmed white rose, as they had done for the other two finalists, because we were finalists. A nice touch, I thought. I took my name tag off my rose, brought it home and gave it to my wife, and told her it was from the Poet Laureate Commission, "because you have to put up with me."
 
Those serving on the commission have a thankless task, really. No one, I am sure, will ever go up to any of those folks and say "I really want to thank you for all the time and energy you've put into selecting the next Poet Laureate." Just won't happen. But it should.
 
I did a good interview and I am prepared for whatever recommendation the commission makes to the Governor, and whatever decision the Governor makes. An announcement should be forthcoming sometime in the next two weeks, I think. I'll keep you updated.
 
*
 
In the event that the appointment goes to someone else, a "consolation prize" of sorts has already been offered to me. I got a phone call on Friday from the head of the writing department at a college in our area, about an hour's drive, asking if I could teach a fiction-writing course for them in the fall semester.
 
"Our fiction writer will be on sabbatical in the fall," my caller said. "No problem, we thought. We expected to offer fiction-writing in the spring. However, because we are in transition between our old curriculum and our new curriculum, the dean says we are obligated to teach the course this fall. Can you do it?"
 
"Oh," I said, and I was kicking myself as I was saying no. What an opportunity. "I have to tell you I don't feel qualified to teach fiction-writing. It wouldn't be fair to your students. If it were a course in writing poetry or creative nonfiction, I'd say yes in a minute."
 
Not silence on the phone exactly, I could hear wheels turning. "Let me check schedules and talk to the dean," my caller said. "I may be able to teach the fiction-writing course, and you could teach the creative nonfiction course I'm supposed to. I'll call you back."
 
He called back, said: "The dean is sending you a contract."
 
So, in the midst of everything else, I am exhilirated now to be putting together a course in writing creative nonfiction. It is quite an honor for a working writer (one who has learned the craft in the school of hard knocks, rather than in a writing program) to be asked to teach a class like this. As I said to Mary, "the farm boy will be telling the college kids what he has learned about writing prose."
 
I'll keep you updated on this development, too! Life is WHEE! quite a ride!
 
---------------------------
 
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART EIGHT 
 
This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
 
"I picked raspberries and gooseberries and shocked wheat and planted tobacco," Pearl said when I asked her if she had other stories about her life on the piece of ground she has inhabited for ninety years. "Working with my dad. I never drove the horses, he always did that."

"I had a little experience with the horse one time," Pearl remembered. "My little brother always rode bare-back to go bring in the cows. He had a case of appendicitis and could do the things he had been doing. So he sat up in the barn. And the little horse he rode bareback was a very gentle little fellow and so Pearl said she'd ride it this time, to go back for the cows. He saw me off. The barn's on a hill, and there was a big valley where the lake is now. I rode horseback out to get the cows, had them all coming in like we usually did. The horse came to the barn without Pearl on it. That scared my little brother to death, he was just sick about it - he had caused Pearl to get hurt, you know. Pretty soon I walked up the hill where he could see me. Everything was okay. A horse-fly had got after the horse, and it was switching its tail and shaking itself, and I slid off. Not hurt, but I slid off."

"I fear for farming in this area," Pearl said when I asked her to assess its condition where she lived. "The land is being filled up with homes. People are moving out from the city. They like the out-of-doors, they like to be out. Farmers are not making money. They are selling lots along the roadside. You can hardly drive half a mile anywhere that you don't see new houses being built. People are moving out because they like the out-of-doors and farmers are hard up so they're selling their land, which reduces agriculture in the area. It seems that many city people want their cities to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and they want to bring in business and so on, but they're cutting the agricultural area to hardly any big farms. One young farmer who does nothing but farm has to have a lot of land or he doesn't make a living on it because prices are not what they should be. So he farms several farms, and that's his business, and the fellows who own the farms go into town to get jobs. Farmland is being lost."

"I wonder what the future will bring?" Pearl asks. "We have to have farms. One of the biggest farms in our neighborhood, between here and Lewisburg, it has about thirty houses on it now, not a single farm field on the whole place any more. That's an example of what's going on. If you keep putting on new houses, where are they going to grow corn? And this is supposed to be the Corn Belt."

"We have several factories in Lewisburg now," Pearl said. "People are coming into Lewisburg instead of going out due to General Motors or the other big businesses in Dayton. The community is growing in terms of people. Their work is right here in Lewisburg."

"We didn't have electricity on this farm until 1939," Pearl said. "Neither did other people in the area. Along came Rural Electrification out of Greenville - the office was in Greenville, Ohio, which is twenty miles away. They came through before they built, wanting to know if people would accommodate them, and be patrons of their business. That was in 1939. My father, of the old school, went along with everybody else, ten dollars to be wired in. When they started putting in new posts out here for the electrical wires, Dad wondered what it was all about then. He said he didn't care whether he had electricity or not. This was in 1939 and all the family was gone from home - it was just my father and me. Electricity would be such a convenience for me. With the big family - all the nieces and nephews by this time - how could I handle it? I've got to look out for Pearl. So I talked to my dad about it, I said 'Dad, the farm is in your name, but I'm going to put this money into wiring the place - it was costly - what about it?' And he said I could buy the farm. It would be in my name. He could still live here. And he did, from 1939 to 1954, just like he always did, and made what he could make off of it. But Pearl paid the taxes and insurance and got electricity put in. So I had the conveniences everybody else had."

When did Pearl learn to drive?

"Everybody had cars," Pearl said. "The father of an extra-good friend told me, he said 'Pearl, you've got to have a little car.' So I bought a second-hand Model T in 1924 - that was my first car."

"My first radio was right here on this table," she said. "That was back in the 1920s some time, and that chair right there sat right here where Dad listened with ear-phones."

When television came, Pearl said, "it was just another thing, just another invention."

"This is a good time to be living in Ohio," Pearl said, "with all the history being celebrated. The Wright Brothers flew in 1903 and that's the year I was born."

To be continued....
 
-------------------
 
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL 
JULY 9, 1998

A cool morning, air wet with haze. I am home after a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a meeting. I flew Super Death Airways - but spent three times as much time on the ground as in the air. Tuesday evening in Midway all six flights on their board were delayed. People working for the airline were all under stress. There was a terrific system problem of some sort. I will repeat my observation from my Atlanta trip that an airport takes on its own reality; all airports are essentially the same and indistinguishable from one another, featureless, without weather, hypnotizing in their monotony.

I will add one more observation: why the hell is Grand Rapids, Michigan, intending to look like Los Angeles? Stop and go traffic on its freeways, sprawling across farmland as if the supply of good ground is infinite. So Grand Rapids has tripled in size since the 1960s - can't it look like a midwestern town instead of an LA knock-off? It is obvious that we do not think about the big picture in our everyday little decisions. I am inclined to agree with Wallace Stegner that man is a rogue, weed species. Grand Rapids, were it a thinking entity, would be thinking about gobbling up some more of the world around it.
 
To be honest, the same charge can be made against Fond du Lac, Rosendale, and Ripon. The same charge can be made against the development being done in the fields behind the Village Mart in Fairwater.
 
A stray cat stands on our driveway, thinking he owns it. The windshield of the pick-up is dark with bug parts. I drove home from the airport last night. I had forgotten what driving at night will do to a windshield in Wisconsin in summer.

How many of us could be set down randomly on a piece of ground and be able to identify where, roughly, we are? What would you need to look at to succeed? What kind of test would this be? Who could pass it?

Our good retired farmer is working the flower bed at Five Corners this morning. He is offering the flowers water and they are taking a drink. He is smoking a cigarette. He stays to his business and doesn't look up.

There! That is a distinction to make in the world - between those who look up and those who don't. I'm afraid I am one of those who looks up and that's more a curse than a blessing.

You run a lot of make-ready, sometimes, creating the context for one good idea.

*

JULY 10, 1998
I lay abed an hour longer than usual again this morning and I'm moving kinda slow. Those damn birds, they have got to start singing louder at 5 a.m., if they're to roll me out! But at least I'm moving now, breathing, heading to work, another day another dollar. Consider the alternative.

