William Stobb

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...

Benjamin Staudinger, Milky Way, wikimedia commons Later, I will be conscious of the fact that being outside at night is one of my favorite things. I will experience a kind of internal  exhale  when I have an opportunity to just sit out, alone, hearing cars on the highway and the Empire Builder sounding its horn about a mile west of us, beyond the Mississippi. I will love slow hours, watching the moon move, airplanes and satellites, a light breeze shifting the maple tree. This night, though, I have been called away from my basketball—I’m acting out a radio broadcast of a Minnesota Gophers game on a toy hoop taped to the living room paneling—and asked to go out to the garage and check on my father. He has been working for a long time on a complicated repair to his Oldsmobile, and it’s a cold, mid-winter night, so he has the heater on. My mother is worried about the ventilation. “If he’s blue, it’s probably too late,” she tells me. I hurry out the door and immediately feel t...

Boo would drink six beers and practice tricks until punch-in time.   Invent an eternal detective armed with throwing star lashes, put her on the trail of a fugitive—he'd run ‘til the cliff dropped or the blade sliced his neck.   Or he’d just repeat something, like Marilyn, Marilyn, and I suppose go through every image ‘til there were no more—then she’d be gone, and that was another trick.   I’d be playing rummy while he vocalized—he’d start from scratch: name the fluid, name the bubbles, the permeating feeling.   Make a sound to signify mind-travel to a ceiling fan, microwave color-scraps as they originate in linoleum and travel into the ragged weeds colonizing the broken joints of what we called our office.   He hadn't even clocked in.   J ust going on with words I didn’t even know, articulating concepts I'd probably never learn.   He seemed both happy and a little frightened.    Frightened by happiness maybe.

Congratulations to Kimberly Blaeser, the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015–2016. And many thanks to Max Garland, who served the state's arts & literature community so well in 2013-2014. Really, the whole Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission deserves a lot of thanks--dedicated volunteers who've worked hard to keep the program alive.  As of today, the new web home for the WI PLC is here . Check it out! You can find some of Kim's work there, and information about the state's past laureates. And, if you're someone who values this kind of arts programming, you can find ways of making a donation that will help to ensure its future in the state. About Kimberly Blaeser Blaeser lives in Lyons Township (midway between Burlington and Lake Geneva), Wisconsin. Her work draws on literal observation and the power of metaphor to create complex harmonies between the vibrant natural world and the resonant human imagination. The author of three acclaimed poetry colle...