William Stobb

I have dropped my mini-van at the shop for repairs—stuck ignition and failed door lock actuator.   They’ll call with an estimate, but I’ll pay any amount.   I know nothing about ignitions and actuators.   On the plus side, I’ve loaded my bike in the back of the van, so my repair bill at least buys me a brisk ride on the marsh trail that connects across town to my neighborhood.   I’m just a quarter mile out when I stop downtown at the riverfront pier—a barge out of St. Louis is stalled in our main channel.   The usual cast gathers—the elderly, depressed, and disoriented, skippers of work, scabs, cads and drifters.   “Engine blew,” says an old codger in a plaid Tam.   I’m too late for the major drama, but can still see a scrim of black smoke drifting upstream.   “Gonna have to tow it.”   He sounds aroused by the prospect but I’m preoccupied noticing the world changing.  L ate-season and in elapsing, life’s become beautiful—new color...

Yahya Frederickson The third installment of the notes from the 2015 AWP memorial panel honoring the late poet, novelist, teacher and editor, Jay Meek. The panel included brief talks by Jay's daughter, the poet, musician and scholar Anna Meek, Thom Tammaro, Jane Varley, myself and Yahya Frederickson, with a special contribution by Jay's wife, the poet and scholar Martha Meek. This installment of the panel's highlights comes from Yahya Frederickson. Yahya is a poet, co-translator of Arabic poetry, former Fulbright Scholar, and former Peace Corps volunteer. He is the author of five poetry collections including The Gold Shop of Ba-'Ali , T he Birds of al-Merjeh Square , and Returning to Water . He serves on the faculty at Minnesota University - Moorhead. *    *    *             In 1989, I was a budding poet, fresh with an MFA from University of Montana, trying to find homes for my poems.   I’d heard ...

My daughter and I road-tripped through some western territories this summer, and hit Saskatchewan just after the big fires started near La Ronge. Not to minimize the impacts of the fire season in western North America this year--it's obviously been alarming, devastating in a variety of ways--but for Claire and I, it was just a couple of spooky days on the trans-Canada highway. We were safe, hundreds of miles south of the fires, and the main effect was the whitewashing of everything. As we drove, landscape features that would've ordinarily been visible for miles came into view suddenly, and everything looked ruined in the smoke. Hawks that ordinarily would've been soaring, scanning the territory for movement, were swooping, hunting the prairie at close range. And the smell permeated everything. I think I was so immersed in the experience that I forgot to take pictures. The luxury of car travel made it a kind of immersive, aesthetic experience, like driving through an apoc...

I knew this guy who left his family, moved to the town of Baker, Nevada, which is a town of 100 people, right at the entryway to Great Basin National Park, on the Utah / Nevada border, where there's a glacier and an amazing grove of Bristlecone Pines up at elevation. But it's high desert. No one lives out there. There's not even the ranch-glamor of Montana country. I think now they're loners, the population of Baker--that the great open space dwarfs them in a way that feels accurate-- though I know they did have friendships, community, purpose. Anyway, he moved there to a little cottage along a runoff creek and became a Wiccan priest, a Warlock, and changed his name to John B. Free. I don't know what his name had been before. He didn't say much about his previous life. It wasn't right. He did a ceremonial kind of tai chi around witch's rock, a big boulder in a meadow a few thousand feet below Wheeler Peak, which is kind of the geological st...

"I think I / pretend, mainly to understand my motives,"             from "Interval," published in Colorado Review , and picked up by Verse Daily , here . "I think the poem's trying to enter the storm spiral that is trying to think  in a historical time period where thinking itself  is hastening global crisis." From "The KR Conversations," in July, 2015, Kenyon Review online. Here. "What is happening seems mainly about to happen-- a fade into a possible other sandbox strewn with trucks and full of buried Superballs (TM) somewhere deep in in- or external space."                                From "What is Happening," in Kenyon Review , July / Aug 2013. Online here . "everything's quiet but I'm wired / with weirdly woven histories-- / waistcoats, lightning bolts, powdered wigs and IV bags."                   ...

The second installment of the notes from our 2015 AWP memorial panel, honoring the late poet, novelist, teacher and editor, Jay Meek , comes from Jane Varley.  Jane teaches writing and chairs the English department at Muskingum University. She is the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Flood Stage and Rising ; a chapbook of poetry, Sketches at the Naesti Ba r; and co-author of the coaching memoir, Y ou Must Play to Win! with Donna Newberry.  Jane was a student of Jay's in the creative writing program at the University of North Dakota. I put a lot of time and thought into this panel presentation—and it is such a paradox, the more I was thinking and writing, the more I cut from the text. It is because I care so much and this is so meaningful for me. Words don’t do justice to my feelings. Also I get a little jittery because of the egocentrism and self-referencing of so many writers. I’m not above it—my first stop is often speaking of my own experiences. But with Jay Me...

At the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference, I was honored to be part of a memorial panel celebrating the life and work of the late poet, novelist, editor, teacher, friend, father and husband, Jay Meek (1937-2007) . The other panelists and I (Anna George Meek, Jane Varley, Yahya Frederickson, and Thom Thammaro) discussed ways that we might work to advance Jay's legacy. One small step is to publish our panel presentations in some public forum, so they might be available for Jay's present and future readers. Here is the first of those publications--Thom Tammaro's talk, reprinted below with permission from the author. Thom Tammaro is the recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Loft-McKnight Award in poetry, and a Jerome Foundation travel grant to Italy. He is the recipient of three Minnesota Book Awards. “Words put own and carried in the dark”: Homage to Jay Meek April 11, 2015, Minneapolis AWP T...