EXCERPTS FROM SOME OF THE ESSAYS:

from "A Farther Reach"
I have been reading Gretel Ehrlich's Islands, The Universe, Home. Isn't a book of essays truly a book of questions? she asks. I think that thought: an essay is a question. An island imposes discipline, Ehrlich says, shapes the movement of thought.

What discipline is there, I wonder, when these central states roll from farm to forest to lake to high plains, stretching farther even than Thomas Jefferson imagined, stretching to the rough edge of distant mountains. Yet we here in the middle west are not more discursive simply because the land seems to reach forever.

Distance creates its own islands. Our kind of silence I call "Wisconsin taciturn;" you see it on any farm: clipped, chewed, tight-lipped, no nonsense, spare of language; someone knows damn well what he thinks but isn't about to tell you. A kind of language the son of an Iowa farmer might use when he becomes a father himself. With our cultural propensity for silence out here, it's a wonder any farmer's son ever becomes poet or essayist.

from "Father, My Measure"
My wife and I have two daughters, they are grown now, gone off. I wonder whether I have given them anything for measure, as my father gave measure to me. Was there some incident in childhood they can hold up as a standard of comparison? Did they ever race me to their own shed, hogs, and chores in the pasture, metaphorically-speaking? As they were growing up, Mary and I had asked only that they do the best they could. Both are intensely driven, each in her own way. I don't know what we've contributed along the way, you can never really know. I wonder what they will be asking themselves some twenty-five years hence when it is me on the hospital bed, cut open and recovering too slowly. What will they think back to? Have I given them anything to remember?

from "Justin Isherwood: Farming Potatoes & Words"
It is the curious mind that traces a name to its source, the interesting mind that remembers words have grown from things. This mulling, this turning over of stones no one else thought to, serves Isherwood well. His prose reads as if it were written by a poet who must follow ideas and observations wherever they lead, knotted and folded and layered with meaning and life. Who but Isherwood would see that radial tires are "great for mileage, safety, and economics, but the world is shrunk by the sound of them." Who but Isherwood would notice it is the great blue heron, not the crow, that flies "as the crow flies."

from "Who Is Poetry For?"
At dusk, the sun: its last long rays filter through the grove around the farmstead. A farm boy, like any other farm boy, patient in the cycle of days and chores and seasons, looks west and begins, now, to understand the sun's loneliness. Or, rather, the settling sun and the sweep of color along the horizon, the shimmering splotches of light coming through the trees to mark the boy and the ground around him, the special, dancing quality the air takes on in the last light of day - these he begins to recognize as emblems of feelings he has had: a loneliness which is not the usual loneliness, for he has good family surrounding him; a longing which is not a longing because he is content in his life; rather, he comes to a budding awareness, perhaps, that the surface of something is not all that it is, to a realization that life is not simply the endless repetition of days and tasks. Standing alone in the grove, the farmer's son is standing in awe of something mysterious, as if the universe has just yawned and he knows it.

from "Creative Nonfiction in Steamy Baltimore"
O'Hare Airport, Chicago. I am sitting at my gate, waiting to board. There is a woman next to me - middle western, middle aged, middle weight. She has round features, short dark hair, glasses. She wears the air of resignation you might find with someone who teaches composition to Illinois farm boys. We do not make eye contact. On her lap, there is a pile of student themes. She has been reading one of them, correcting it, making suggestions. I see her give that short piece nearly an hour of her attention. Her comments are extensive - she has to write sideways down the page to tell her student everything she needs to say, everything he needs to know.

from "Kissing Poetry's Sister"
Sometimes the answer is the asking: sometimes it's not what we find but that we looked. The essay should be question and exploration, should be curiosity and infatuation. It should be silver with the tingle of desire. It should be the run of the heart's chase, turned with surprise, rushed with sudden joy. It should finger and tease the skin lightly; it should smash like a fist. One needs an interesting mind, an interested mind.

 

ISBN: 0-9711874-1-X
120 pages, $12.50 (plus $2.00 shipping & handling)
Order from: Tom Montag. PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931