Timothy Murphy,1951- 2018; RIP

I cannot do justice to Tim's many interests and careers here even if it were not late at night. Farmer, businessman; poet and student of poetry, vigorous with unfashionable rhyme and meter (it was said that under the tutelage of his Yale mentor, Robert Penn Warren, he memorized 30,000 lines of Greek and English poetry); adventurer, gay man, gun nut (a 28 bore on the prairie!); Catholic (as another Catholic writer, Michael Gruber, once put it, practicing and trying to be perfect, with no illusions!)

In a just world he might well have been poet laureate, and he was enviably productive too. His cancer diagnosis spurred him into writing at least four extra BOOKS!

He wrote the best poems on dogs of our time, and on our common mortality:

When the returning dove
roosts at your mother's grave,

Ill bury a box of ash
beside her in the sod.

Vaya con Dios, love,
You were the dog of God.

Our fellow bird hunter, Catholic, and writer Jameson Parker called him "A Predatory Poet in a State of Grace." Exactly right.

Oh and-- for extra cool points: His childhood babysitter was Bob Dylan,

Wild Poem

From a wild poet friend, Tim Murphy, as he fights his cancer battle...

The Four H’s Again
for Steve Bodio

Last night I dreamed I flew an eagle-owl,
her wing span just six feet,
the talons of her feet
clutching my fist, horned ears above her cowl.

We hunted high, hard scrabble Kazakhstan,
my barrel-chested horse
scrambling aloft in force
for wolf, the war bird’s muffled glide our plan.

The peaks above still buried deep in snow,
we rode on broken ground,
hunter, hawk, horse and hound
as sheep and goats lay grazing far below.

A wolf flushed far under a bergshrund’s rift.
Launched, and the stealthy strike was blinding swift.

Tamgaly petroglyphs, Kazakh Steppe N of Almaty, 6000 years old; "4H". The rider is the stick figure across from the quarry...

Good Bones

Several people have sent me links to Nora Krug's Washington Post essay on Maggie Smith's poem "Good Bones"- you know, the one that begins "Life is short/ Though we keep it from our children" (sorry, no link- still hypertext challenged).

Although I agree with everything she says, and recommend the essay, which also features Smith reading from the poem, I am more cynical.

I think we don't tell them how short life is because they wouldn't-- couldn't-- believe it


UPDATE: Aaah, here:

Rock and Hawk

"This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the faqlcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud."

Robinson Jeffers, Rock and Hawk

Black Gyr on basalt in Iceland, taken by Kirk Hogan theee days ago

Rockabilly Poetry!

I finally got Effigies II, the  London- published collection of five Native female poets that includes Ungie Davila;  Most are dutiful to OK, but Ungelbah's are brilliant, partially because she draws upon the  cultural history of New Mexico as seen through the rhinestone - studded red sunglasses and sensibilties of a talented cowpunk artist and pinup esthete who knows history, rodeos, and the Fifties. I have known her since she was born, in 1987, thirty miles south of the pavement in her father's house, a unique passive- solar creation built of stone by Mexican craftsmen and tucked beneath the slopes of a little volcano, a house that stays warm even in winter despite the subzero temperatures of Mangas in winter, especially between the twin peaks, Escondida and Allegre, and watched her grow and travel from the ranch to Quemado to the Japanese diaspora in Taiwan and Brazil to the Prado. She has learned from her father, the bronc rider, chickenfighter, and world traveler; from her mother, born to a Navajo mother, now a professional Culinary- school- trained pastry chef, from her ancient grandfather Pete Daniel, prophet- bearded Jack Mormon gold prospector and hand, who has sought treasure off the coast of Belize and in the mountains of New Mexico; from her girlhood mentor Russell Means; perhaps even from reading her old semi-uncle, me. She is at home on the ranch, in Albuquerque, Europe and Asia, at a keyboard, behind a lens and in front of one. She is indeed The Gothest Girl I Can. And these good poems are not even new; I believe they pre- date her  (recently folded) La Loca magazine.

