US Poet Norbert Blei 1935

Norbert Blei (born August 23, 1935) is an American writer. He has written 17 books of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and essays. In 1994, he established Cross+Roads Press, dedicated to the publication of first chapbooks by poets, short story writers, novelists and artists.

Blei was born in an ethnic (primarily Czechoslovakian) neighborhood of western Chicago, Illinois known as Little Village, in the 26th & Pulaski area. An only child, Blei and his parents moved to the near-western Chicago suburb of Cicero when he was in grade school.

Blei attended Illinois State University, studying English, and graduated in 1956. He taught high school English and subsequently worked at City News Bureau as a reporter. In 1969, Blei left Chicago and moved to Door County, Wisconsin, a rural vacation destination for Midwesterners that sits at the top of the Door Peninsula in the middle of Lake Michigan, 50 miles north of Green Bay. For four decades, he has worked in a converted chicken coop in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.

Blei's first book was The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories by Norbert Blei, published in 1978.

CHI TOWN (1990)

Literary Themes

A sense of community, and threats to community, are the twin themes of Blei's writing, whether he is writing about urban Chicago or rural Wisconsin:

"Norb specializes in the fleeting look at the little people of the city, the aged newsstand operators, the small restaurant owners, Greek, Bohemian, Slovak, who still provide, in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, national dishes and national atmosphere. And he is determined to get these glimpses of a disappearing Chicago on paper before they are ploughed under to make way for new high-rise apartments, or succumb to the creeping wave of debris, human and material, so characteristic of most large cities these days." (Henry Shea, 1970)

"Thus a profound feeling of loss permeates all of Blei's work. Perhaps Blei's own sense of himself as an isolated, alienated writer—a consistent self-portrait, across geographies and through years of economic and literary success and failure, prominence and reduced visibility—derives from his sense of doomed place, or, more properly, doomed community in place. Whether author imposes his vision on place (others in Cicero and Door County have found more to cheer about over the past thirty years), or place imposes itself on author, the result is an author celebrating the forgotten, the beat and defeated: others and himself." (David Pichaske, 2000)

The Ghost of Sandburg's Phizzog (1986)

Works

Story collections

• The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories by Norbert Blei (1978)
• The Ghost of Sandburg's Phizzog (1986)

Novels

• The Second Novel: Becoming a Writer (1978)
• Adventures in an American's Literature (1982)

Non-fiction

• Door Way: The People in the Landscape (1981)
• Door Steps (1983)
• Door to Door (1985)
• Neighborhood (1987)
• Meditations on a Small Lake (1987)
• Chi-Town (1990)
• Chronicles of a Rural Journalist in America (1990)
• Winter Book (2002)

Poetry

• Paint Me a Picture/Make Me a Poem (1987)

'The Quiet Time: Door County in Winter' (1997)

Articles

• A Review of The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War, by Robert Bly
• Lowell B. Comie: An Interview, published in After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing and Art (2003)
• A Review of My Racine by David Kherdian, published in Wisconsin Academy Review (1996)

Collections & Anthologies

• Wisconsin's Rustic Roads: A Road Less Travelled; Photographs by Bob Rashid, Text By Ben Logan, George Vukelich, Jean Feraca, Norbert Blei and Bill Stokes (1995)
• Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place, by David Pichaske, University of Iowa Press (2006)
• Selected Anthologies

Recordings

• The Quiet Time, Door County in Winter: Readings by Norb Blei/Music by Jim Spector (1997)
• Readings from Door Way (1996)

'The Elephants and Everybody Else' (Crossroads+Press)

The Internet

• Blei was an early adopter of the Internet as a means to distribute his own work and call attention to other writers. His Poetry Dispatch is a weekly enewsletter that features a short selection of poems by a single, noteworthy poet, while Notes from the Underground is a more irregular emailed missive that features brief essays on a wide variety of current topics, literary and otherwise.

Cross+Roads Press

In the early 1990s, Blei started Cross+Roads Press to offer established and beginning writers an opportunity to be published in chapbook form. To date, works by almost 40 writers have been published, including Mariann Ritzer, Pedro Villarreal, DyAnne Korda, Donna Balfe, Emily Rose, Phil Bryant, Michael Koehler, Jackie Langetieg, Paul Schroeder, Tom Montag, Don Skiles, Albert DeGenova, Charles Rossiter and Dave Etter.

