William Stobb

I'm pleased to announce that my poem "A Moment for Authentic Shine" has been awarded the 2012 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize.  The poem is printed in full on the SRPR website, here .   The new issue of SRPR  includes the judges comments by David Baker. Also, the online mag The Offending Adam  recently ran   this review of   my 2011 Penguin Poets collection, Absentia.   It's written by Kelli Anne Noftle, and looks at the book's relationship to the work of artist Michael Heizer , whose sculptures and earthworks inspired a group of the experimental poems in the collection.    I'm grateful for the good words of these editors and reviewers.  Thank you.

Fox, William.   The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin.   Reno: U of Nevada P, 2005. (The desert video below is shot from the first turnout on Soldier Meadows Road, Black Rock Desert.  As far as I can tell, there’s no footage available online of just d esert.  I do walk into the frame at the eleven minute mark.  Sorry.  Then it ends.  Larger version at  https://vimeo.com/55545311 .) For the last five years or so, William L Fox’s The Void, The Grid & The Sign ( VGS from now on) has occupied a special place in my life.  It’s taken the place of Leaves of Grass and Jay Meek’s Stations as my go-to travel book—the book I carry with me if I’m on a trip because I love it and it’s nice to have something you love with you when you travel.  As its subtitle explains, the book traverses the Great Basin, looking at land art and signature landscapes while thinking about the human and natural history of the region and how the Great Basin challeng

I Feel Like Sort of Maybe…. I don’t remember a whole lot from my limited studies in Linguistics, but I remember that linguists will sometimes study the ways that people use certain kinds of qualifiers that act as disclaimers or “hedges” in conversation.   I’m not a linguist at all, but I still plan to offer an absurdly over-generalized theory about the increase in use of certain specific disclaimers or hedges. In recent years, any attentive language user has noticed the qualifier “sort of.”   It's interjected into propositions made by speakers who either are or desire to appear to be thoughtfully considering other perspectives on whatever it is they’re saying.   “Sort of” indicates appropriate hesitance—it’s a marker of the speaker’s non-bossy-ness: “we expected the Voyager craft to sort of encounter resistance at the edge of the solar system but it's sort of just continued forward sort of beyond our expectations.”   That’s not a great example, but it’s meant to illu

The Window Encasing the Fjord: Following Poetry All the Way (to Iceland) Sketches at the Naesti Bar , Poems by Jane Varley (Finishing Line Press, 2011). “Old Sow in the Road,” a poem by Bill Holm.   From Common Ground: A Gathering of Poems on Rural Life.   Mark Vinz and Thom Tamarro, eds.   (Dacotah Territory, 1990).   During a general education literature course I took as a sophomore at the University of North Dakota, professor Jim MacKenzie taught a selection of poems from a regional anthology called Common Ground .  Though I enjoyed reading, I hadn't read many poems in my life, and didn't expect to like it.  But I remember reading Bill Holm's “Old Sow in the Road.”  I was immediately struck by Holm's accessible, declarative style: OLD SOW IN THE ROAD   Thirty below.  A hundred miles from home the Buick throws a rod.  Dead. An hour later, I'm headed south away from Paynesville in a truck. I could read this.   It wasn’t too compl

             What I’ve been trying to suggest in the last two blog posts is that both “narrative” and “the environment” are limited paradigms in important ways.   “Narrative” is often considered to be humans’ “natural” way of knowing the world—we perceive and process our lives as stories—but I suggest that stories isolate their protagonists (often ourselves), and don’t successfully honor what we’ve come to know about the interconnectedness of all things.   I also suggest that narrative, while it may be underpinned by neurological structures, always exists in relationship to culture, so that our well-established narrative mode may not be inevitable .   Our ways of knowing might evolve to reflect new knowledge, new values, new imperatives.   “The Environment” is similarly limiting, in that it positions humans at the center of the natural world, construed as our “surroundings.”   In fact, our lives are fully intertwined with the world, so that thinking of air, water, weather, etc. as deta

If we tend to perceive and understand our lives in terms of narratives, and if narratives have values like beginnings, middles, and ends, points-of-view, protagonists, and themes—values which are not necessarily inherent in the raw material of reality, but which are imprinted on the world by our principle way of knowing—then perhaps we can speculate about the consequences of our cognition by looking at how an important issue, “The Environment,” is framed within a manageably sized narrative, William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.” To begin: “environment” itself is a concept like narrative.  If we consult the OED, we find that the word environment basically originates as “the circumstances or conditions that surround us.”  “ Our environment.”  How often do we hear that phrase?  Not only do conditions surround us in a way that leaves us unconnected, isolated at the center, but we own those conditions.  In my teaching of writing, I often raise the question of what the word

Young, Kay and Jeffrey L. Saver.  "The Neurology of Narrative."  SubStance 30 (2001), 72-84. Almost anyone will tell you that humans are "naturally" storytelling creatures, and I know what they mean: we talk, we compare stories about our lives, and even interpret our moment-to-moment experience according to our sense of the ongoing plot(s) we're living in.  Recently, I encountered an article that provides some interesting neurological evidence for this claim--"The Neurology of Narrative," by Kay Young and Jeffrey Saver, published in the journal SubStance.   The full text is worth checking out, but for the purposes of this discussion, the abstract will serve: " Narrative is the inescapable frame of human existence. Thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Barthes, and Bruner have recognized the centrality of narrative in human cognition, but have scanted its neurobiologic underpinning. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest that a region