I  have not gotten permission to reprint these poems, as I don't have Ungie's current numbers and John is off the grid, but I am sure printing them to promote Ungie's career comes under the doctrine of Fair Use. And I encourage Ungie or any of her friends who read this to get in touch with me.

 John when Ungie was about one:

Aaaah, a little more...

New Tim Murphy

Enjoy these- they will only be up for a month...


September, an Ode

Song for the Sandhills

Forested shoulders sloping down its valley,
the Sheyenne carves its way through North Dakota
to Agassiz, lakebed of the Red River.
I pass a timber truck to prove that logging
endures far east of our Montana mountains.

Certainly cutting spruces, climax forest,
their seed borne to the plains in bison droppings,
much as the Sioux fled from the Ojibwa
who built birch bark canoes to run our rivers
long before the Lakota learned Horse Culture.

Lake Agassiz burst east, out through the Pigeon
to feed the Great Lakes, clear to the St. Lawrence.
How slowly it retreated questing northward
to bring its mighty river up to Churchill.
Agassiz lapped six hundred feet above me.

Long hunting the Sheyenne National Grasslands,
a vast moraine, scrub oak-clad hills and prairie
draining its watershed forever northward,
bound for the Arctic, bound for the Aurora,
it makes an aging man feel mighty youthful.

No Township, Range or Section

There ain’t no grouse in southeast North Dakota
save for one secret spot I have long scouted,
a half section high on the Sheyenne’s shoulder,
gravel moraine, weather-rounded erratics
left in the wake of our retreating glacier.

An eastern outlier of short grass prairie,
what makes it magic is its silverberry,

knee-high shrubs irrestible to sharp tails
who covet berries dangling at eye level.
Treeless covert, I found it in my twenties
well before dawn, wingtip to wingtip covey
hurrying home from water at a stock pond.

Don’t ask me where, it’s under strict embargo,
but lies less than a hundred miles from Fargo.

Ransom County Rambles

Force five gale from the West, the grouse flushed wild,
and I was porting my tiny Twenty-eight.
The slingshot that I brandished as a child
might have been more lethal.  We came too late,

grouse in the silverberry wide awake,
skittish, flushing seventy-five yards out,
three years since I left grouse guts in my wake,
the prairie lush, healed of our summer drought.

Tomorrow I’ll go back, heavier iron.
Long before dawn we’ll leave our little house,
vest up at sunrise and explore the siren
scent trails of the wary prairie grouse.

Hunting at Sixty-five

Clothe me in camouflage, and like as not
I’ll miss because my reflexes are shot,
my eye is bleary, and my legs are not

fit to pound up four hundred hillside feet
behind young Chucky, every bit as fleet
as Feeney.  Let me not just repeat

triumphs recorded long ago when young.
Let me swirl sips of whiskey on my tongue,
recalling barn doors where my cocks were hung

to air, their entrails in the bloodied grass
where young hunters sigh with a soft alas
this hunt is over, and this too shall pass

when like our forebears we are growing old.
Too soon I shall come in out of the cold.

Best of Seasons

I’ve longed to farm the Sheyenne River bottoms,
their topsoils black as the Red River Valley.
Instead I’ve hunted them for forty autumns.
Wake in the dark, sleepless before each sally,
white line fever, the asphalt still before me,
Columbian the coffee to restore me.

Ploughshares too swiftly bury all the stubble,
no pigeon grasses for the witch doves’ covens,
and every day I pray to shoot a double
jalapenoed and baconed for our ovens.
Sumac turns crimson and the aspens yellow.
I scratch the soft ears of my little fellow

and offer praises to the One who made me
and every side hill scrub oak that will shade me.

A Poem for the New Dogs

Margory Cohen sent this, by the late, great, and much- missed Vicki Hearne:

The New Hound Puppy

Now it is time for her name –

Start the call.  The time may come
For her job, which is to run
Holes in the palpable wind

Hallowed by world and the world
Will collapse, follow this hound
Through meteoric  valleys.

Wolf-shag domains.  Here God says
Himself through the wolf until
A slenderness of hound bitch

With a speed like silk shimmers
At God, all arc and angle,
Revelations for voice.  So

It was in the beginning
And evermore shall be, so
Her arcs speak back to the light

Which is become an affair
Of luminous shadows, so
It was in the beginning

And evermore shall be in
Her temporal impudence,
Intended as litany.