The Clearing

For over 30 years, Blei was writer-in-residence at The Clearing, a folk arts school founded in 1935 by landscape architect Jens Jensen. The Clearing self-describes itself in this manner: "The Mission of The Clearing is to provide diverse educational experiences in the folk school tradition, in a setting of quiet forests, meadows and water...a place where adults who share an interest in nature, arts or humanities can learn, reflect and wonder...in keeping with the goals of Jens Jensen...who loved it as a special place where one could feel kinship with the earth and reassess one's life." Blei's annual June writing classes drew developing writers from across the country. Since 2007, Blei has independently conducted his annual writing classes.

'Torso,' Berlin Wall Series

Visual arts

Blei has always had a close affinity with painting as a watercolor artist, but a trip to Berlin in the then-West Germany in the early 1980s provoked an especially fertile time, as he created an entire series of works based on the experience. The "Die Mauer" paintings focused on the Berlin Wall and were exhibited in Santa Fe, among other locations.

Chronicles of a Rural Journalist in America (1990)

Controversy

Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's proposals for Aspen, Colorado during his candidacy for sheriff in 1970, Blei fomented local controversy, and even rage, when he outlined a new vision for Door County, Wisconsin in an article in the area's weekly newspaper, the Door Reminder (later reprinted in Chronicles of a Rural Journalist). Titled 'Shut the Damn Door,' and first published in 1992, the area's residents were sharply divided on the proposal, as recounted in an essay by Blei's publisher at Ellis Press, David Pichaske: "Blei outlined a Master Plan for the Future of Door County loosely based on the 'Industrial Tourism' chapter of Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Blei suggests that county officials freeze all building, property sales, and residential, commercial and public planning in the County; turn the entire County over to Nature Conservancy; close the new bridge at Sturgeon Bay and make an outdoor walking mall of it, with artsy-craftsy shops, a Ferris wheel, and Chicago style food vendors; admit tourists freely across the old bridge May through October, subject to a tax of $50 per vehicle per week and $25 per person per day, but from November through April by visa only; tear up all highways and back roads and return them to their natural state of dirt, gravel, good Door County earth; place a moratorium on new road construction in the County; encourage vandalism of commercial signs while instituting a $3,000 fine for anyone caught erecting new advertisements or newspaper mail boxes; tear up 'ugly metal road signs' and either replace them with wooden ones or leave the roads nameless. 'Take any dirt road and get lost,' Blei concludes. 'You may discover the real value of this place. You may discover yourself.'"

Blei, aka 'Coyote'; drawing by Chick Peterson

Current Writing Projects

As of March 2009, Blei is reportedly working on a number of writing projects for publication in late 2009, including the fourth book in his series of non-fiction Door County profiles, and a new novel, his first since 1982.

One of Blei's most eclectic, and yet global projects is his ongoing collaboration with the pseudonymous Monsieur K, located in France, who in the space of a half dozen years has created an assortment of web sites for posting of writings by those artists judged to abide by the spirit of 'free jazz.' Blei regularly provides Monsieur K with commentary on significant artistic events for the Metropolis site (http://www.m-etropolis.com/wordpress/en/, e.g. the death of Marcel Marceau), poetry and other material for the Basho's Road site (most recently a haiku translated into Russian and originally posted at http://www.wowwi.orc.ru/), and a wide variety of artistic profiles and critiques for Poetry Dispatch & Other Notes from the Underground (an April 2009 posting on the topic of "Wyeth & Peterson: some thoughts on the painter and his setting, in memory of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)—Maine & Pennsylvania, in praise of Charles Peterson—Door County, Wisconsin" (http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/). Cumulatively, his writings on these various sites have recently reached a total of almost 100,000 unique visits.

Broadcast Interviews

1. Michael Feldman Show (8.2.08), Wisconsin Public Radio
2. Larry Meiler Show (9.17.08), Wisconsin Public Radio
3. Door Pod Show Podcasts

Alterra Coffeehouse, Downer Street, Milwaukee, Wis.