All of a SUDDEN - I am lost in the day. I've driven to where the hawk lives without a single thought, only silence, without realizing I haven't had a single thought. Then the leaves of the trees, being two-toned as they are, snap me to consciousness, suggest a storm is coming. The corn, too, seems to have itself curled against fierceness. Even starlings are hunkered down in a row along the ditch at Five Corners. The coming day doesn't look bad to me. Perhaps it is the heat for which things are preparing.

Ripon is all set up for its celebration, which starts this evening. Note to myself: stay home; you know how much you don't like crowds.

In the distance, the caw of crow.

Who owns the day?

What I choose has chosen me. 

SATURDAYS POEMS
--------------------------------
APOSTLE ISLANDS HISTORY
by Judith Strasser

I spend the morning reading scholars' accounts
of people early to these shores: Ojibwa who moved
to Chequamegon Bay the decade Columbus "discovered"
America; the trappers, traders, voyageurs who paddled
the unsettled lake; 19th century masons who quarried
brownstone in eight-by-four blocks and shipped it
off to Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, as far east
as Buffalo. By noon I am weary of driving stakes
for pound nets, cleaning lake trout, felling white pine,
stripping hemlock bark. I need a nap. I am drowsy
from sawdust history and growth-of-industry fact.

I go down to the lake to haul water for washing dishes.
Wind drives three-foot breakers onto the shallow beach.
Rollers slosh in and out of my brown Rubbermaid pail.
A wave breaks on the rocks and soaks my boots, my socks,
my jeans, the sleeve of my polypro fleece. Fog drips
from the balsam branches. Nothing will dry today.
I have a change of clothes, a roof, a fireplace.
But what of the voyageurs, rushing to rendezvous?
And the loggers, swarming the smoky cookhouse in sweat-
drenched trousers and shirts? How wet does a fisherman get
in November, racing the making ice to pull his herring nets?
This is the story. The sun disappears, Ojibwa children shiver,
a gale howls from the northeast.

*

COUNTY ROAD
by Judith Strasser

Sand Island
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

The settlers are gone, cabins
rotted or burned. What remains:
the school house foundation,
moss-garden-capped concrete;
a Model T, sunk to its fenders,
kneeling under the trees.
A trail -

choked with balsam and alder,
roadbed rutted, muddy, sodden,
a permanent bog of memory
bordered by sentinel trees.

Penny candy from the co-op;
Noreng's berries, big as
hens' eggs, too juicy to ship
anywhere; dances - pump organ,
squeezebox, fiddle, the whole
village at the school; crossing the ice-
bridge for mail; the storm
that took Harold Dahl.

PHIL HEY'S HOW IT SEEMS TO ME
COMES BACK FROM THE PRINTER

One of my projects this spring and summer has been preparing a volume of Phil Hey's new and selected poems for publication. How It Seems to Me has been a wonderful undertaking from the start. Phil is one of those poets who labors with quiet diligence, more concerned with substance than flash; I think he wants to be a good man and a good teacher first, and if his poems get published or they don't, so be it. The kind of man with the kind of work I'm proud to publish.

I met Phil in Sioux City, where he lives, when I was on book tour in support of my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm, Curlew: Home. He gathered a group of fellow faculty members and students and brought them to hear me read at a local coffee shop. God bless him, he still sends me the occasional e-mail expressing his pleasure with some of the prose in my memoir.

The common rap against poets is that they tend towards "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." That's not the case with this book, folks. Phil doesn't have much to offer me except his friendship and possibly a reading at Briar Cliff University where he teaches. I'm not going to let friendship get in the way of publishing this book; and, for the record, I haven't done a reading at Briar Cliff. I don't have much to offer him except friendship and - one hopes - a few readers for his good poetry.

In the interest of complete honesty, I suppose I should confess also that when I e-mailed him the other day about when copies of the book would be arriving at his humble abode, he did state that if he wins the lottery, MWPH Books, my imprint, would receive "a huge endowment." To tell the truth, I don't think he plays the lottery.

I am not the only one who loves Phil's work. God rest her soul, Gwendolyn Brooks said of it, "These poems are so good, so bready!" James Autry, author of Love and Profit and Life After Mississippi, said "by all the Gods of poetry, if this isn't an authentic voice, we're never going to find one." Vivian Shipley said the poems "take flight at every moment's crossroad in order to preserve the hard daily lives of men and women who are living scant, but like the farmer's wife who buys day lilies with egg money learn to flower in the midst of such neglect." Jeanne Emmons, author of Rootbound and winner of the Minnesota Voices Award, wrote that "in his hands conversations overheard, places discovered on the road, found objects, and the events of everyday life become gifts and graces."
 
I've included a sample from the poems, below, "Route 39 south of Pittsville," which won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine.

Phil Hey's How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems (96 pp., trade paper) is available for $12.50 per copy plus $2.00 for shipping and handling; order from: Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. Make check payable to Tom Montag. You'll be glad you did.


Route 39 south of Pittsville
by Phil Hey

For years she had dreams of getting
a bait and fried chicken place,
nothing fancy, one of those
little bungalows like you see with
white painted clapboard and green trim,
not new when she got it and not
likely to get any newer either,
and out front a screened-in entryway
with those enamel metal signs
of Nehi and Mission Black Cherry,
and inside, some used glass cases
full of reels and lures gathering dust,
and on the wall shelves of those red
cedar curios they don't make within
two hundred miles of the place.
And those cards and signs you wouldn't
laugh at anymore if you ever did,
though one in particular sticks in my mind:
if you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
And in the air hangs a certain scent
of cigarettes and fried fish,
specially over by where they eat
at old Chromecraft tables
but wooden chairs, and all around
near the ceiling are these pictures
of folks and the big fish they caught.
That's the place she got, too,
so well known in those parts
she never even named it,
though they call it Myrt's
after her. She ain't smart,
doesn't care much about money,
wouldn't trade.

----------------

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART SEVEN

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"So what'll I do with the sheep?" Pearl continued. "I'll take care of them. They're good mowers, and I learned what to do with them. Sure enough, lambs began to appear in the morning before school, and so forth. One morning I went to the barn to take care of the sheep and here stood a little lamb, back in the corner, helpless, of course born during the night. And the mother was not taking care of it. She was standing off some place else. Well, I was prepared. I had condensed milk, very rich, and the ewe's milk is very rich. And I had all the equipment to feed the lamb with a bottle. That little lamb would not be alive when I came home from school because it hasn't had anything to eat. What'll I do? What'll I do?"

"I came to the house and had my breakfast," Pearl said, "and I got a bushel basket and lined it with newspapers. The last thing I did before starting to school was to talk in the barn and pick up that lamb and put it in the back seat of the car. I took along the milk and things I'd need to take care of it at school. It was winter-time, but lambs come pretty warmly dressed, you know. It'd be alright in my car because the car was warm. With the sun out, it would be well taken care of in the bushel basket."

"I got to the school building with the lamb in the basket," Pearl said. "I had everything taken care of, the bottle and everything to take care of it. And I even had a leash, a little leash that I had on my puppy. In my room at school, the encyclopedias were in a little case that had legs. But I thought I'd leave it in the car, it'd be okay, I'd go out at noon to feed it. I parked my car; I went into the office; I told the principal, I said: 'I have brought that lamb in my car - it'll be alright out there - I'll go out at noon to feed it.' She said, 'Bring that lamb in.'"

"I had the leash on it already," she said, "so I went out and brought the little lamb in, laid down some newspaper, tied the end of the leash to the Britannica stand. I had it all ready for the children when they came in. Their eyes popped, you know. City school. Little lamb walking around up there in the front of the room. It got taken care of really well."

"During the day," she said, "I let the children, three by three, take the lamb, the bottle, and the paper towels to the kindergarten, the first grade, and so forth. The little lamb was taken care of. I fed it on the bottle and it grew up."

Pearl said: "Often at the end of the year, the last week of school, I'd tell the children, 'Now we've had a lot of fun and we've worked hard and we've done a lot of things. I wonder if you wouldn't take a piece of paper and write an evaluation of your fifth grade. Rather like writing me a letter, and I'll read it this summer when I'm not with you."

