Poets read from new Western collection
Lowell Jaeger, editor of “New Poets of the American West,” loved Erin Fristad’s poem “Advice to Female Deckhands” because its speaks to the nitty-gritty details of life.
“It’s a poem about work, about being a deckhand on a fishing boat, about stoves, bungee cords and deck buckets,” he says in the new book’s introduction.
Fristad grabbed Jaeger and a place in the collection by projecting a movie in his mind, netting him with a narrative alive with fresh images devoid of romantic notions of life at sea.
On Thursday evening from 5 to 8 p.m., Jaeger and three other Montana poets read their own works and some from the other 250 poets and 450 poems featured in this latest book from Many Voices Press. The reading at The Hockaday Museum of Art begins with a reception with books available for sale and signing.
It marks a homecoming of the collection from a tour all over the West. According to Jaeger, the book has been well received, rewarding the three years of work he and other volunteers devoted to compiling the anthology.
“Sales are tremendous — it’s been selling lickety-split,”Jaeger said. “We hope to reprint it before Christmas.”
For the Hockaday event, Montana poets Victor Charlo, Roger Dunsmore and Cas Still will join Jaeger for the evening of savoring the nitty-gritty and not always pretty in their poems such as Charlo’s “Bad Wine.”
“You can love a dying Indian,
But when he drinks bad wine
And breaks your best glass
You give him to the wind.”
The great-great grandson of Chief Victor Charlo of the Bitterroot Salish, the poet also contributed “Buffalo” in both English and Salish, one of several poems provided in two languages. Dunsmore, professor emeritus of the University of Montana, and Still, a poet inspired by her garden and Flathead Lake orchard, serve up more slices of the many layers of western perspective in “New Poets of the American West.”
Jaeger, an English instructor at Flathead Valley Community College, said poets in the book come from all economic backgrounds, political persuasions and walks of life. “We gathered a broad spectrum of voices, as a kind of microscopic slide, of all the various ways people live in the West at the turn of the 21st century,” Jaeger said.
They also share a literary focus on the things of the real world like “Spittle Bug” by Sandra Alcosser, Montana’s first poet laureate, which begins:
“I watched an insect dive
upside down in a crystal bowl.
Magnified, it resembled
a friend’s identity crisis —
red eyes, amorphous body
arched like a scorpion.”
In the book’s introduction, Jaeger says that most people haven’t sat long enough with a poem to get to know one.
“We are busy people, more likely to spend our lives stacking bricks and mixing mortar than we are inclined to fortify our hearts and minds,” he said.
“Maybe in this culture, it’s the poet’s job to slow people down from all this ‘doing’ and get them thinking about what it is they are doing and why they are doing it.”
The Thursday evening reading provides an opportunity to slow down and fortify with Jaeger, Charlo, Dunsmore and Still at the Hockaday reading. It may offer a last opportunity to buy a first edition of the 520 page “New Poets of the American West” for $24 and other collections by the poets.
“People are calling it a landmark anthology,” Jaeger said. “We feel it is a significant literary achievement.”
Admission to the reading costs $10 for the general public, $5 for community college students with ID or $8 for Hockaday members, including refreshments and beverages.
Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.