 
Vicki Hearne

Tricks of the Light
University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
2007

New Poems from Tim Murphy

To Stephen Bodio



I dreamed I was striding beside your horse,

        dogs coursing in the mist,

        the falcon on your fist

husbanding her inconceivable force.



Shahin, hoping that we were hunting quail,

        spiraled aloft to hover

        as we quartered her cover.

Over the brush we saw a single sail,



then broke the covey. At an explosive flush

       the blinding stoop and kill.

       On a High Desert hill

she nibbled neck meat in the windless hush.



Yours is the hunter’s highest form of art.

       Beside my prairie stream

       I read your books and dream,

sharing the wild passion in your heart.





Horseman NOT!



I never learned to gallop on a horse.

       Just once my Stetson flew

       and even worse, I knew

greenhorn disgrace, bounced from my mount, of course.



Aged six I’d had a Shetland pony rear,

      throwing me to a rock

      where coming to in shock

Timmy conceived a new deep-seated fear.



Soon I’ll fly south to ride with Bodio

      and watch his falcon sail

      high over furtive quail,

hoping my host will let us take it slow.



Mountains for me are best designed for walking,

       hoisting a heavy pack

       up a steep switchback track

or seated on a saddle gently rocking.




Road Trip



Syrdal and I flew down to Albuquerque

to hunt spruce grouse, cousin to our wild turkey.

Steve flew his goshawk (said to taste like chicken.)

It was a thrill to see that big bird kickin’

grouse from the air, felling them for Steve’s hounds

who warily circled our killing grounds.



This was a trip on each man’s bucket list.

Steve’s books and some Youtubes you might have missed

were all we knew of what we came to see,

New Mexico’s desolate majesty

where Steve mastered the art of falconry.



(An ornithological correction: we are too far south for spruce grouse.Though if we did hawk for them, a Gos, one of their natural predators, would be a good choice. Seems that "Sage" would work, poetically and historically, although our population is no longer huntable).

Siberian male Gos on the Hi- Line in Montana, chasing Sharptails, by Rob Palmer at Falcon photos.

Harrison Poem

They used to say we're living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

Another Wind River Poem

From Tim:

Wind River Justice

Alan riding his first horse from Big Sandy
to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday:
his mare reared in the lodgepoles when a spruce grouse
flushed and nearly pitched him down a switchback.
My own gelding stampeded through a meadow,
and our young wrangler called those ponies “gentled.”

We braved Pyramid’s boulders, Barnard’s clinkers,
apogees of our climbs in the Wind Rivers,
then turned our backs forever on those summits,
Gannet, the tallest peak in all Wyoming,
the Highline Trail cleavered between the Temples.
We limped, blistered, back to our dusty Bronco.

There stood a girl, sobbing beside the stables.
The boy, his terror turned to helpless fury,
and a young ranger argued mixed-use forest,
treeline grazing, lamb-eating bears and coyotes,
leash law and the permitted use of rifles.
Read the rules posted at every entrance.

Two hikers had surprised the sheep at twilight,
young Lykos growled, then raced across a meadow
three thousand feet above Big Sandy Trailhead,
and a Basque herder shot the German shepherd
which met no blue heeler or border collie,
no, only a rifle.  Wind River Justice.

Bernie Kelly sadly saddled his horses.
Bearers rode up, and Lykos down the mountain,
but who descends it twenty-three years later,
no longer carrying Murphy or a backpack?
Slippery the scree, the pool below unfathomed.
Where is the meadow and the watchful shepherd?

More Tim--and Johnny UK, and Kazakhs, and the Urbigkits

Tim says to John Hill,  on "Huntress": "Johnny UK, my late partner Alan Sullivan, who attended the death, always choked up at that last line." I agree, but the one that really gets me is the end of "Perro del Amo": Vaya con Dios, love/ you were the dog of God."