"Dear Miss Mt. Castle," the letters would start, Pearl indicated, and they would talk about the things the students liked during the year, "the poems that we learned, the fun that we had one way or another. I had been to South America that one year and I had pictures I'd shown them on the screen. They talked about different things we'd done, and how much they think they had learned that year, and some of them liked the teacher and some of them didn't say whether they did or not. They wrote what they thought was a good evaluation. And many of them wrote, 'The best day of school was the day you brought the lamb.'"

Pearl laughs at the memory. "Oh, I had a lot of fun with my teaching, a lot of fun."

"That was in 1954," Pearl said. "In 1988, we had a drought - no pasture, and nobody would sell me hay. My pasture was just like straw. I couldn't buy hay. I didn't have any way to them the sheep. I had to give them up, which was like a funeral. I'd had sheep all those years, raised top-notch lambs, went to lamb school when professors from Ohio State came down to Eaton and collected the sheep people of Preble County for classwork on how to feed lambs, how to have healthy sheep, how to shear them, that sort of thing."

Pearl also kept a garden all those years - "green beans and peas and tomatoes, sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, enough onions to last me the winter."

"Once I wrote down on a card what I canned one year," Pearl said. "I had about two hundred quarts of green beans and peas, peaches, all kinds of fruits. When my dad was living, we always had peaches - that was his favorite fruit. He'd go to the orchard and come back with a bushel of peaches and say 'Here, Pearl, here are the peaches.' That'd be twenty quarts of peaches."

"Through the years we had fruit trees here," Pearl said, "apples, pears, and cherries, but they're gone now. There's one apple tree left, up near the barn."

To be continued....

----------------

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 6, 1998

We are coming off a three-day weekend celebrating our independence from Great Britain. How much different would this place be had we not won our independence? Would this be a French land, or at least bordering on a French land? Thomas Jefferson would never have made the Louisiana Purchase without our war of independence, would he? Wisconsin and Michigan would be very much like Ontario, wouldn't they? Our government would be different, our schools would be different, our landscape would be marked differently. We'd be more Canadian, eh?

It has not been so hot. It is overcast and humid this morning. There is a sticky summer sweetness in the air. In the country, a fierce greenness today, in farm fields and scrub land alike. A flock of sea gulls is set down in the field of alfalfa recently harvested, a study in green and white.

White morning glories cling to a rare stand of fence.

Corn is five to six feet tall in places; tassels are, all of a sudden, very much in evidence. Elsewhere along Highway E, the corn is only six inches high.

North of Five Corners, the sour smell of pea vines left on the ground after harvest. The rip of that odor is part of the cost of doing a business in peas, I guess.

In Ripon, an ambulance screams, turns toward the hospital. A quiet summer day is broken by the siren. A quiet summer day, and someone lays dying.

*

JULY 7, 1998
Our friend who moved to California in May for a new job has quit the job and headed back east. He lasted about three weeks. He is visiting a friend in South Carolina and looking for a job in that area. He is a Massachusetts boy and when he told me he was going to California, I laughed. I laughed and laughed, over the phone, talking with him, and he may have been offended. He wanted to know why I was laughing. I said the California gestalt would not fit his Massachusetts psyche. He lasted three weeks. He e-mailed me saying he was quitting the job and going back east, admitting that I had been right. He said the job didn't allow him an ounce of creativity and "Los Angeles was too weird." So - it's true that some things are eternal and one of them is you can't easily transplant a sardonic Massachusetts fellow into a show-place California setting. What formed us holds us. We ignore this fact at our own risk.

A cool, grey morning. A riffled surface to the pond (where it's free of algae). A mourning dove's call. The trees are quiet. This is very much, today, like waking in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, except I have to go in to work now, and later fly to Grand Rapids, MI. A fat robin in the back yard shows me the way to peacefulness. If only we, too, could accept what we need to accept. But NO! we think we should be happy and then we don't know what happiness is. Whoa, Tom! Now you're goin'.

Along Highway E, the beans are growing by leaps, wide leaves turned to the morning. Three crows eat at a raccoon killed on the road; they hop out of the way of traffic then return to the feast. The grey overcast above is air-brushed in place. A woman drives a big rig south-bound towards Fairwater, secure at the wheel, rolling.

A goat trims the farm yard grass just south of Five Corners. He is kept in place with a rope tied to a tire filled with cement. Every couple of days, the tire gets moved and the goat trims another area. If only we could learn to accept what we need to accept.

SO HERE IS THE NEWS I'VE BEEN
SITTING ON FOR ABOUT A MONTH

Look at the following news release closely and you'll see the name of your Fairwater correspondent among the three finalists for Wisconsin's next Poet Laureate appointment. How fortuitous is it that August 31st is my 57th birthday? We'll see.

I am honored and humbled to be selected as a finalist. And, of course, excited as hell.

The three finalists interview with the Poet Laureate Commission this Saturday, July 17th. I'd say "Wish me good luck," but it is better to want this to come out the way it should, whatever way that is.

I will say that I wouldn't be embarrassed to lose the appointment to either of the other finalists. The Poet Laureate Commission has a tough task, making such a choice.

Here is the text of the news release the Commission has sent out:


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wisconsin Poet Laureate Finalists!

Who will be the next Wisconsin writer to carry the torch for poetry? We should have that answer soon, because three finalists for the Governor-appointed Poet Laureate position were recently chosen – they are John Lehman (Cambridge), Tom Montag (Fairwater), and Denise Sweet (Green Bay). One of these poets will succeed popular outgoing Wisconsin Poet Laureate Ellen Kort, Appleton.

The responsibilities of the second Poet Laureate will be lofty ones – "to serve as a herald for Wisconsin’s poets and their work, to promote poetry statewide, and to enrich the lives of our citizens by sharing and encouraging the gift of poetry."

The seven-member Poet Laureate Commission will make a final recommendation to Governor Doyle, who will officially appoint our next Poet Laureate. Chair of this Commission is Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler (Appleton) representing the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Other members are David Brostrom (Waukesha), Vice-Chair of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Barbara Coan Houghton (McFarland), representing the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association, Jane Hamblen of the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Poet Laureate Ellen Kort, Marilyn Taylor (Milwaukee), of the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and Linda Ware (Wausau), Vice-Chair of the Wisconsin Arts Board.

By August 31st, this important literary torch will pass from poet to poet.

----------------

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART SIX

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

What does the work of a 99-year-old woman consist of? What is her day like?

"I go by the clock," Pearl says. "I'm going to bed at 11:00. I start yawning, maybe, at 10:30, then I get to bed by 11:00 and it's not long until I fall asleep. I slept til - like now - I slept until about 7:00. So I get my seven or eight hours of sleep. I cook my own breakfast, slowly. The same thing every day. I like brown bread, I buy the sandwich kind, whole wheat bread. Two slices of toast with butter and jelly or preserves, absolutely home-made. Then, one egg, fried in bacon grease. For many years, I took coffee, but I have bladder trouble, so I quit coffee and have a glass or milk or a glass of juice. I could go into that kitchen and fix breakfast almost blind-folded, I've done it so many years. I don't cook every day because I might have things leftover that I warm. My micro-wave is a stainless steel skillet about so big around that holds just enough for one big helping of soup or warmed over green beans or whatever. I have an electric stove. I eat lots of fruits and vegetables."

"I'm so slow, I don't get much done," Pearl said. "I've kept this house all this time. You have to dust and run the sweeper and do all that sort of thing. I've charmed a couple of the little girls in the neighborhood - who are forty or fifty years old - their husbands grew up in this area and fished in my pond. I haven't told you yet, some of my best friends are my fishermen. When you drove in, if you'd have gone just two or three rods farther, you'd have seen the lake. All we needed to do was build a dam and the water just flowed in. It's about two and a half acres of water, and it's good fishing. Stocked it with bluegills and large-mouth bass. Now one bluegill is enough for me for a meal. You never saw bigger bluegills than the ones in that pond. A lot of people like to fish, and some of my best friends today are my fishermen. One fisherman, for instance, keeps me in that brown bread all the time. Are you familiar with the Roman Meal bread? Well, that's my loaf. That's the only bread I eat. I can eat it with fried chicken gravy and any other way, toast, sandwiches. I'm not eating too much bread, but I'm getting the good bread. That's the way I eat. That's part of what's keeping me going here - good food."

