Reading by Wyoming Poet Laureate David Romtvedt at WWCC on Feb. 11

From Rick Kempa at Western Wyoming Community College:

David Romtvedt, accomplished writer and musician and the Poet Laureate of Wyoming, will read from his work on Friday, February 11. The event will take place at Western Wyoming Community College in Room 1302 at 7:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

Raised in Southern Arizona, Romtvedt attended Reed College and the Iowa Writers’ workshop. He lives in Buffalo, Wyoming and teaches half time in the University of Wyoming MFA program for writers.

His books of poetry include Some Church, Certainty, How Many Horses, and A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know, which was a selection of the National Poetry Series. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Wyoming Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts and has received the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award.

Romtvedt also writes essays, fiction, histories, and nonfiction. Among his other books are the anthology he edited, Wyoming Fence Lines (Wyoming Humanities Council, 2007), Windmill: Essays from Four Mile Ranch (Red Crane Books, 1997), and Crossing Wyoming (White Pine Press, 1992).

The state's fourth poet laureate, Romtvedt started his term August 15, 2004. The position of poet laureate is filled by the governor, who selects an appointee from a list of recommendations submitted by a nominating committee. The position is honorary and without compensation, and invites the appointee to "submit writings for selected historic occasions" of choice. The incumbent serves a term concurrent with that of the governor. Romtvedt succeeded Robert Roripaugh (1995-2002), who followed Charles L. Levendosky (1988-1995), and Peggy Simpson Curry (1981-1987).

A musician as well as a writer, Romtvedt plays dance music of the Americas with his band The Fireants. He is the founder and a board member of Worlds of Music, a foundation that provides opportunities to participate in music-making involving cultures all around the world. His series on traditional music of the American Southwest aired on Montana National Public Radio.

In addition to his public reading, Romtvedt will give a three-hour poetry writing workshop on Friday afternoon, as part of a one-credit Visiting Writers course.

The event is sponsored by the Arlene and Louise Wesswick Foundation and by the WWCC English Department. It is the second in a series of readings planned for the spring, which will also include poet and editor Maria Melendez from Pueblo, Colorado on March 4 and fiction writer Karen Brennan, formerly of Salt Lake City and now from Tucson, on March 25.

For more information, contact WWCC Associate Professor of English Rick Kempa, the coordinator of the reading series and the class, at rkempa@wwcc.wy.edu.

Monday poetry

What with the full moon tomorrow, a lunar eclipse beginning a bit after 1 a.m., tomorrow being the winter solstice, and the oft-forgotten December Ursid meteor shower that will peak on the nights of December 22 and 23 (the Geminids peaked before dawn on December 14 and get more raves), here's a moon-inspired poem from American Life in Poetry: Column 300 by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006

From Kooser:

This is the 300th column of American Life in Poetry. I realized a while back that there have been over 850 moons that have gone through their phases since I arrived on the earth, and I haven’t taken the time to look at nearly enough of them. Here Molly Fisk, a California poet, gives us one of those many moons that you and I may have failed to observe.

Hunter's Moon

Early December, dusk, and the sky
slips down the rungs of its blue ladder
into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs
in the air above the ridge like a broken plate
and shines on us all, on the new deputy
almost asleep in his four-by-four,
lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher,
on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass
and racking it, one eye checking the game.
It shines down on the fox’s red and grey life,
as he stills, a shadow beside someone’s gate,
listening to winter. Its pale gaze caresses
the lovers, curled together under a quilt,
dreaming alone, and shines on the scattered
ashes of terrible fires, on the owl’s black flight,
on the whelks, on the murmuring kelp,
on the whale that washed up six weeks ago
at the base of the dunes, and it shines
on the backhoe that buried her.

American Life in Poetry: Column 296

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Those of us who live in the country equate the word “development” with displacement, and it has often been said that subdivisions are named for what they replace, like Woodland Glade. Here’s a writer from my state, Nebraska, Stephen Behrendt, with a poem about what some call progress.