Here is the Magdalaenian from East Anglia, with his bespoke Darne  magnum twelve that Herve Bruchet made for him, and his own "Perro del amo", his lab Petra...

 

And here in Magdalena

A particular favorite of Tim's from his extensive  repertory:

Soul of the North

Out of the wilds, I pray.
Bound by my northern birth
to fish, to hunt the earth
and follow my forebears’ way,
I mutter I have sinned,
wander the knee-high grass,
flourish awhile and pass
whistling into the wind.

As char swim to the clear
tundra rivers that run
under the midnight sun,
as wolves follow the deer
drawn from ford to ford,
as clamorous geese in V’s
throng to the thawing seas—
all creatures of one accord—
my soul thirsts for the Lord.

.. and then Tim realized, like so many others, we her at Q blog are (at least) three, and sometimes more, but always two. This one goes out to you, Cat!

"I read the front page of your blog with great pleasure last night and did a double take, not realizing there are other posters.  Steve runs sheep in the Winds in summer and winters them in New Mexico? Whoa!  Alan and I spent a lot of time in the Winds, and I'd like you to send this little poem to your friend, Cat.  If you ask me what the form is, I'd say amphibrachic dimeter, an ancient Greek meter.  I only know two examples after 500 BC, both mine, bien sur.  I wanted the gait of a mountain pony on switchbacks, and I think I got it."

Headwaters

Up switchbacks through passes
we ride winded horses
through spruces, then grasses
ribboned with watercourses,
the Wind River's sources.

A trail called Highline
meanders through flowers
from treeline to snowline
where War Bonnet glowers
on Cirque of the Towers.

A bald eagle's shadow
plummets from its aerie,
then circles this meadow
whose cold waters carry
some hope to our prairie.

The galloping line reminds me of Kazakh folksong, surprisingly accessible to western ears, always with a rhythm of horses. Cat, what do you think?

She visited, fifteen or more years later, some of the same people I hunted with, including the late Aralbai, a true wild man, and his son, now married with a wife. The third photo MAY be him- I lost a lot of files, including a good one of him by Cat (Cat?).  In the intro to the new pb edition of Eagle Dreams, she  tells how, as a good Wyoming cowgirl should, she beat him in an impromptu horse race, winning a silver- mounted riding crop; like any proud Kazakh, he immediately proposed, saying he was Moslem and could have a second wife. Cat had the perfect rejoinder: "I know your FIRST wife- and you can't!"

In this photo from the first expedition, he is rolling a cigarette as he takes a break from riding around in circles, dragging his bird by its jesses in a way that would look ridiculous to any falconer. He raises his head to me, indicates the intense  discussion going on behind, and says "Stev-- photographers FUCKED!" People always learn the bad words first! Of course, there is also the matter of my NAME. When I asked Canat and our driver Siassi why they always pronounced my name like that, Siassi looked at Canat for permission, then turned to me and said "You are  Stev, because 'Steef' mean.."; and he gave me the universal sign for intercourse, with his finger going in and out of his circled fist. It is just GREAT to know that your name means "Fuck" in Kazakh, though through the years, I have come to accept it, and even sign my letters and emails "Stev"...

 What the hell, a few more; this post has become pure free association anyway: Siassi and me and Canat, young and strong and invincible in late February  '97; my first hunting paty in Mongolia, pure Indiana Jones; and a scare- Magpie  hung over Aralbai's lambing corral, showing that intelligent corvids are not the herder's friends. Jackson used to have an Irish- sounding reel he had written called "The Magpie's Breakfst"; when asked what a Magpie's breakfast was, he would answer succinctly, "Roadkill!" And Pere Henri Michel, the naturalist priest in Serignan, home of Jean- Henri Fabre, would shake his head over the sheer numbers of Magpies there, which kept the numbers of song and game birds depressed, and say "Les pies sont mechant; ils ne sont pas baptisee!"