Pearl's siblings were no older than 80 when they died. "My oldest brother was 80," she said, "and the older girls were only in their 50s and 60s when they died. My oldest sister was in a tractor accident and died after that, she was only 58 at the time. She was a farmer's wife, driving a tractor down the road, pulling a wagon that had some big heavy tool on it. It started weaving and pulled her over in the ditch and the tractor rolled on her. There was a lot of diabetes in the family. I lost three sisters to diabetes. I've been very, very careful about my food. In fact, my doctor insists that I take a very tiny little tablet in order to keep me on the level. I've never had high sugar. I go in every three months for a check-up, and one test is a sugar test. So I keep ahead of that. My younger brother died in 1983, he would have been 70. My younger sisters also died in their 50s, 60s, 70."

"If I went into Lewisburg and asked people for stories about Pearl, what would they tell me?" I asked.

"That she lived around here and was the flunky for the neighborhood," Pearl said, laughing. "The fishermen are always here. The boys in the neighborhood. I haven't told you about the sheep yet, have I?"

"Why don't you tell me about sheep?" I said.

"Oh, my," she said, "that's a big story, a big story."

"This farm, seventy-six acres, only part of it can be tilled because of the terrain," she said. "Dad farmed most of it with horses. We had cows and we had sheep. Dad always had sheep in pastures and they ate the grass down low. We rotated pasture. When dad passed away in 1954, in December, he had sixteen ewes that were to lamb in January or February. His passing away in December left me here with lambing time coming up. Well, I didn't know too much about it, but I studied it. At that time, my brother lived next door and could help - the father of the nephew who lives up here now, my younger brother. What am I going to do with these sixteen ewes that are about to lamb. Take care of them. How? Well, you get up at five o'clock and feed them and take care of them and see if there were any lambs born during the night, and that sort of thing. Come back to the house and get yourself breakfast and dressed up ready for school. You go to school and wonder what's going to happen by the time you get home. I had to put my mind to looking after sheep as well as the little pupils. I was living alone now that Dad was gone. My brother was next door and ready to be called for anything that I needed, although he was not here every day then. But it was up to me to get it done. He was a great help - my little baby brother. He was only nine years old when my mother died."

To be continued....

----------------

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 1, 1998

We enter the second half of the year. A mourning dove calls in the distance. Blue sky. Quiet pond, summer algae. Beads of moisture on the grass. Daylight comes.

The sunlight on the cornfields creates a golden sheen. The irrigation rig north of town on the east side of Highway E is spraying canning factory waste-water today. Farther on - a strong smell of skunk. GOOD MORNING!

Thistles in the ditches have fat blossoms. Red clover and sweet clover are in bloom, too, along the roadside. Sweet, sticky smells in the morning air.

At the Sina pig farm, a man sits motionless out in the middle of his yard. In the morning sun, his skin is bronzed; he could be a statue.

Those pea fields that were harvested have been tilled again. What will come up next?

I am contemplating the division of lands: farm-land, wilderness, waste-land.

Once again, the monster-beast goes to work, like the good German he is.

*

JULY 2, 1998

Shall I complain about another perfect summer day? How can I? It is another good one!

North of Fairwater, waste water from the canning factory is being sprayed onto the field to the west of Highway E. A strong, sour stench.

I am missing the hawk. It has been a long time since I've seen him. Where is he?

Weeds and corn are starting to show themselves in a field of beans. I remember the miles and miles of beans I've walked. That was an eon ago, of course. That was a previous life.

I do love the flowers at Five Corners. Someone should hug the man good who tends them.

Farther north along Highway E, day lilies are in bloom. They are tough competitors, sturdy beasts. This season is a good one for all plants, though. It's green all the way to the mountains.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART FIVE

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"With a case of polio," Pearl said, "a person is crippled by it in some way or other. Of course, my crippling was in the ankle and foot, which is what bothers me now, that's my biggest problem right now. After a while you lay the polio aside and kind of forget about it. You put up with it - not being able to wear good-looking shoes and not doing all the things others did. You just make peace with it and go on, on your own, and forget about the difficulties. A thorn in the flesh is what it is, you know. You can't just sit down and do nothing, if you have a mind. And I'm blessed with that, but you have to keep that mind busy, and I've done that."

"My family is all music," Pearl said. "I can tell if you're a half a pitch off. A keen ear. None of our immediate family ever cultivated the music, but we had an ear for it. My oldest brother played the fiddle back in the old days, and all of us sang. I sang a solo in church before I started in school."

"I've lost my voice now, at this stage," she said, "but I've sung for my friends' weddings, at funerals, and I always taught music in school. Many times I taught in other rooms because that teacher couldn't teach them music. She'd come in my room and teach a little writing or something while I helped out with her music."

"I've always been around music some way or other," she said. "In college, I was in choir. While I was teaching in Dayton, I was in the Philharmonic Choir, which was a hundred fifty voices. I sang with them. I directed the choir in my church for fifteen years. I sang in every part of the program they've had in church."

"I taught Sunday school class for sixty-four years," she said somewhat nonchalantly.

"If I had a dime for every hour I spent in the little church up here in Lewisburg," Pearl said, "I could have retired many, many years earlier. I loved the work and was educated to the point that I could be a leader in certain things. When they needed someone to teach the class that was coming out of high school, and there was no place in the Sunday School for that particular age - they had up through high school age - it was 'Pearl, you're chosen.' I taught that class sixty-four years. I was in my nineties when I quit teaching. Some of those students are my best friends now."

How did Pearl relate to those recent high school graduates?

"For a while," she said, "I was almost one of them. I wasn't much older than they were. They were at the place they were either going to college or being employed in one way or another. We studied the Bible."

"I've been in a Methodist church for many, many years," Pearl said, explaining what she taught those young adult students. "There's a set of Bible study lessons that we had. We studied that way - the Scripture, and applying it to the present day. One time I was talking with an older woman who was very strict in her Bible study. For me, studying the Bible, you compare the old time to the new, and apply what you read. That's the way I taught the Bible. Once I was teaching about Joseph in the Old Testament, and I said 'he was just a spoiled brat, wasn't he?" Well, strict woman thought I was being sacrilegious."

It was 1964 when Pearl retired from teaching grade school. "I was 60 years old and 1964 was my last year of teaching," she said. "I could name doctors, attorneys, teachers, farmers, and sweet little old grandmothers who were my pupils. When you are teaching ten-year-olds, you wonder what their potential is, what will happen. One of the best heart specialists in Dayton was one of my little ten-year-olds, and a doctor in Springfield, another doctor in Dayton, and several attorneys. I read their names in the paper and see what they're doing."

"I watch very little television," she continued. "Some of it isn't worth looking at, you know. If I can finish my work, I like to watch the news at 6:00 p.m."

To be continued....

----------------

from
BETWEEN ZEN & MIDWESTERN (1981)
"For Mary, At Work"


How the light shimmers, these
mornings, with you gone to

work & only the wind
to whisper what you would

tell me, suddenly behind
me with your surprise of

arms, hugging. Instead -
my coffee goes cold & I

haven't finished saying
how much I love you.

I'M BACK, I'M TIRED,
I'M FULL OF STORIES

I will tell you that it rained all day on the Fourth of July in L'Anse, Michigan, and after twenty-two hours of it my rain-proof tent gave up keeping the water out. I slept that night in the car. I had to dry the tent (and some of my clothes) once I got to South Dakota, when it wasn't raining there.