Developing the Land

For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture:
coyote voices fluting across the greening rise to the east
where the deer have almost ceased to pass
now that the developers have carved up yet another section,
filled another space with spars and studs, concrete, runoff.

Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise
for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand;
only three years past came great horned owls
who raised two squeaking, downy owlets
that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road
behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail.

It was on an August afternoon that you drove in,
curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek,
that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight,
three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze,
who vanished when you turned your head.

We have felt the presence on this land of others,
of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left
in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up,
turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals;
their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow
where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.

WAC roster artists presenting sessions at bookfest

We are please that four members of the Wyoming Arts Council artist roster will be presenters at the Sept. 24-25 Equality State Book Festival in Casper. They are children's book author Gene Gagliano of Buffalo; Aussie storyteller Paul Taylor of Laramie; Wyoming Poet Laureate David Romtvedt of Buffalo; and poet George Vlastos of Casper.

David Romtvedt will present two crafts talks: “What Do You Make?: The Ethics of a Writer’s Work,” from 9-9:45 a.m. on Friday in the Strausner Student Center, Rm. 217, Casper College. Followed from 10-10:45 a.m. by “What You Say and How You Say It: Clarity, Simplicity, Sincerity.” Strausner Student Center, Rm. 217.

From 9-11 p.m. Friday, George Vlastos will serve as emcee and referee at the Bookfest Poetry Slam at Metro Coffee in downtown Casper.

On Saturday, 9-9:45 a..m., Paul Taylor will present "Telling Stories at the Root of It All" in the Aley Fine Arts Center Durham Hall, Casper College.

Later on Saturday, 1-3 p.m., there will be a "Young Authors/Letters About Literature Presentation" with Gene Gagliano at the Natrona County Public Library's Crawford Room.

All of these events are free and open to the public.

These authors will attend the book signings both days and will be available to talk about their work during the festival.

For full list of events, go to http://www.equalitystatebookfest.com/index.php/events/

American Life in Poetry: Column 287

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I love to sit outside and be very still until some little creature appears and begins to go about its business, and here is another poet, Robert Gibb, of Pennsylvania, doing just the same thing.


For the Chipmunk in My Yard

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

Casper's ARTCORE schedules international "Music & Poetry" event for Oct. 10

From an ARTCORE press release:

Wyoming’s Poet Laureate David Romtvedt contacted ARTCORE in Casper because he enjoys the organization’s summer format of "Music & Poetry." The University of Wyoming MFA program is bringing two Canadian writers to the state, and their Casper appearance will be sponsored by ARTCORE, the Casper College Literary Advisory Committee, and the UW MFA program on Sunday, October 10, 2010, at 4 p.m. in Durham Hall of the Aley Fine Arts Center of Casper College. Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst will read their poetry, and Romtvedt, well known as a solo performer and as a member of Fireants, will provide the music at this free event. For information, call 307-265-1564.

Jan Zwicky's books of poetry include Wittgenstein Elegies (Brick Books, 1986), The New Room (Coach House Press, 1989), Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (Brick, 1998) which won the Governor General's Award in 1999, Robinson's Crossing (Brick, 2004) which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau Press, 2005). Her books of philosophy include Lyric Philosophy (UTP, 1992; second edition, Gaspereau, forthcoming), Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau, 2003, 2nd ed, 2008), and Plato as Artist, due out from Gaspereau in the fall of 2009. Her unusual approach to prose philosophical discussion presents design challenges, and Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press has twice won awards for his work with her books. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, and she publishes widely as an essayist on issues in music, poetry, philosophy, and the environment. She is also a violinist, with a strong interest in baroque performance practice. Since 1986, she has edited poetry for Brick Books. A native of Alberta, she now lives on the west coast of British Columbia.

Robert Bringhurst was born in Los Angeles in 1946 and raised largely in Montana and Alberta. His father, however, was born near Garland, Wyoming. As a boy, Bringhurst spent many summers with his grandmother in Lovell. He has published nearly twenty books of poetry over nearly four decades, from The Shipwright's Log (1972) to the recent Selected Poems, issued by Gaspereau Press in 2009. Design schools and publishers throughout the Western Hemisphere rely on his book The Elements of Typographic Style (3rd ed., 2004), which has now been translated into ten languages.

