Sky writers

By CANDACE CHASE The Daily Inter Lake

Book edited by FVCC instructor shares Montana through poetry

Three bucks cover charge, five per couple,
Saturday night at the Eagle's Club downtown Kalispell.
Grandmothers of the Ladies' Auxiliary
mind a cash box at the door. Good to go, one nods to me.
Hope you and your Mrs. kick up some dust.

Such is the beginnings of the poem "Learning to Dance" by Lowell Jaeger, editor and one of the many contributors featured between the covers of the first edition of "Poems Across the Big Sky," a collection of Montana poetry.

Jaeger explains the genesis of this anthology in his "Editor's Notes."

He writes that inspiration for the collection arrived in a dream issued forth from "three cardboard boxes that had been haunting me for years."

"I'd inherited, one by one, the life's work of three poets," he said. "Three of my best students. Now dead and gone."

Relatives of the students, having no idea what to do with their works, gave them to Jaeger. He said it seemed "a terrible sadness" that he pushed here and there until the boxes came to rest at his feet, under his desk of his college office.

He went to sleep one night, "thinking of those three archived lives entrusted to me." Jaeger had a powerful dream in which he couldn't remember the events but he knew he spoke with the students.

When his alarm went off, he felt resolved.

"I knew what I had to do," he said.

The spirits of Anunda Cole, Brenda Nesbitt and Irvin Moen directed their inclusion in "a collection of voices that reached across the Big Sky, over the wide open spaces between us."

At the conclusion of months of compiling, Jaeger penned poignant portraits of these former students as the book's dedication in his "Editor's Notes."

We meet Nesbitt, "her long hair a wild array of braids and ribbons and dandelions, her slight form floating beneath wispy ankle-length skirts and brightly embroidered blouses." We see "her euphoric, ever-smiling face, and her spontaneous leaps and twirls out of nowhere, as if she moved to a music all her own."

Jaeger remembers Moen as a gentle giant who struggled with mental illness and spoke in words "soft, full of compassion for any human frailty."

"His voice wavered when he talked, his large hands trembled, and his face flushed a rosier glow than usual, as if something in him waited to explode and he choked it back."

He describes Cole as "no ordinary little old lady. She reminded me of a butterfly, so delicate her movements, so faint her comings and goings, her small feet seemed to barely touch the earth."

At Cole's funeral, Jaeger misunderstood that he was to read Shelley and Keats (her favorites) and came unprepared. Instead he read some of her own verses displayed on a table, shivering to hear the poem he had read earlier without much notice.

"Sad that it took me 'til then to open my eyes to the profundity of her unassuming songs," Jaeger said in his notes.

Poet Cole's final stanzas in "The Lost Meadow" reveal a depth beyond her struggles to reach the meadow of her memories "carpeted with flowers, lupine and paintbrush:"

Then went on, and finally found the place

I'd longed for. But

not the flowered meadow. The years

had turned my meadow

into a seedling forest.

My tears blurred it all,

All this wild beauty. The world

is old enough

to break my heart.

According to Jaeger, the new anthology appeals to both those schooled and unschooled in the poet trade. The goal was to kick down the door and bring an audience back to the joys of poetry.

"We wanted to be accessible … to be very Montana," he said. "It's observed experience."

He and the other editors include more than a dozen American Indian poets in the collection. Several of these poems have versions in native languages alongside their English translations.

"That's one way this is really different," Jaeger said. "We wanted to reflect those lives too."

Sunk Pa (Minerva Allen) shares a slice of Montana experience in "Beautiful Existence:"

Death my friend is not long.

Wrapped in a tanned buffalo robe,

painfully I sank to the floor,

forcing my aching knee joints to bend.

I sat cross-legged.

Fumbling for my ceremonial pipe,

filling it with tobacco from a

small pouch; lit it.

Smoke wreathed around my head.

I felt for my drum and began a faint

Tapping on the taut rawhide.

The voice that once rang from mountain

tops, echoing along beaver streams.

Softly I sang a chant of death.

All is quiet.

Jaeger best describes the birth and purpose of the anthology in his "Editor's Notes."

"These three deceased poets, from their vantage point in the stars, looked down on the twinkle of yardlights peppered in the darkness, and they heard a hundred pens on the pages of a hundred notebooks, scratching out the small truths of daily life in a gorgeous and difficult place. And they didn't want those voices and notebooks to end up in the Dumpster, either."

Considering the anthology arrived in bookstores on Aug. 1, this book promises a commercial success rivaling its predecessor "The Last Best Place," edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith.

"We're better than half sold out," Jaeger said.

With the pace of sales, Jaeger expects a second edition out soon from Many Voices Press, a newly-formed literary group based at Flathead Valley Community College. Formed as a nonprofit, the press keeps costs low enough to offer the collection for $16.

"We're doing the distribution ourselves because distributors charge a fee," Jaeger said.

Any excess revenue goes back to the nonprofit press to publish additional works.

Local bookstores carrying "Poems Across The Big Sky" include Borders, Books West, the Hockaday Museum, Flathead Valley Community College bookstore or directly from Many Voices Press by calling 756-3907.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com