Risky Essays

As of February 2025, I have selected twenty or so songs from each of the eleven Yokel Song collections and published them to the blog I've had running since 2011. The first page that comes up when people type johnwenstrom.com into their browser is a brief intro to the Yokel Songs, followed by links to all eleven collections in Chakra order. This works fine for me when I do it from my phone. Each selection contains fewer than half of the songs in the corresponding complete collection, whch have their own integrity. As of April 2026, these selections have become the basis of printable Selected Yokel Song collections.  I made the selections very quickly, and I'm not even sure what my criteria were -- mainly, I included my favorites. I think one of my criteria was discretion -- though I know that Pretty Yokel , in particular, violates all discretion.  I just added a couple of Outtakes poems to the  Doomed Yokel  selection. The Yokel Songs celebrate the joy of living in...

  This translation of a poem from the second series of Rilke's  Sonnets to Orpheus  has received 301 hits:                                                                    Monday, April 3, 2017 Flower-muscle, Anemone  Flower-muscle ,  anemone, gradually opening in the meadow morning, as into you the many-toned light of the bright heavens is poured , into that tense but quiet muscle of infinite reception — sometimes so completely overpowered that the resting posture of the downfall hardly allows the hinged petals to spring back and cover you: You, decision and power of how many worlds! We, violent ones, we weather longer. But when — in which of all our lives — can we finally be so open and receptive?

 So now I'm neck deep in the Yokel Songs again. This time I'm abridging the Yokel collections for publication - turns out, in my old Google blog:  johnwenstrom.com  -- but maybe then on Substack. The Yokel is everything that the patriarchical MAGA oligarchy tries to demonize. The Yokel is doomed , woke , bardic , vulnerable , pretty , trans , comic , altruistic , elegiac , splendid , and loving .  The Yokel Songs celebrate the joy of living in the world as a sexual body.  The longer books were "finalized" and printed in September 2024 - they continue to be the editorial baseline, though they have to change to keep up. I hope that I can post essays such as this one on Substack, and the selected Yokel collections too.  The idea of publishing the collections on a schedule and trying to get people to subscribe seems preen-y to me -- not that I don't enjoy preening, but I don't want to enlist people to watch me preening. We'll see. That's the plan right no...