In 1999, Bringhurst published a groundbreaking study of a Native American oral literature, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999). Two volumes of translation followed: Nine Visits to the Mythworld (nine mythtexts dictated by the Haida poet Ghandl) and Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. In 2004, this trilogy won the prestigious Edward Sapir Prize, awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and was chosen as Literary Editor's Book of the Year by the Times of London. "Bringhurst's achievement," wrote Margaret Atwood, "is gigantic, as well as heroic. It's one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head." Bringhurst has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, writer-in-residence at the universities of Edinburgh, Winnipeg, and Western Ontario, and Philips Fund Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Bringhurst and Zwicky will hold a joint residency for several weeks during Fall 2010.

David Romtvedt was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up in Southern Arizona. A graduate of Reed College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he also studied at the University of Texas where he held a graduate fellowship in folklore and ethnomusicology. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaire (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He teaches in the MFA program for writers at the University of Wyoming and serves as the state's poet laureate. His books include: Moon; Free and Compulsory for All; How Many Horses; Windmill: Essays from Four Mile Ranch; A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know; Crossing Wyoming; and Some Church. He is the recipient of the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, a Wyoming Arts Council Literature fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry series award, and two NEA fellowships in poetry and music. He lives in Buffalo, Wyoming with his wife, the potter Margo Brown.

Monday poetry -- American Life in Poetry: Column 279

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Rhyming has a way of brightening a poem, and a depressing subject can become quite a bit lighter with well-chosen rhymes. Here’s a sonnet by Mary Meriam, who lives in Missouri. Are there readers among you who have felt like this?

The Romance of Middle Age

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers
at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim
in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours
and days and decades, head to foot, and slim
is just a faded photograph. It’s strange
how people look away who once would look.
I didn’t know I’d undergo this change
and be the unseen cover of a book
whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.
One reaches for the pleasures of the mind
and heart to counteract the loss of quicker
knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind,
although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer,
in case I might attract another geezer.

American Life in Poetry: Column 278

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection.

Rain
Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

American Life in Poetry: Column 277

Apropos to the baby boomer generation, here's a poem about the healing of a heart after heart surgery.

From Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
Here’s hoping that very few of our readers have to go through cardiac rehab, which Thomas Reiter of New Jersey captures in this poem, but if they do, here’s hoping that they come through it feeling wildly alive and singing at the tops of their lungs.

Rehab
We wear harnesses like crossing guards.
In a pouch over the heart,
over stent and bypass, a black
box with leads pressed onto metal
nipples. We pedal and tread and row
while our signals are picked up
by antennas on the ceiling, X’s
like the eyes cartoonists give the dead.

Angels of telemetry with vials of nitro
watch over us. We beam to their monitors
now a barn dance, now a moonwalk.
They cuff us and pump and we keep on
so tomorrow will live off today. Nurse,
we won’t forget the animated
video of our cholesterol highway
where LDL, black-hatted scowling
donut holes on wheels, blocked traffic.

But with muscles like gutta-percha,
can we leave time’s gurney in the dust?
By now only the dead know more about
gravity than we do. In reply, a tape
of Little Richard or Jerry Lee comes on
and we’re singing, aloud or not, all
pale infarcted pedalers, rowers, treadmillers,
and our hearts are rising in the east.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Thomas Reiter, whose most recent book of poems is Catchment, Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from The Hudson Review, Vol. LXII, no. 2, 2009, by permission of Thomas Reiter and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

W.S. Merwin to be named U.S. Poet Laureate

From the New York Times:

W. S. Merwin acknowledges that his relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano in Maui, Hawaii, will be disturbed by the Library of Congress’s announcement on Thursday naming him the country’s poet laureate.

I do like a very quiet life,” Mr. Merwin said by telephone after learning of his appointment. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.” He said he does relish “being part of something much more public and talking too much,” however, and the job of the nation’s premier poet will enable him to do both.