Here are Cat and Jim at their trailer house on a dirt road south of Pinedale, where I took refuge from Jackson Hole, a place that my convalescing friend Peter Bowen (well, a character in one of his best novels, Wolf no Wolf) calls "a good place for a nuclear accident". For three days, we rode around and looked at the country, the livestock, and the wildife; at night we drank and talked and laughed. Jim and Cat's well - honed political comedy act had me in stitches. He likes to portray himself as a poor dumb rodeo cowboy who works in the gravel pit; no matter that he and Cat have received grants from the Wyoming livestock council (I THINK-- Cat can set me straight) to go to places like Turkey to study livestock protection dogs and their culture, and that Jim and I can stay up all night killing a bottle of vodka and  discussing the science and anthropology of  domestication, pulling out more abstruse papers than anyone not a student of the subject would ever think existed.

 My most impressive experience there was not even hearing the wolves howling down on the river (a sound still rare in my country, and one that will make the hair rise on your nape no matter WHAT you think of wolves),  and going out in the morning to see that the dogs had held the line and moved the wolves on, and were only a LITTLE cut up-- see Rant in the pic below.

No, it was the political comedy act. I knew them well enough to know they were pro-gun and pro- conservation and VERY pro- domestic livestock, but didn't know any details. I had been complaining about the Hole, where everybody is a pc liberal, where everybody now owns THREE houses, because the billionaires have driven out the millionaires; where I had been reasonably informed that there were 63 private jets on the runway the day we flew in; where there are more poor southern Mexicans than in Albuquerque or, probably, New Mexico, because such people need servants; where a celebrity lawyer whose hair, like that of Warren Zevon's Werewolf, was perfect (my not particularly Puritan soul had been shocked to see, on a previous visit, that the first thing you confronted when you walked in the front door of his mansion was a garish ten- foot high full frontal nude portrait of his wife, by him (and no, Jim C, I am not talking about the wonderful whimsy of "Mail Order Brides come with Issues", or as I think of her, the Goddess and her dogs-- I would happily sleep with her and her watchful dogs at the foot of my bed forever, if only Penelope would let me!); but he had been good to Libby after Harry's death,  when there were still plenty of climbing hippies and Mormon cowboys in the Valley, so I introduced myself  and mentioned the name of a serious writer and friend who had worked in the oil patch long ago and written a good book about it and about this lawyer, quite complimentary--only to have him take my hand languidly, stare over my shoulder, and say "I can't quite recall anybody by that name..."

 I was going ON, as people who know me know I can. We had been invited by a wonderful old friend of Libby's, an educator and classicist, and incidentally quite rich, to come up and cook for his daughter's (rather odd-- the best part was Mark's reading from Wendell Berry on the responsibilities of marriage, which seemed to puzzle the crowd) wedding, and, being a gent, he PAID her for it. Which seemed to encourage some of the young people, like the barely post-adolescent  lout who said he had just spent 6 months in the Andes "skiing for social justice", to treat Libby and Martha (only the greatest outdoorswoman of her generation, and another old Outward Bound friend of Mark's, and unlike Libby still in the food biz), the way the nuns of my odd aristocratic grammar school (the school, not me, I'm plain as dirt, a scholarship student born in "Saint Maahk's Parish" in Dorchester, who didn't find out about that scholarship until 1987) told us NOT to treat servants.--

 So Jim begins, reflecting."Well, you know I robbed the cradle. I started dating Cat when I was thirty and she was twenty.

"And when she turned twenty one, I took her down to the Sublette County courthouse, to register to vote.

"Now I was born here, and I know the drill,[Cat was born in Kentucky I think, though she moved out early] so I say 'Urbigkit'- resignedly.

"Then I spell it.

"Then I say, 'Democrat' [pronounced cowboy, "Dimocrat"]- resignedly."

I raised an eyebrow. "Really?" (I don't know many non- Hispanic cowboys that are Democrats).

Jim: "Yup, I'm the chairman of the Sublette County Democratic party-- I nominated Obama."

I laughed, a bit incredulous still. "Any buyer's remorse?"

"Every day- until I see your guys!"

This time I whoop and high- five him, and return to my seat."What about Cat?"

"Well, remember, she's still this naive little girl. So she turns to me and says, 'Jim, what am I?'

"And I say to the registrar, 'She don't know it yet, but she's a genetic Republican, so put her down as that."

