{"id":923,"date":"2023-01-25T16:16:20","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T21:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=923"},"modified":"2023-01-25T16:16:21","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T21:16:21","slug":"what-were-reading-by-associate-editor-tyler-michael-jacobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/what-were-reading-by-associate-editor-tyler-michael-jacobs\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Reading: by associate editor Tyler Michael Jacobs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m currently sitting with Kwame Dawes\u2019 collection\u00a0Nebrask<\/em>a<\/em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). I\u00a0just love\u00a0Dawes\u2019 poem \u201cChadron\u201d from this collection\u00a0and\u00a0looking at the poem as an interrogation of the myth of the frontier and the speaker\u2019s place as \u201ca strange statue in the wind\u201d (25) of Chadron, NE. I find this collection to be a search of place discussed through the seasons of Nebraska and through history.\u00a0As a native Nebraskan, I find the poems in this collection honestly cohesive while also being a formally restless exploration of a place I have known for\u00a0the thirty years of my life. While I keep returning to this collection, it returns me to a home I\u2019ve known most of my life. The speakers of Dawes\u2019 poems try to walk carefully over icy driveways due to the winter freeze in\u00a0the opening poem\u00a0\u201cHow I became an Apostle\u201d (3); they realize how you learn to ignore the sounds of yourself in the quiet vastness Nebraska surrounds one with in \u201cLoneliness\u201d (14). In \u201cPrairie\u201d Dawes reminds us of the enormous space\u00a0between\u00a0the towns of Nebraska, assuring us it all\u00a0\u201cstretches over \/ the open fields, mutates, pulses, breathes, \/ finds its own music\u201d (61).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve also been revisiting Mary Oliver\u2019s work. In particular,\u00a0House<\/em>\u00a0of Light<\/em>\u00a0(Beacon Press, 1990). In my undergraduate career, I stumbled\u00a0upon a reading of \u201cThe Summer Day\u201d by Oliver herself and the grasshopper she describes\u00a0\u201c\u2026eating sugar out of [her] hand\u201d (60), which always takes me back to my childhood sitting in the grass outside of my grandparent\u2019s house under the birch tree in their front lawn while grasshoppers would fling themselves into my palms. This poem\u00a0found its way to me again as I drove back to Ohio from Nebraska nearing the end of winter break. I was listening to\u00a0On Being<\/em>\u00a0with Krista\u00a0Tippett, revisiting the interview with Mary Oliver, when\u00a0Tippett\u00a0played an audio file of her daughter reciting Mary Oliver\u2019s \u201cThe Summer Day.\u201d\u00a0I found myself back in that innocence in the lawn as a young boy, much like I did in my undergrad, and when I returned home, I picked up Oliver\u2019s book and found myself\u00a0lost again in her poems, wanting\u00a0\u201c\u2026to\u00a0stroll through the fields\u201d (60)\u00a0rather than hiding from the cold of winter under a blanket in my Ohio apartment.\u00a0I have this poem taped to my office door so I\u2019m reminded of summer in these frigid months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After moving to Ohio, I\u2019ve kept\u00a0a copy of\u00a0Ted\u00a0Kooser\u2019s\u00a0Splitting an Order<\/em>\u00a0(Copper Canyon Press,\u00a02017) sitting on my office desk which I\u2019ve returned to over and over throughout the fall semester and continue to do so. I find\u00a0Kooser\u2019s\u00a0observations in\u00a0Splitting an Order<\/em>\u00a0to be both incredibly familiar and quite deep in what lies behind the actions of the personae, as in the titular poem, which describes an elder couple, as the title suggests, splitting an order,\u00a0\u201c\u2026and then to see him lift half \/ onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring, \/ and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife\u201d\u00a0(9).\u00a0It\u2019s a very vulnerable act of compassion and love and I find myself returning to this poem when, at times,\u00a0life\u00a0may\u00a0feel bleak and void of these acts, as a reminder that such small moments of kindness and love do exist. Poems such as\u00a0\u201cTwo Men on an Errand\u201d\u00a0(5)\u00a0take me back to my childhood spent in the waiting room of mechanic shops while my father talked the mechanic\u2019s ear off\u00a0as I\u00a0spun\u00a0on those stools wrapped in duct tape only found in mechanic and autobody shops, and the scent of grease and metal where men in denim bibs and suspenders would chat over coffee in Styrofoam cups. Maybe there\u2019s an air of nostalgia with\u00a0Kooser, but I\u2019m wary of reducing\u00a0Kooser\u00a0to\u00a0pure\u00a0nostalgia\u00a0as the\u00a0sole\u00a0reason\u00a0I\u2019ve read and keep reading this collection of poems.\u00a0I think,\u00a0too, of poems like \u201cGarrison, Nebraska\u201d and how\u00a0Kooser\u00a0speaks of his town in\u00a0winter\u00a0with\u00a0\u201cits gardens\u00a0of broken washing machines, \/ its empty rabbit hutches nailed to sheds, \/ cold and alone on the sea of the prairie\u201d\u00a0(47)\u00a0speaking on the beauty, the normality of cluttered lawns, and Nebraska\u2019s harsh seasons. Or how he explores the\u00a0domestic\u00a0intimacy of a lost life in \u201cMouse in a Trap,\u201d\u00a0in which\u00a0Kooser\u00a0eulogizes what we deem as a pest and how it comes to rest on \u201c\u2026the ship \/ of the rest of its life\u201d\u00a0(48). I keep returning to this book for the way\u00a0Kooser captures a life, or a moment of a life, and the impact these seemingly fleeting happenings that surround us can have, which only poetry can put words to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Tyler Michael Jacobs, MAR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m currently sitting with Kwame Dawes\u2019 collection\u00a0Nebraska (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). I\u00a0just love\u00a0Dawes\u2019 poem \u201cChadron\u201d from this collection\u00a0and\u00a0looking at… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[100,98,43,101,29,99,97,96],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-were-reading","tag-kwame-dawes","tag-mary-oliver","tag-mid-american-review-2","tag-nebraska","tag-poetry","tag-ted-kooser","tag-tyler-michael-jacobs","tag-what-were-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}