The rain didn't dampen my spirits, nor did it get in the way of some good Vagabonding. While in L'Anse, I toured the Ford Sawmill in Alberta Village. I hiked to Canyon Falls and to Sturgeon Falls, and on the steep climb back from Sturgeon Falls I was hearing "a distant pounding like a motor trying to start, but it can't. I suppose that is my heart working for me, as hard as I'm working to gain this sense of who we are." I drove almost to the highest point in Michigan, Mt. Arvon, but gave up the attempt when the pool of water was wider than what they call a road, and I didn't know how deep it was and how soft the mud beneath it. A challenge for another trip; the pamphlet did say the roads are not always suitable for passenger cars. I toured Pettibone Manufacturing in Baraga with company president Kevin Walsh, and talked with plant manager Jerry Niemi, chief engineer Ray McDonald, and Phil Latendresse, grandson of the Phil Latendresse who invented Pettibone's flagship product, the Cary-Lift. Later in the week I also did formal, more personal interviews with Ray and Phil. I climbed to the top of Little Mountain just outside L'Anse, and noted that "in that battle between water and rock, water always wins." I made my way by car and by foot to the far tip of Point Abbaye; and walking back to the car I had something of an experience; this is what I wrote: "Part-way back to the car, I hang my head and cry. I don't know why. I have touched something large, I know that. Have I over-juiced on God? Have I felt a tug of what it means to be part of the universe? Have I just had a mystical experience? Shall I never pass this way again?" On July 3rd, I attended the Fourth of July parade in Baraga, but I didn't stay for the fireworks that started at dusk. I did wake that night when the rainstorm hit at midnight; that's the rain that continued all through the Fourth and into the following night. I interviewed Nancy Besonen who, in writing about my February trip to L'Anse, had said: "Tom Montag is defining the character of the Midwest - one character at a time." Nancy is a Chicago girl who always liked the northwoods. I heard Da Yoopers in concert, part of the Lumberjack Days/Fourth of July celebration that wasn't rained out, but got moved into the Bingo Hall at the Baraga Casino.

I drove kitty-corner across the upper middle west, from L'Anse, Michigan, to Redfield, South Dakota. On the way, I stopped in Doland, South Dakota, to see what remained there; Doland is where former vice-president Hubert Humphrey graduated from high school in 1929, and where Dennis Koslowski graduated in 1977; Dennis "was the first American to win a medal in Greco-Roman wrestling in a non-boycotted Olympics - a bronze in 1988. He won a silver medal in 1992." I also stopped in Frankfort, South Dakota, to see what was left in Harry Eisele's hometown. It was obvious all across Eastern South Dakota that the area has been getting plenty of rain this summer. Things looked green.

Again on this visit, I stayed with Marlin and Lyn Flint; they always take such good care of me. I did finally get a hair-cut, for those of you who worry about that. I couldn't go into Alley Cuts by front door, though; I had to go through the alley - Main Street has been torn up for a couple months and, though work is almost completed, sidewalks still need to be poured. I interviewed Barb Paulson, a teacher in Redfield who grew up in Redfield; Barb left the community to make her way in the world before she and her husband decided that Redfield was where they wanted to raise their family. I interviewed Barb's father, Royce Bush, who operated a full-service gas station in Redfield for much of his career, back in the days when Redfield had fourteen gas stations. I interviewed Gerald Marlette, whom some think of as Redfield's Mr. Lions Club. I visited Tulare, south of Redfield, to see what's there - the South Dakota Wheatgrowers elevator by the railroad tracks, the Bar With No Name, Mrs. Louie's Cafe, and what else? I interviewed Stan Schulz, who with his wife Kari operates the SAKS Restaurant in Redfield. Stan was "the foot" in Dances With Wolves, the foot seen kicking out a campfire at one point in the movie; he has been in several others since then. Kari Schulz showed me through Redfield's depot, which is being restored and soon will be re-opened as a tourist information center. "Imagine all the history that went on in this building," Kari said. "A woman told me the depot has both happy and sad memories for her. She said she'd gotten engaged on the platform, and that her father had dropped dead in the door of the express freight room." I think Kari sees the same kind of ghosts I see. She said, "When these old buildings are gone, they'll never be back." I interviewed Pastor Tim Fugman of the Congregation Church and Dave Durfee, the veterans service officer for Spink County. I interviewed 80-year-old Andy Clawson, a Republican who doesn't think he can vote Republican in the coming presidential election. I got a tour of Redfield from Craig Johnson, Spink County's economic development director, who took me to the CallSynergy call center in Redfield where I talked to Mike Rohrbach, the night-shift manager, about their work. Afterwards, because the afternoon had grown hot and we had grown thirsty, Craig and I stopped for a beer at the Chrystal Palace; Craig didn't tell me the history of the place and I couldn't print it if he had. Then we gathered up Craig's wife, Corrine, and Craig bought me supper. Thanks, Craig. I saw the Redfield American Legion team lose its first game in the weekend tournament, 3-2. I interviewed Redfield physicians Jo~ and Dewi Cabacar, who came from the Philippines for additional medical training in America, and are still here, doctoring in an "under-served area." Jo~ is an internist with a specialty in nephrology; Dewi is a peditrician with a specialty in pediatric neurology.

And, to understand where and how the middle west ends and the west begins, the last official act of my trip was to drive the 181 miles west from Redfield to Faith, South Dakota, on Highway 212, then drive 64 miles north to Lemmon, South Dakota, and then return to Redfield via Highways 12 and 281; I've made 45 pages of notes about that drive, some of which I'll inflict on you at some point in the future.

It was a good trip. I got lots of good material. I worked hard, but not so hard that I didn't have a good time. I didn't have such a good time that I didn't want to come home, however. I'm glad to be home.

----------------

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART FOUR

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"In 1991," Pearl said, "I had my first opportunity to see this place my uncle lived, and where the Olson boys lived, near Minot, North Dakota." There was no longer any of her uncle's family in the area, however. A friend of Pearl's, knowing that she loved to travel, had said 'Pearl, where are you going to go next?' I said 'I want to go to North Dakota." She said 'I'll take you there.' So she and her friend, who'd just bought a new car, and her mother and I - four women - took the trip to North Dakota."

"It was my 50th State," Pearl said. "I'd been to all the other states before. It was one of the nicest trips I ever took, of course, because of the things we saw and did."

Pearl talked about her travels. "In 1932," she said, "two other teachers and I and a fellow we knew who had a new Chevrolet car decided we wanted to go to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. So all of us, in our twenties, late twenties, went to the Olympic Games in 1932. We visited all the western states while we were out there."

"One of the girls knew a fellow who would be in the Olympics," Pearl explained. "He would be running in a relay race at a certain date. We started our trip early enough that we could visit parks in Colorado and Arizona and so on. We hit all the states - from Los Angeles we went north to Oregon and on up into Washington. A big circle - we took in all those states up there. We saw everything else but not North Dakota. I took a hundred dollars with me, and came back with some money left, after four weeks of travel."

"While we were in Los Angeles, Pearl said, "we lived in the home of a cousin of one of the girls and, of course, that was cheap living."

"We cooked for ourselves on the trip," she said, "and stayed in little parks, like rest areas are today. I still have the iron skillet we took along with us. We'd do some cooking when we had the chance to. We really pioneered, but we got to see a great deal, back in the days when things weren't so commercialized. An example of that - Mt. Rushmore which we saw on that tour was just Washington, and the second face was started. In 1991, when I went to North Dakota and around through South Dakota, all four faces at Mt. Rushmore were finished and it was very commercialized. There was a big difference in the area in that length of time."

A girl who was my first pupil - she was 12 and I was 19 - finished college and started teaching and still lived in Lewisburg. We became great friends. Not too many years between us, see. She wanted to travel and she was free to do so. I took many summers when I'd do something for Pearl - I'd work hard for ten months - and she and I traveled together a great deal. Our first trip out of the country was to Mexico. Another trip was to Alaska. Another trip to South America."

"I had another good traveling mate," she said. "She and I went to Australia"

"I've been to all fifty states," Pearl said, "to Mexico, to seven countries in South America, the Holy Land, Egypt, Spain, and Portugal. If I had a good strong arm to hang onto, I'd still go to Antarctica, which is the only continent I haven't been to."