And SHE gets up, and high fives Jim, and says "And I'm the REPUBLICAN chair of Sublette County!" And I say, "You know, I've heard more political intelligence and diversity of thought in this trailer house than in a week in Jackson."

And then I go back to Jackson and some rich jerk asks me where I've been and I say on a ranch south of Pinedale in Sublette County and he says "WHY? That's the asshole of the world!" I say to Libby, just a little later, never say I lack self- restraint- I did NOT say- yell!- "No, THIS is!"

 

And finally, a link to Tim: (No, it won't work. Tomorrow)

More soon. It has been a long day, and night

Tim Murphy

In a just world, North Dakota's Tim Murphy would be not just the Poet Laureate of his beautiful Siberian state, our truest North; he would be the Poet Laureate of the USA. Good (but lesser) honored real poets, like Dana Gioia, know and say this,..

But like any cradle Catholic, even one lapsed or "relapsed", he knows this is not a just world. Nevertheless, he sings his songs...

Besides, says the academy, he writes poems about HUNTING DOGS. Says I, so did the Greeks.

Tim has honored me by giving me some of his yet unpublished longer poems, and one for Easter Week. But I thought I would start with these four, from his Hunter's Log, one of my "Book of Books" 100. Resist if you can...

And NO, I am not going to TYPE them!

I will put the third on Ataika's grave if I live long enough.

More to come..

C J's latest project

C J Hadley came over as a young girl from Birmingham in England, and worked at Car and Driver magazine in its legendary years, when the late David E Davis ran a strong stable of writers and illustrators. It may be advancing age, but I think magazines were more colorful then, perhaps because they were a more important part of the market. These were also the days of the Pat Ryan Sports Illustrated, training ground for many of the writers that helped form me, howing me how broad a subject a sporting essay could be.

CJ met Tom Quinn there, when Tom did this legendary cover:

Both went on to other things, Quinn to become a wildlife painter, perhaps our best; CJ, however improbably, ended up in Nevada runing the outspoken rancher's voice, Range magazine, where the English girl has been nominated for Cowgirl Hall of Fame by Jameson Parker, Joan Chevalier, and John L Moore, two of whom make frequent appearances here.

I have one original Quinn, a watercolor sketch of  a roadkill Bee eater that I snatched out of the fire kindling in his studio (really), any amount of prints, and have been privileged to write the text to a collection of his work, The Art of Thomas Quinn.

Tom's firestarter:

Quinn and me, with his wife Jeri's oil of a horse in the background (plus wolves by his old friend Vadim Gorbatov, painted by Vadim before he visited NM for a Korean edition of Seton's Lobo, the story of a cattle- killing New Mexico wolf, with our aid for background material.

CJ, as Tom says, is not always controversial. She has just released what I believe is her second, broadest in scope, most ambitious  and best collection of western art and poetry (in this and other images forgive some rather odd croppings; I photo'd it on my coffee table!)

You say you don't like cowboy poetry and art? Well, there are plenty of those represented: Buckeye Blake, Waddie Mitchell, Wallace McRae, as well as traditional western writers like Will James. But so is the far less traditional cowboy Paul Zarzyski (he is a Democrat!); Ted Kooser; Linda Hasselstrom, and many many more. In artists Tom is well represented, but also the old master Maynard Dixon,  Charlie Russell, and any number of writers and artists who may be new to you. Here is a broad if non- random selection:. A always, right or double click and you can blow it up big enough to read easily.

Good job, CJ! It is $43, available at 1 800 RANGE-4-U.

Here is CJ with Montana novelist and friend of Q John L Moore.

UPDATE : here is a pic she just sent of her  with her dogs Belle Star, Strider, and Cache Drogan.

A little poetry

An excerpt, a vision of Elysian fields by Tim Murphy. He has a HUGE collection coming out next year-- watch for it.

Forests and fields lie just north of the Gulf,

teeming with boar and hunted by the wolf.

We rack our spears at sunset.  Songs are sung,

and all the hunters and their dogs are young.

