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By Kevin Young AN ONLINE COLLECTION OF POETRY provided by the Ad Astra Poetry Project, Kansas Arts Commission, 2009 • "Childhood" by Kevin Young (January 20, 2009) • "At Cather's Grave" by Amy Fleury (February 09, 2009) • "Married to a Cowboy" by Jack DeWerff (March 02, 2009) • "Late Harvest" by James Vincent Tate (March 17, 2009) • "The Jackalope" by Gary J. Lechliter (March 20, 2009) • "Not A Regular Kansas Sermon" by Charles Plymell (April 26, 2009) • "Lightning's Bite" by Kevin James Rabas (June 02, 2009) • "Coyote Invades Your Dreams" by Linda Lynette Rodriguez (June 18, 2009) • "Columbarium Garden" by Denise Lea (Dotson) Low (June 30, 2009) • "Sunset" by Victor Contoski (July 21, 2009) • "Yearly Restoration" by Serina Allison Hearn (August 16, 2009) • "Spider" by Donald Warren Levering (September 14, 2009) • "From Angle Of Yaw" by Benjamin S. Lerner (October 14, 2009) • "Watching the Kansas River" by Elizabeth Avery Schultz (November 11, 2009) • "My Advice" by Stephen E. Meats (December 07, 2009) KEVIN YOUNG (1970 - ) “IK evinthink Young, there’s born a in lot Nebraska, of interesting spent middle history and highregarding school in Kansas,Topeka before both attending its history Harvard as aUniversity. state and He being is a professor a free at Emorystate, University and also in just Atlanta, in general and he itsis acultural renowned history poet and editor. He has won Guggenheim, NEA, and Stegner Fellowships. Young was once a student of mine in a summer creative writing workshop for middle school students at Washburn University. When he was still a teenager, Thomas Fox Averill of Washburn sponsored Young to edit a book of poetry by Kansas poet Edgar Wolfe. These early opportunities make a difference for youngsters, as his career shows. I hope this example encourages teachers and community arts program leaders. Young’s poetry shows influences of Langston Hughes and the blues, with lean lines and sharp images, but he definitely has his own contemporary vision. This poem appears to be set in the Kaw River valley, where ash trees grow. The meditation on childhood begins with a “welcome” from the woods. He describes chicken-of-the-woods fungi on fallen trees, which seem to be listening ears. Beyond sight can be heard woodpeckers, which references John Keats’ nightingale. The pivot in the poem comes before the halfway mark with the question: “Where is nature human?” The narrator looks down from canopy heights to the ground, and the mood darkens. With nightfall, aging begins, and also a process of confusion. Young uses vivid comparisons to explain this mystery: strips of bark on the ground are a coded text. Darkness is like dangerous depths of water. In the last two lines is another shift, as mosquitoes bite: “Wish /them well. Wave.” The poem tells us to embrace the dark. CHILDHOOD Autumn & the leaves turn bark thin & pale to people—yellow, brown, as paper, coded Morse. red—then die. Only ash You are lost, path trees stay white, standing— unmarked. It grows the woods welcome you, trail dark, you older, night like a tongue, half-hidden. around you like a lake Ears cover fallen trees: you’ve swum out too far pale mushrooms, listening. into—tread moonlight Stop & you can hear while the bugs begin the peckerwoods high up. taking your blood Where is nature for their children. Wish human? On the ground them well. Wave. Education: Kevin Young graduated from Topeka West High School. He has an A.B. in English and American Literature (Harvard University 1992) and MFA in Creative Writing (Brown University 1996). Career: Kevin Young's books are Most Way Home (William Morrow, 1995), National Poetry Series; To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books 2001), finalist for Academy of American Poets prize; Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf 2003), finalist for 2003 National Book Award in Poetry; Black Maria (Alfred A. Knopf 2005); and Dear Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf 2008). Young edits anthologies from Harper Perennial and Everyman. Young's poetry and essays have appeared widely in print & electronic media. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2009 Denise Low, AAPP 29 © 2008 “Childhood,” Kevin Young, from Dear Darkness: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf), reprinted with permission of the author © 2007 Denise Low, photograph AMY FLEURY (1970 - ) Amy Fleury was born and raised in Seneca, attended Kansas State University, and taught at Washburn University for more than ten years. She visited many area arts centers and colleges for readings and conferences. Her writing has a fresh quality, conveyed by a narrator who has a quiet excitement about the surroundings. Even this elegy, “At Cather’s Grave,” set in a forest cemetery, has a brightness. Like Cather, the narrator is displaced from western plains. Monadnock in the poem is an isolated