"It must have been the 1960s when we went to South America," Pearl remembered. "Our first stop was in Panama. Then over into Ecuador, Peru. We crossed the Andes a couple of times. Over into Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile."

"I spoke very little Spanish," she said, "but this was a school group, so we visited schools in various places. It was a conducted tour. We met teachers at the different places we went."

Back in the classroom at home, Pearl the teacher said, "we studied these places in geography. And I'm a geographer. I could just tell you lots of things. One time I beat the people who were on the Jeopardy program because I knew my geography - they all missed the problem and I got it."

"All that was curiosity," she said. "I think I loved the first map I ever saw. I know maps. I know left or right, east or west. A lot of people don't know east or west, you know. The only place I don't know east or west is in the mountains, where I've got to know straight up."

"In 1928," she recalled, "my college room-mate liked to travel as much as I did and we decided we wanted to go to Canada, so we drove my car to her house, which is eighty miles from here. I left the car there. We went to Toledo and took a boat across the lake, shot the rapids of the St. Lawrence, visited the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec. We took the train from Montreal through New York into Vermont and on into Massachusetts, by ship into New York City, and from New York City down to Washington, DC, then home. That was 1928 or 1929."

"My sister two years younger than I am lost her husband and wanted to get away one summer," Pearl said, explaining how she saw the southeastern United States. "She and I took a trip, stopping at Roanoke to visit relatives, then down through the Carolinas, on down to Florida. We hit Kentucky and Tennessee and so on coming back."

To be continued....

----------------

THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)

"You know," Ivan said, "one nice thing about living in Smith Center - when they have a class reunion we don't have to drive hundreds of miles to attend. We're already here."

"Gas gets any higher, I'm gonna have to see Jim Tharp about buying a bicycle," Ivan wrote. "They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle. What they meant was you never forget how to wreck a bicycle."

"Judy Hall was coaching first base for her little girls T-ball team," Ivan said. "One little girl came running down to first base. Judy said 'Nice going, Ashley.' The little girl said, 'I'm not Ashley, I'm Kaitlin.' Judy said, 'Oh, that's right, I never can get you girls straight.' Kaitlin said, 'You ought to be able to. I got freckles and Ashley don't.' That reminded Nolan Hajny of a song he used to sing - 'She's got freckles on her but she's pretty.'"

"Where did I go wrong," Ivan asked. "All my kids are Republicans. And now my youngest is running in Senior Track Meets. What fun is it to run 1600 meters when you are fifty years old? Unless you are running to a voting booth where you can vote Democratic."

----------------

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 30, 1998

A cool morning. We get to start the day fresh, but I suppose it will be very hot by noon again, as it has been here the past few days.

I am lost in the day - in the blue sky, the white clouds, the green corn and beans - dreaming. I am halfway to Ripon before I am conscious that I am halfway to Ripon. It is a shock to recognize that I have been "in the moment" entirely - not thinking about it, just here. Then I ruin it by thinking about it, by making these notes! Isn't that the curse of the writer with his material, and the curse of the physicist trying to study wave and particle?

I lean forward to let the breeze cool my back that has grown sweaty against the seat of the pick-up. To ride the moment once again.

SATURDAY'S POEMS
-------------------------
SPEAKING MIDWESTERN
by Harriet Brown

Now that I've lived twelve
winters here, and another
coming, I've grown fluent

in the language of coldness,
I've learned to keep cool,
skate on ice so thin

it's invisible, so thin
the slightest flare of heat
and you fall through forever.

Here words are like rock salt,
scattered one pellet at a time
to thaw the surface.

There are other languages
for fire – the one I learned
growing up, the language

of history and oppression,
the deep exotic gutturals
of loving and of loss,

where words simmer
and steam and boil over
like soup left on the stove.

Still, even on the endless
prairie, every now and then
there is a warm spot, a brief

bright rush of grief or lust
out of the frigid land,
an arterial gush of longing

that never freezes, no matter
how long winter lasts.
And this needs no translation.

*

WHERE WE WENT
by Harriet Brown

You to your mountains,
your ruins and old stories.
All the loves of your life.
The bony underpinnings.

I to what's mine – unspeakable
blue evening, nearly full moon.
Such contrast between darkness
and light, such faraway shining.

The same moon shines
over you, just a different
face, her long hair
spread over your pillow.

Maybe you dream of me –
the sharp taste of my tears,
scent of my hair. The shadow
of your hands across my skin.

Where I am the land is smooth
with age and weather. No one
would guess these mere hills
were ever sharp with longing,

were mountains once.


"Speaking Midwestern" originally appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review. Harriet Brown is the author of The Promised Land (Parallel Press, 2004) and several nonfiction books. Her poems appear in Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, and other magazines. She lives in Madison, where she's the editor of Wisconsin Trails magazine.

----------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.

INDEX OF THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 2004
o David Clewell, "Depot: Beaver Dam, Wisconsin" - February 21, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o R. Chris Halla, "My Prairie Wedding" - June 5, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Robert Schuler, "Thaw, 2003, Stanton Township" and "The American Millenium" - June 26, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004

I'M GONE VAGABONDING AGAIN,
TO L'ANSE, MI, AND REDFIELD, SD,
FROM JUNE 29-JULY 12/13TH
BACK TO BLOGGING JULY 13 OR 14
YES, PETER, IT *IS* "OPEN MIKE"
THIS WEEK, THE TOPIC IS BLOGGING
AND ITS PLACE IN YOUR LIFE & WORK

Dick Jones, from DICK JONES' PATTERAN PAGES, left the following reflection about writing and blogging and playing bass in a comment over at Cassandra Pages. I will be away for two weeks. The last time I was gone, earlier this month, Peter at slow reads asked: "Does that mean it's open mike week here?" Well, yes, I guess it could mean that. And since we've recently lost Tonio's blog, and Common Beauty, and Book of Life, and Fred at Fragments from Floyd says he's gonna slow down a little bit, and I find myself leaving comments here and here about why I blog, why don't all of you have an open discussion here about your blogging, how it fits the rest of your work, whether it energizes or drains you, etc. Should you wish to oblige, I will be pleased to come home to a messy collection of wisdom on the topic. Here is Dick Jones' comment:

I feel more comfortable with my writing now than at any earlier time in my life. If I was driven excessively from the start by the desire to set the world alight with my deathless prose & my incandescent verse, that imperative ran out of momentum when I realised that all was vanity & I was only reaching a constituency of one & even he was losing interest in my prodigious output. So I stopped & played bass guitar in a series of bands instead.

This was a salutary experience. Audiences identify with the vocalist or adulate the lead guitarist; they don't notice the bass guitarist. He plunks alone, shadowy & monosyllabic behind the fireworks. So I stood on the left of the drummer, laid back on the rhythm & just enjoyed the simple process of playing an instrument. And that small epiphany had its kickback into writing: for the first time I started to write poems for the sake of the statement made & the craft of putting it together, unconcerned with rapturous reception from the world at large.

That enjoyment has been supplemented, but by no means supplanted, by some modest publishing success over the past 18 years. But it's principally been the pursuit of a personal notion of excellence that has driven the writing on.

And I guess I may well have wobbled off towards old age content enough with a small bunch of homebrew, free range poems tucked into a notebook, read by family & friends, had it not been for the dicvovery of the weblog. The joy of blogging for me - & I'm certain for many others too - is in its synthesis of ars gratia artis on the part of the writer & instant interaction with the reader. There is no sense of tailoring output for a largely invisible public: if the stuff has instrinsic merit then it will find its constituency &, one by one, maybe, they will come knocking on the door via the comments box. And for my purposes at this fairly advanced point in my life that works about as well as anything needs to.

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POETRY JUMPS OFF THE SHELF

Some time ago, Shoshauna Shy at Woodrow Hall Editions/BookThatPoet.com put out an unusal call. She was looking for "lively and upbeat poems" to launch the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program. Any topic was welcome, Shoshauna said, as long as it referred in some way to bicycles, walking, public transportation, car-pooling or appreciation of the natural environment. The poems selected will be produced for Community Car, Madison, Wisconsin’s member-based car-sharing program, and Budget Bicycle’s Red Bikes Rental Program; the poems will appear inside hand-sized books in glove compartments, attached to handlebars as laminated bookmarks, on membership invoices or in Community Car newsletters.

