Kissing Poetry's Sister

Tom Montag

Kissing Poetry's Sister
Tom Montag

A Joint Venture Publication
Midday Moon Books &
Midwestern Writers
Publishing House
ISBN: 0-9711874-1-X
120 pages
$12.50
(plus $2.00 shipping & handling)

Order from:
Tom Montag
PO Box 8
Fairwater, WI 53931

"I want to run and jump and fly as the swoop of the language and the roll of the images take me. I want to start in chaos, maybe, and end in chaos, and make a hell of a run. I want to be able to say: 'Either the stars are winking at me or we've got trees out there walking around.'" - from "Kissing Poetry's Sister"

Reviewing Tom Montag's memoir Curlew: Home for Booklist magazine, Donna Seaman noted that "Montag's prose is thoughtful and unhurried, opening out into moments of beauty and wry humor, echoing in its quiet rhythms and low-key observations the gentle roll of the rich midwestern landscape he loves...." Kissing Poetry's Sister brings together more of Montag's angular pieces, these with a literary bent but still insistently middle western and still at the edge of memoir. In "A Farther Reach," Montag muses about coming back to the writing of essays after his years away from the task. With "Poet in a Business Suit," he tries to understand how it ever came to this, a business suit! "Poet in the Water" finds breath the common measure in both scuba diving and poetry. "Father, My Measure" shows Montag standing between the man he has become and the man he would measure up to, his father stretched out now in intensive care, machines churring and beeping. Three pieces are profiles of fellow writers: Justin Isherwood, Elaine Cavanaugh, and Phyllis Walsh. "Who Is Poetry For?" reprints Montag's classic call for a poetry that speaks to all of us. "Creative Nonfiction in Steamy Baltimore" offers the inside skinny from a writers' conference, and perhaps some wisdom too. "173 Words About the Essay" is that, and maybe more. And the title essay posits that the personal essay is poetry's sister, that the business of writing personal essays is the pleasure of kissing poetry's sister.


Excerpts of review of Kissing Poetry's Sister
by Jessica Powers - at newpages.com

"Tom Montag has a gentle style; he writes with depth—thought and emotion are carefully balanced and you get the sense as you read this that here is a wise man—not a perfect man, but a good man—and he is letting us into his house and his life for a few moments each day so we can experience the richness that is his."

"I look forward to reading whatever Montag writes in the future."

READ THE COMPLETE REVIEW

REVIEW OF KISSING POETRY'S SISTER
by Marshall Cook
Creativity Connection
(610 Langdon St. #622, Madison, WI 53702. Four issues - $18)

Like dogs barking in the night
Kissing Poetry's Sister, by Tom Montag, a Joint Venture Publication (Midday Moon Books and Midwestern Writers Publishing House), 2002. 115pp, pb, $12.50

Poet and essayist Tom Montag writes of the price he's paid for keeping the day job the past 20 years.

He writes, too, of the rewards--wife Mary, "sturdy and loving and sweet as jelly from our own grapes," and their two grown-up daughters, Jenifer and Jessica. The very personal essays in this book have much to say to any writer about the nature of the craft and its demands.

"Any farmer's son has a lot he could want to say," Tom says of his need/urge to create, "even if there's no one who wants to hear it. ... The need to write is a need to explain the world to myself."

For Tom, writing comes down to "a matter of leaving what I was put here to leave."

Tom recently retired from the day (or, for the first 14 years, night) job as a pressman, then supervisor, then manager at a printing plant in Ripon, Wisconsin. He hopes for another 15 years to write in. "Can I write one good paragraph a day for 15 years?" he wonders. "One good sentence a day?"

He knows this is a lot to hope for.

In "Poet in a business suit," Tom explains that when he was younger he thought he would "wear the poet's blue jeans and leather vest and very long hair forever" but learned that he couldn't do that and support a family, too. So he entered the work world, guided by his farmer father's dictum of "a day's work for a day's pay, and anything less is cheating your neighbor and spitting at God."

At first he had to chant a mantra ("over, under, around and through") to remember how to tie his necktie, and he felt separated from those he worked with. "They think [the poet] has a birdcage around his head with birds in it," he writes, "fluttering and chirping. ... They know poetry is like dogs barking in the middle of the night and if you're lucky you can go back to sleep."

But he kept at it, a lesson he no doubt learned from writing poetry, kept getting promotions, and wound up a key employee for a rapidly-expanding business.

In another essay, "Poet in the water," Tom likens poetry to scuba diving. Breath is crucial to buoyancy in both, and you must never hold your breath in either.

The volume also packs a reflection on Tom's father (whom he calls "my measure") and the great essay on creative nonfiction, which I wrote about at length in CC #47 and which is worth the price of the book all by itself. (I also reviewed Tom's memoir/exploration, Curlew: Home, in CC #49.)

Tom also includes profiles of other writers: Justin Isherwood (for whom writing prose is "akin to grave-digging, plain square work, and at times the ground is frozen"); Phyllis Walsh of Hummingbird Press; and Elaine Cavanaugh, editor of the current Wisconsin Poets' Calendar. (Tom and Mary edited the first three editions.)

Finally, in "Who is poetry for?" Tom invites those who "fill with a slow wonder at the world and its rhythms" and those who give themselves "entirely to the moment to play, to worlds of their own making." Poetry, he concludes, is all about "expanding the possibilities of the human spirit."

That's precisely the effect this marvelous book of prose had on me.

In case you come across Kissing Poetry's Sister in a bookstore and don't recognize it for what it is-what it isn't is a romance novel, even if those lips and that sunset might try to persuade you otherwise.

And if that doesn't make you want to buy this book, I don't know what will!
For whatever reason, buy this "Joint Venture" book. For information on how to do so, contact the Coach, write to Midwestern Writer's Publishing House at Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931, or visit Tom's website: www.wlhn.org/vagabond.


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