New Hampshire mountain that rises over pine forests, and it emphasizes the sense of shadow at the gravesite. The prairie skies become the contrasting life in the poem. Here Fleury turns to landscape as eternity, like Cather’ novels about the prairie create a literary heritage that continues. Fleury writes that “the prairie/ is like a page,” and so she joins the author with her own writings. She contrasts the dark New Hampshire woods with “sun-doused sedge” and also graveside and life. The last stanza integrates opposites with affirmation of the continuity of wind, which tells stories everywhere, and the land, which “will take us in,” whether in forests or on the plains. Fleury herself recently moved to Louisiana, but will never truly leave Kansas. At Cather’s Grave Veiled in deep New Hampshire pines, you rest in a bed of mast and loam. A pilgrim from the plains, I’ve come in homage to your open-skied and earth-turned words. Monadnock will not shadow you. We both know that the prairie is like a page, our living and dying written in every tuck and swell. I wish we could walk out together, arms linked, toward the sun-doused sedge. But everywhere, whether here or there, the wind stories us and the land will take us in. We are all happy to be dissolved into something so complete and great. Education : Amy Fleury graduated from Seneca High School. She received two English degrees from Kansas State University (B.S. 1991, M.A. 1994) and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (McNeese State University, 1997). At KSU she received the William H. Hickok Graduate Fellowship in Fiction. Career: Amy Fleury taught at Highland Community College (1997-1998), Washburn University (1998-2008), and McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana (2008 - ). She received the Crab Orchard First Book Award for Beautiful Trouble (Southern Illinois University Press 2004), and she has a chapbook Reliquaries of the Lesser Saints , RopeWalk Press, University of Southern Indiana. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2009 Denise Low, AAPP 30 © 2004 “At Cather’s Grave,” Amy Fleury, first published in Beautiful Trouble, Southern Illinois University Press. JAMES VINCENT TATE (1943 - ) James Tate grew up in Kansas City, on both sides of the state line, and he attended Pittsburg State University. He then went to Iowa University, which launched his distinguished career as a poet known for his “dream logic.” The laws of the imagination, in his poems, are as potent as laws of physics. He is able to draw readers into his vision by telegraphing vivid images that are suggestive of stories. This allows readers to invest their own experiences into the accumulated information. His technique is like Aesop’s fables, which strip stories to their basic elements. His plot sequence, however, is more subtle. “Late Harvest” is one of Tate’s few regional poems. He seldom attaches his imagination to finite geography. In this poem he collages together colorful images: “white buffalo,” “red gates,” dried out “cellophane” grasses, and a “black tractor.” What he captures is specific to this geography: the distorted size of late afternoon sun, as it stretches into the horizon. Dimensions in the grasslands have greater depth, so objects may line up as though they were visionary. The “white buffalo” may be drained of color by the sun-glare optics, it may be albino, or it may be a spiritual being—or all of these things. The narrator is surprised by the buffalo, but he cannot rouse the birds nor the girls, who accept this cosmos. The falling of night quiets his fears, as natural order returns. Tate shows Kansas as a mythic place. LATE HARVEST I look up and see a white buffalo emerging from the enormous red gates of a cattle truck lumbering into the mouth of the sun. The prairie chickens do not seem to fear me; neither do the girls in cellophane fields, near me, hear me changing the flat tire on my black tractor. I consider screaming to them; then, night comes. Education: James Tate received a BA in English (Pittsburg State University 1965) and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (1967). Career: Tate is a distinguished university professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His second book, The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press 1967), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets). His Selected Poems (1991) won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award, and his Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994) won the National Book Award. He also has won the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has published over a dozen books of poetry and prose. __________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2009 Denise Low, AAPP 31 © James Tate, “Late Harvest” in Selected Poems 1991. © Star Black, Academy of American Poets, photograph 2007.
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