Shoshauna selected two of my poems for this adventure, "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain" and "Simply Morning" from Between Zen & Midwestern.

The project is coming to fruition. In today's mail, I got samples. What a nifty idea it is. My poems are printed on white stock that has been laminated on both sides; a punch-hole in the upper corner allows a key chain to be put through the sheet. These poems will be "attached to the handlebars of 4-to-8 Red Bikes. These bikes start out as trade-ins, get painted red, then given to people to use during the warm weather months for a nominal deposit. If returned intact by Halloween, the riders get their deposits back."

We can only imagine all of the places your poems go and who happens to read them, Shoshauna suggests.

I admire the inventiveness of this project, and am pleased to be included. Indeed, it takes poetry off the shelf and out of the classroom, and puts it face-to-face where people are.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT. CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART THREE

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"I had a boy that was a nuisance in the classroom," Pearl remembered. "He wanted to show off and he didn't care whether he learned or not. The new year, my class came in. Of course, I had to get acquainted with everyone, and everyone was the same as far as I was concerned. I didn't know who they were. The teacher who had him before said 'Oh, did you get him? Oh, Pearl, I feel sorry for you.' I finally found out who this boy was. He was going to show off, make fun in the classroom, play horse. One day he came to school with steel taps on the heels of his shoes. The school building was old. It had wooden floors. It sounded like a horse walking across the room - clump, clump, clump, you know. One day I thought 'I can't take all this.' So as the children were coming in from playing, I was at the door receiving my class, and he was tagging along behind about six or eight feet. CLOMP clomp CLOMP clomp. I stepped in front of him while the rest of the class went on in and took their places. And I said 'Bob, I know that you have to have these heel taps to save your shoes. Boys wear out their shoes, I know that. But couldn't you be a bit more quiet as you walk?" He said "I suppose." So he walked on his tip-toes back to his seat. And the next day the taps were off.

Pearl didn't challenge him, she asked him for help. "Charmed him" is how she puts it. "Psychology," she said.

In the Depression, Pearl said, "we always had good food. We raised our own cows. We butchered our own hogs. We had a big vegetable garden. We canned. We had fruit preserves. I still love to cook. I cook three meals a day and eat right."

Eating right might be another part of Pearl's secret to long life. "It has to be - living here where I have good food, a good atmosphere, quiet, peace, and we have a spring here. When we first got the farm, we had a hydraulic ram that pumped the water up to the house, so we had running water in a trough in the basement - like a refrigerator. Everything stayed cool. In the family we had cows and chickens, so our income was from the milk and eggs and the butter we made. We ate well, but we were poor and didn't know it. With my mother's good management. It was all the years, I'm talking about, the early ones too, not just the Depression."

"Even now," she said, "I'm eating almost all out of the garden - the peas and so on. My nephew who lives here in the mobile home - it was his wife who just called me - he dug the garden. I had polio and can't walk - that's my big problem. See how I have to walk, that is a burden."

"With my polio," she continued, "my mother got me to the doctor right away and he diagnosed it almost at once, but in those days there wasn't much they could do. They massaged it. When I was a little girl and would lie down to take my nap, my mother would massage that ankle and that leg most affected by the polio."

During World War I, Pearl said, "my mother, being away from her family, corresponded all the time with her brothers and their families. Her youngest brother went to North Dakota and took up a claim in 1900. She corresponded with him regularly, and with the brother and his family and her mother back in Roanoke. I believe in keeping in touch with family. Right now I could go back to the Civil War era and tell you about my grandfather who wore the Confederate uniform. That's been a love of mine, to keep up with the family. That's history."

"In the First World War, there were some Olson boys from North Dakota, where the younger brother of my mother had settled. They were stationed at Wright Field in Dayton. They were on their way to Europe. My uncle wrote my mother and said 'Those boys are there and can't go home, can't get back to North Dakota. Maybe you could call them and let them know you are interested in them.' And he gave my mother the address of these Olson boys. Mother looked at me and she said, 'Pearl, that's a job for you.' I was only 14. She said, 'You can be the one to write.' So I wrote a letter right away, to the address my uncle had sent. Before the letter ever got to them, they were moved out of Wright Field and were in New York to be shipped off. They couldn't answer me until they got to England. So a little 14-year-old girl was corresponding with those North Dakota boys in Europe."

The correspondence continued for a couple of years while the boys were in Europe.

To be continued....

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THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)

"Stevy Pete was a tellin' about when he lived in town about twenty years ago," Ivan wrote. "Pete lived in the northwest part of town. He was being bothered by skunks. Steve said one morning about three o'clock he was on his front porch wearing only his jockey shorts and boots shooting at a skunk. His neighbor yelled, 'I've got pictures.'"

"Jenifer Hamilton, the New York Lady, loaded her pick-up, Trusty Rusty, and headed for her new mission field, Sterling, Colorado," Ivan said. "Hamilton left Western Plains Village around nine o'clock last Wednesday morning. There was a trail of brown flecks in the wake of Trusty Rusty. It could have been rust or it could have been something about the same color as rust."

"Judy Hall held her first T-Ball practice one evening last week," said Ivan. "She put the helmet on one little girl. As she was putting it on, Judy said to the little girl, 'Now you know what this is for, don't you?' The little girl said, 'Yes, it's to keep the hair out of your eyes.'"

Ivan said: "I said to Brenda the waitress, 'You know, you are a kind of a pain in the rear.' She said, 'I know, but I'm good at it.'"

"Like the late Ted Relihan used to say," Ivan wrote, "'we have made a lot of improvements in Smith Center and I've been against nearly every one of them.'"

"I did learn something at Paul's Cafe last Friday morning," Ivan said. "When I got there Glen Allen was the only one there. Glen said he had stayed up all night waiting for dew on the grass. He said there wasn't any even after the wind went down. Now the reason Allen was waiting for the dew was because he wanted his alfalfa to get some moisture on it before he started baling it. He said you had to have dew. Gene Conaway came in and said you need to have a little moisture to bale. Said it kept the protein in the leaves. Then Kendall Nichols observed that there are not many old farmers who fool with alfalfa anymore. And, he continued, most of the alfalfa is baled at night. I get a better education right up there at Paul's Cafe than I would if I enrolled at K-State."

"I think I got Lonna's name spelled right," Ivan said after mentioning her. "I just sounded it out and used whatcha call your fonicks."

There were three preachers at The As the Bladder Fills Club one morning. "With three ministers gathered in one place, the place took on a kind of a sanctimonious glow," Ivan said. "Conversations were cleaned up and no one eye-balled the waitresses. Oh, that reminds me, waitress Julie Schmidt coached little girls T-Ball Thursday night. Julie takes her orders directly from team manager Judy Hall. They call themselves manager and coach but I don't think they had a bunt signal between them."

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 29, 1998

Going back to work this morning is about more than going back to work. It is about stepping back into my customary rituals, my usual habits, about going back to dance my eternal dance. In a sense, it is reassuring - getting back to what I know. In another sense, it is confining, I suppose like stepping back into the darkness of prison.

At the very least, I shall be able to start again my morning meditation on the drive to work. I wonder how long it will take me to get comfortable with this once more. My writing has been very hit and miss the past month.

Oh, loud birds, birds singing in my yard. I start the pick-up. The ritual has begun. With song, with mourning dove on the driveway, with sun coming over the tree tops, long shadows.

Dew glistens on individual blades of grass.

Just north of town I see a large part of a tree is down. I had not noticed that on Saturday.

The winter rye has turned color and should be ready for harvest in two or three weeks perhaps.

A little water still stands in some of the fields. With the moisture and the heat and the humidity, you can almost hear the corn growing.

All the fields of peas along Highway E have been harvested.

Now I see soybeans up in all the untilled fields just south of Five Corners. Morning glories are in glorious bloom in the flower beds at Five Corners.