Of course, no matter how many public appearances Mr. Merwin may ultimately make, for most people he speaks most eloquently through his verse.

At 82, Mr. Merwin is an undisputed master, having written more than 30 books of poetry, translation and prose over the course of six decades.

“W. S. Merwin is an inevitable choice for poet laureate,” said Dana Gioia, a poet and a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “He has created a distinctive style. His poetry is lyrical, elliptical and often slightly mysterious.”

Frolander's poem chosen for American Life in Poetry

Sundance poet Patricia Frolander has had her poem chosen for the American Life in Poetry series, sent out by http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/, sponsored by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser of Nebraska.

The series is carried by newspapers, while a large number of readers receive the column via e-mail subscription. Current readership is approaching 4,000,000 per week. The audience includes readers from Indonesia, Uganda, Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and the U.K., as well as U.S. readers from Maine to Hawaii.

The New York Times education blog -- The Learning Network -- will feature the ALIP weekly poem along with a piece from the Times that elaborates upon the poem's themes.

Pat was a featured artist in WAC's Artscapes Fall 2009 issue. Pat is also a member of Bear Lodge Writers, Wyoming Writers, Inc., and WyoPoets.

Poetry Out Loud state competition March 1-2

Getting ready for Poetry Out Loud, I've asked people if they could recommend any poetry books to give to our student contestants. A big thank you to Nancy Curtis of High Plains Press who sent Learn to Love the Haze (1996) by former Wyoming Poet Laureate Robert Roripaugh; Circle of Light (1995) by Charles Levondosky; Wyoming Promises (1984) and Cowpuncher Poetry (1986) both collections edited by Nancy. I also received, from mom (thanks, mom) who has had them stored in her shed for years, Wordweavers (1986), a collection of poetry by Wyoming Writers published through Wyoming Writers, Inc., a statewide writing organization. Look for info put up by Mike in earlier posts about this year's conference to be held in Cody, June 4-6.

This volume has many wonderful Wyoming writers in it and their bios--Patricia (Midge) Farmer from Gillette, who would go on to write, for the city of Gillette, the proclamation proclaiming April 22 as Poetry Day, the only town in Wyoming to do so; John Nesbitt, who back then was "now teaching at Eastern Wyoming College...and has published short stories, literary articles, book reviews, a few poems and magazine articles," all this before John would be publishing several (more than 20 to date) trade westerns; and Orval Meier, who wrote a humorous poem, titled:

Parking Space

You cruise the crowded parking lot
Hoping to find a parking spot,
One that's somewhere near the store,
So you won't have to walk a mile or more.
Things look bad, and you despair, but
You finally spot one over there.
You mentally shout, Oh, Boy! Oh, Boy!
And leaps your heart with boundless joy.
You rush the space a mile a minute,
Only to find a motorcycle in it.

Students from all over the state will come to Cheyenne March 1-2 to compete in the state competition. Wyoming's winner and a chaperon will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. to compete in the national final, April 26-27, 2010. The students have worked hard to memorize and inhabit the poems they've chosen from the POL website http://poetryoutloud.org, which lists more than 400 poems for students to choose from. Wyoming POL is sanctioned by the Wyoming High School Activities Association. The events are free and open to the public.

American Life in Poetry: Column 251

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

The poet Lyn Lifshin, who divides her time between New York and Virginia, is one of the most prolific poets among my contemporaries, and has thousands of poems in print, by my loose reckoning. I have been reading her work in literary magazines for at least thirty years. Here’s a good example of this poet at her best.

The Other Fathers

would be coming back
from some war, sending
back stuffed birds or
handkerchiefs in navy
blue with Love painted
on it. Some sent telegrams
for birthdays, the pastel
letters like jewels. The
magazines were full of fathers who
were doing what had
to be done, were serving,
were brave. Someone
yelped there’d be confetti
in the streets, maybe
no school. That soon
we’d have bananas. My
father sat in the grey
chair, war after war,
hardly said a word. I
wished he had gone
away with the others
so maybe he would
be coming back to us

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Lyn Lifshin, whose most recent book of poems is Persephone, Red Hen Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from Natural Bridge, No. 20, Winter, 2008, by permission of Lyn Lifshin and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Morning poetry

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE: It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land, you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.