Another Poet

Tim Murphy is not just one of our finest living poets, and the only one I know who celebrates what I have called "our Siberia", the chilly plains of North Dakota. He is a living rebuke to stereotypes: a farmer, a businessman, a Yale graduate who studied under Robert Penn Warren; a classicist who writes about dogs; a gay man who is a practicing Catholic; perhaps above all, at least for subjects, a passionate bird hunter who has written the only poetry collection I know of that is dedicated to hunting. I have written about him in my book of one hundred books. Here he talks about all these subjects and more on North Dakota TV.

Coursing Poem

The sporting poem lives-- in several forms, but I like it that it does in our own vernacular and non-academic culture, not just as a barely- living remnant in England. By Dave Isely, of the threatened California coursing culture, sent by his wife Robin:

Found Poem

Recently there has been a small revival of the odd early twentieth century writer Robert Chambers, especially his "King in Yellow" a sort of pre- Lovecraft, atmospheric, semi- horror tale with a fin- de- siecle air about it-- think old Howard crossed with Beardsley or Wilde, though not as good.

I saw  a battered  copy of his 1904 In Search of the Unknown, supposedly about its narrator's search for and discovery of extinct or legendary beasts,  and picked it up, hoping for a cryptozoological version of Lovecraft. Besides, it had a cool cover:

 It was appallingly bad; overwritten, hysterical, without the vaguest notion of storytelling, animals real or imaginary, or far places. But in the front was a short poem, rather in the school of Kipling, that was worth the few pennies-- not great literature, and I am not sure I agree with its last line, but-- well, see for yourself:

Sounds like an idyllic childhood to me-- sounds like my childhood, or Ed Wilson's. Nor do I really buy the "murder to dissect" school"--  but then, I bet Chambers didn't as a kid...

Poetry

From Larry Gavin's new collection The Initiation of Praise:

My Reader

My reader is part of a small

club like those who fancy

terriers and the taking of game

to ground. My reader stumbled

on this book by accident because

of a mistransposed order

number or an absent minded

librarian that was thinking

about fishing instead of listening

at the time. My reader

holds a glass of something

that has some grief in it,

and folds the book

back on itself breaking the binding

like day breaks in the east

orange and then yellow. My reader

smells of dew and wild mint,

and can keep a secret, and knows

at least two good lawyers.

My reader is sensitive; believes

in Bigfoot and not the Loch Ness

monster. My reader's favorite

north Americabn ungulate

is the Musk Ox. My reader

dreams of flying, dreams of vessels of containment, dreams

of more poems like this one.


--Available from Red Dragonfly Press (www.reddragonflypress.org)

Magdalena's Poet

Bruce Holsapple wasn't born here any more than I was ("I'm not from here/ I just live here"-- James McMurtry); but sooner or later you make your stand. Would you not credit Gary Snyder and his adopted watershed in the dry Sierra, or me in my Querencia?

Bruce has been here long enough to put down roots, and he is one of the very few people other than my late mentor Floyd Mansell who you might encounter high in the mountains of our fortunately neglected range outside of deer season. In his new collection Wayward Shadow , he sings our austere highland's subtle songs, like some latter- day Zen monk praising "Mountains and Rivers Without End".

Like Snyder, he speaks with precision, but so simply he is almost laconic, painting his chosen landscape with a dry brush, making a subtle picture anywhere you care to make a cut. I particularly like this piece below, perhaps because I too look over my shoulder for our (ambivalently) beloved but subtly feared apex predator whenever I descend through the switchbacks after the sun goes behind the ridge:

"Walking a twisty arroyo

cliff, hillside, tumbling rock, sand

& at one damp spot

shelved in by rock

a cougar's track

where it leapt down

into the wash

then across--

me searching the canyon walls

from that point

especially as the sky darkened"

Hunter's Song

Kittinguharmiut Song

As I recall once more
The time I drifted out
On an off-shore wind
And believed I was in danger,

I recall again my fears,
Those small ones I thought so big,
For all the things I hadn’t yet
Accomplished in my life.

Yet there is only one big thing
That truly matters:  to live
To see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.

A Traditional Kittinguharmiut Song (as adapted by Gerard Cox)