A bicyclist between Five Corners and Union Street wears a bright tie-dyed shirt - gold like the sun, red like blood.

It is good to be home again.

TOMORROW I LEAVE FOR TWO WEEKS
    OF VAGABONDAGE
IN L'ANSE, MI, AND REDFIELD, SD

Tomorrow I will hightail for L'Anse, up at the bottom of Lake Superior's Keweenaw Bay, in the Land of Accent-on-the-First-Syllable-and-Let-the-Rest-Fall-Where-They-May - KEE-wenaw Bay, BEARaga County. There is to be celebration of the area's history over the 4th of July holiday. One of my Vagabond tasks is to partake of the celebrations that help define my "focus communities." You can be sure I will report on L'Anse's when I return.

I'll be camping out while I'm there, but I'll trust that any trees in the campsite will not - I repeat, WILL NOT - throw the butt end of a 250-pound branch down on me, as happened at my camp-out last September in Rugby, North Dakota. There I was, looking up at the raw, torn end of the branch inches from my forehead and thinking "What a stupid way to die." I didn't die, but I got some cuts and scrapes. It was my own fault. I'd been sitting at the table in front of my tent writing in my journal; I was just in the middle of writing a sentence poking a little fun at the cottonwood trees, the way they talk, talk, talk in just a little breeze; and one of the cottonwoods retaliated. A fellow from one of the big motorhomes set up in the area saw what happened, and he came over to help me. It was all the two of us could do to move the branch off my camp-site. You might say that only a fool would camp near cottonwoods when the wind is blowing, but the wind wasn't blowing; this happened in the stillness of sunset; there was no warning, no sound of a branch breaking, only the whoosh of it coming at me.

Be careful what you say around cottonwoods!

After a week in the green and blue of the Upper Peninsula's woods and water, I will bee-line across the upper middle west, from L'Anse to Redfield, and spend a week in the wind of South Dakota. South Dakota has wind, and these most amazing sunsets, distinctive enough in my imagination that when I see such a one elsewhere, you might hear my call it "a South Dakota sunset." As Shirley Sanger of Zell, South Dakota, put it for me when I spoke with her last year, "I like the openness that you can see out here, the sunsets. I like to go out to the Black Hills and visit, but after a couple days I want to come back." That kind of sunset. Perhaps the gulp of emotion I feel seeing them has something to do with the fact that my Gramma Allen's family homesteaded in South Dakota for a while (before they gave up and returned to the lush greenness of Iowa).

After two weeks away, you can be sure I'll be ready to return to the lushness of this big cinnamon-colored house in Fairwater. I hope Mary will be ready to have me back. The last time I was in Redfield, towards the end of another two-week trip, I called her on Thursday night, to hear she didn't think she missed me all that much. Well, Thursday at noon I had wired flowers for delivery to her at work on Friday, and I thought "What a waste of $42." I consoled myself thinking that she was just very busy and didn't really have time to think about how much she missed me. Well, she was very busy. I didn't tell her about the flowers on the phone, and they sorta knocked her socks off the next day, or would have if her friends hadn't kept asking "What's Tom trying to get away with?"

As you'll see tomorrow, while I'm gone you'll have a little assignment to work on. It'll be "open mike," as Peter from slow reads likes to put it.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART TWO

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

At age 18, Pearl survived the loss of her mother, whom she loved so dearly. Why and how?

"Well, my father had tenacity," she said. "He had hardly any education. My mother was the business mind of the family and was a great organizer, wide awake to things going on in the community and taking care of her family. She would have been a hero if you are including good mothers."

"I taught school for five years in Lewisburg," Pearl said, "for nine years in Eaton, for twenty-six years in Dayton. For forty years, fifth or sixth grade, ten-year-olds, not babies and not smart alecks. You could challenge them to stand on their heads and they'd try it. And I was one who challenged them."

"Now I have grandmothers and grandfathers visit me," she said. "They are in their fifties and sixties, some of my students. Four little grandmothers were here just a few weeks ago. I taught them back in 1941."

"I've had a great life, a great, colorful life," she said, "but it's been a hard one. Blood, sweat, and tears many times, I'll tell you."

Pearl's young siblings grew up and moved away. Pearl and her father still lived on the farm and Pearl continued to teach.

"My father lived to be 84," Pearl said. "He died in 1954."

"Dad, of course, never had a tractor," she said. "He farmed with horses. This farm is a hilly farm. It's not a very highly-producing farm. It's seventy-six acres, it's hilly. We had cows and sheep. Sheep are the best lawn-mowers there are, you know."

"The kind of person my father was, he couldn't be put down - he went ahead," Pearl remembered. "I have that same tenacity. You can't push me down. I'll push through all the trials and tribulations that go along with losing all your family and trying to make ends meet here in the home, and so forth. In those days, our salaries were low. You didn't prosper too much. Enough to dress decently and have your transportation. You loved your work. I loved my work. I still love life."

Her love of life, Pearl admitted, has to be part of the reason for her long life. "My body was not a strong body in a way," she said. "Yet I could do things that were worthwhile in the world. One of them was taking care of my dad's family. And looking after myself. People might think I was a little bit selfish, but I wasn't. I was looking after the family as well as myself. I couldn't just die, I was still alive - I had to look after Pearl a little bit, you know?"

"Time went on with that life," she said. "I'd gone to college just one year. I taught two years, then I went back to school for another year and graduated from the Teachers College at Miami University, the two year program. Afterwards, to get my degree, I finished another two years with night school and summer school. I got my degree in 1940. I'd started back in 1922. It was difficult holding down the farm and taking care of dad and the children, and at the same time getting my own self promoted."

"I was teaching in Eaton during the 1930s," Pearl said, speaking of the Depression. "I had forty-five children in my class at one time. Forty and forty-five. Teachers now can't believe that. In those days, in hard times, families sent their children to school to learn, not to play horse; and I was there to teach them, and not play horse. We had fun. We laughed, and I laughed with them. And there was no more fun for me than to temper and control some little feisty boy who wanted to show off, you know. I could charm them. I had a little way of charming them. I still am charming kids. I mean that. It sounds like I'm bragging but I'm not. You give me a little ten-year-old and the first thing you know, I'm talking his life and my life, and he's wanting to know more about me and I'm wanting to know more about him. Two years ago, I was invited to go to a re-union of a Sunday School that was in a church a block from my school building. This little fellow was there listening to our conversation. I took my class pictures and was showing them to the people who were in their sixties and seventies, who'd been my pupils. And this little fellow stood at my shoulder while I was sitting there talking and people were looking at the pictures I'd taken of class work, and he just stood there and listened and listened and listened. His grandfather had gone to my school but hadn't been a pupil of mine. This little fellow, ten-years-old, he and I got together, talking. I said 'What are you doing?' and so on. He was a collector of coins. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins and showed them to me. And he handed me a gold dollar. I still have it here on my desk. He loved this old teacher. And I loved him. So, I tell you, I can really charm them."

To be continued....

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 27, 1998

Just back from Montana last night, I am driving into work for a half a day on a Saturday, to give myself a jump start on the coming week.

I see the canning factory is spraying waste water in its field. If I couldn't see it, I could smell it - there is a strong stench of silage.

Farther along Highway E, a field of hay has just been taken.

Driving home yesterday just west of here we saw that fields of peas had been harvested. They have also taken a field of them here, near the power pole where the snowy owl used to perch, that place.

The corn has grown amazingly in our absence. It is thigh high, waist high in places. A storm came through last night and there are wet spots in some of the fields this morning.

It looks like soy beans have come up in one of the "untilled" fields I've been pointing out all along just south of Five Corners. The beans are poking right up through the corn stalks. No till farming, obviously.

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I'M NOT VERY POLITICAL, BUT...

White House spokesman Dan Bartlett was quoted over the weekend about Farenheit 9/11, saying "This is a film that doesn't require us to actually view it to know it's filled with factual inaccuracies." I'm not very political, but... that sounds like the way the White House responds to intelligence information, too. "We know what we want," they must say to each other. "Why would we need to know anything else?"