Bach in the DC Subway

As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.
A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation www.poetryfoundation.org, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2008, by permission of David Lee Garrison and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Frolander open house rescheduled for 10/26

This news comes from Gaydell Collier in Sundance:

All are invited to a book signing and open house honoring award-winning Sundance poet Patricia Frolander on Monday, October 26, from 4-7 p.m. at the Community Room of the Crook County Public Library in Sundance. The event was rescheduled due to an earlier postponement.

Hosted by Bearlodge Writers and friends of the poet, the open house will debut Frolander's new chapbook, Grassland Genealogy (Finishing Line Press, July 2009).

Frolander is celebrating more than a new book. She was recently notified that her poem, "Father, when You call," was named the 2009 winner of the 17th Annual National Senior Poets Laureate Competition, sponsored by Amy Kitchener's Angels Without Wings Foundation. The competition drew over 700 entries from all over the United States.

Frolander also learned recently that U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (2004-2006) has selected her poem, "Denial," for use in his weekly column, American Life in Poetry, supported by the Poetry Foundation. Frolander's piece will appear in June 2010. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals, and she gives readings and presentations around Wyoming and South Dakota.

Grassland Genealogy will be available for purchase at the signing. You may also pick up a copy from the author or your favorite local bookstore, or order it from Backpocket Books, 364 Farrall Road, Sundance, WY 82729 (307-283-2665) for $14 plus $2 shipping and handling. It is also available from the publisher, Finishing Line Press, at http://www.finishinglinepress.com

Montana names Henry Real Bird as new poet laureate

A rancher, former rodeo cowboy and neighbor is Montana's newest poet laureate. Gov. Brian Schweitzer appointed Henry Real Bird of Garryowen as the state's third poet laureate, succeeding Greg Pape, whose term expired.

The governor was effusive in his praise in naming Real Bird to this position: "Our heritage, our lives and our way of life in this great state are often expressed through poetry, and the work of Henry Real Bird brings so much of Montana to life. This is a unique opportunity to bring poetry to the people of Montana."

The Montana Legislature created the position of poet laureate in 2005 to recognize a citizen poet of exceptional talent and accomplishment. The assignment raises awareness of poetry and the literary arts across the state in presentations and by reading poetry to live audiences.

Real Bird lives on the O-W Ranch in Big Horn County with his wife and children. In addition to his writing and ranching, he raises champion bucking horses. He has published a dozen children's books and a poetry book, "Where Shadows are Born", and has recorded a CD, "Rivers of Horse." He was featured in the award-winning documentary "Why the Cowboy Sings" and won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He has a bachelor's degree from Montana State University and a master's from Eastern Montana College (now Montana State University Billings). Here's a short sample:

Hoola Hand

Today as I let go, a hoola hand into the dawn
Among silhouetted horse heads, held by a rope corral
But then, that day was many winters ago
To good horses you are drawn
I have asked that you ride the best
Of beautiful words to create images
Of life's reflections filled with feelings of reality
Winters many may you ride the best.
As sunlight moved in the wind
Among the shadow of an ash tree
I gave the sweat lodge a drink
In the absence of memory
An ole' feeling sprouts
In the charred remains of life
It is customary
That I have no doubts
Wishful thoughts and prayers through dreams strive
For peace in our souls
May you ride the best
Through the four different grounds
Upon our sacred mother earth.

Henry Real Bird

Now you can be a "Ted Head" too

Little did we know when Ted Kooser was a presenter at June's Wyoming Writers, Inc. conference in Casper...

Kooser is a celeb in Nebraska. This native son and one-time U.S. Poet Laureate is now featured on a T-shirt from his publisher, University of Nebraska Press.

The colorful "Ted Head" T-shirt is "back by popular demand," reads a blurb on the press's web site. "Hanes Beefy, 100% pre-shrunk cotton, white, short-sleeved t-shirt with "Ted Head" graphic on front. Quantities are limited."

Get one before they're all gone!