Risky Essays

  In the Twin Cities poetry communities, I'm especially queer because I have a PhD in English. I got the degree in 1991, about thirty-five years (almost half my life) ago. The same diffidence that keeps me from submitting poems for publication impeded my search for a professor gig. I was offered a job at Lamar University, but I didn't take it because I didn't want to move my family to Beaumont Texas. My devotion to literature came from a calling to write poetry, not to teach literature. Corporate technical writing suited me better than teaching because it was collaborative. I didn't have to represent myself as a big-prick authority. In the poetry communities, my PhD is anomaly that, like my old-white-male talkativeness, predisposes people to dislike me. Well, I AM kind of a snob, at that! As a teenager, especially after my self-commitment to poetry as a life-calling, I read a lot of poetry - Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, Ginsberg. In graduate school I studied Milton, T...

About three months ago I printed my preposterously large diary-novel poem, which if it were ever collected together would be called The Yokel Songs . There are eleven themed volumes of Yokel songs, most over fifty pages long, each containing pages that need to be printed in color. I printed them at a unit cost of about ten dollars, mostly to make myself stop working on them. I put the copies in a cabinet drawer in the basement so that I wouldn't see them and be tempted to work on them more. I have no definite plans to give copies to anyone. If I revise the books further, I will have to throw out the expensive printed copies. I can access the books on my phone, so it's easy to find poems to read at readings without needing to bring the printed books, although sometimes I do bring them and have even given a couple of them away. In each collection, the poem titles in the up-front table of contents are bookmarked, so it's easy to navigate in the online pdfs. Yesterday I brought...

In 2011 I started taking poetry classes at the Twin Cities Loft Literary Center. In that first class I tried to write witness poems like Carolyn Forche's amazing poem, "The Colonel"-- scattered severed ears. Regardless of "subject matter" these [witness] poems bear the traces of extremity within them, and are as, such, evidence of what occurred - Milos Radnoti's "Picture Postcards," at least partly written while waiting to be executed by firing squad.  Radnoti's vital juices stained the manuscript. Most of the poems in Against Forgetting deal with wartime atrocity. I had no such witness-worthy experience, and so I wrote dire poems that didn't work. In later Loft classes, I completed the class assignments, but I wrote more and better apart from the class. I think I've almost never kept anything I wrote for a poetry class, with the exception of the "Pueblo" sequence that I wrote for that first class in 2011 and posted on the Goo...

Some writers I know have made me aware of Substack and given me an idea of how it might be used.  I have considered using it to try to recount the poetry life that became a main focus for me after I retired from my final technical job - writing manuals for medical professionals about Medtronic implantable devices. My poetry life has consisted of taking poetry writing classes, participating in poetry open mics, co-administering a Facebook poetry group (2016-2020), and during the same years hosting a monthly coffee shop reading series. Mainly, I've written a lot of poetry, of which I've posted more than 1200 draft pieces on a Google blog, which to date has 180,767 hits - some from actual readers. I mostly stopped reading at open mics in about 2018. I stopped posting on the blog after January 2021, but the blog is still getting hits. And I've just posted on it eleven twenty-poem selections from the Yokel Song collections. So far I have always stopped short of actually posting ...