US Poet J.V. Cunningham 1911 - 1985

James Vincent Cunningham (August 23, 1911 – March 30, 1985) was an American poet, literary critic, and teacher. Sometimes described as a neo-classicist or anti-modernist, his poetry was distinguished by its clarity, its brevity, and its traditional formality of rhyme and rhythm at a time when many American poets were breaking away from traditional fixed meters. His finely crafted epigrams in the style of Latin poets were much praised and frequently anthologized. But he also wrote spare, mature poems about love and estrangement, most notably the 15-poem sequence entitled To What Strangers, What Welcome (1964).

Cunningham was born in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1911. His father, James Joseph Cunningham, was a steam-shovel operator for a railroad who moved the family to Billings, Montana, and Denver, Colorado, where Cunningham spent his youth. His mother was Anna Finan Cunningham. Cunningham graduated from Regis High School in Denver 1927 at age fifteen, showing great skills in Latin and Greek. In high school, he first corresponded with Yvor Winters, who was then a graduate student at Stanford University, and who later became an influential poet and critic. But the death of Cunningham's father in an accident and the family's resulting financial hardship prevented Cunningham from continuing immediately to college. He worked for a while as a "runner" for a brokerage house on the Denver Stock Exchange, where he personally witnessed two suicides in the days immediately following the October 29, 1929, stock market crash. With the onset of the Great Depression, he rode the rails from odd job to odd job, throughout the Western United States, including stints as a local newspaper reporter and a writer for trade publications such as Dry Goods Economist. In 1931, Cunningham again struck up a correspondence with Winters, who offered him the opportunity to stay in a shed on Winters' property and to attend classes at Stanford University where Winters was teaching. Cunningham earned an A.B. in classics in 1934 and a Ph.D. in English in 1945 -- both from Stanford.

During World War II, Cunningham taught mathematics to Air Force pilots. He later earned his living primarily by teaching English and writing at the University of Chicago, the University of Hawaii, Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and Washington University. He took a position at Brandeis University in 1953, soon after the school was founded, and taught there until he retired in 1980. As a teacher and critic, Cunningham often concentrated on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, authoring works such as Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy

Cunningham was married three times including to the poet Barbara Gibbs in 1937 (divorced 1945), with whom he had a daughter, Cunningham's only child. He died in Marlborough, Massachusetts, in 1985.

Poetry

Cunningham's output was as spare as his style. He published only a few hundred carefully wrought poems over his relatively long career. Many were just a few lines long.

His epigrams (including his translations of the Latin poet Martial) and short poems were often witty and sometimes ribald (see, e.g., "It Was in Vegas, Celibate and Able"). “I like the trivial, vulgar and exalted,” he once said. Richard Wilbur labeled him our best epigrammatic poet.

Cunningham was one of a small number of modern writers to treat the epigram in its full, classical sense: a short, direct poem dealing with subjects from the whole range of personal experience, not necessarily satirical.

And there was also work that was not epigrammatical. His plain-spoken lyrics about love, sex, loss, and the American West were especially haunting and original (e.g., "Maples in the slant sun/The gay color of decay/Was it unforgivable,/My darling, that you loved me?").

Critics often yoked him to his early influence, Yvor Winters, but his verse actually bears only a formalistic similarity to Winters's work. The poet Thom Gunn, in reviewing The Exclusions of a Rhyme in the 1960s, commented that Cunningham "must be one of the most accomplished poets alive, and one of the few of whom it can be said that he will still be worth reading in fifty years' time." Though his style and reserve were very much at odds with fashions of the period in which he wrote, they are all the more striking for that fact.

Cunningham was awarded Guggenheim fellowships in 1959-60 and 1966-67 and received a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets in 1976. He won grants from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1965 and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966. Some of his poems have been set to music by the English composer Robin Holloway.

Works

Poetry

• The Helmsman (1942)
• The Judge Is Fury (1947)
• Doctor Drink (1950)
• Trivial, Vulgar, and Exulted: Epigrams (1957)
• The Exclusions of a Rhyme (1960)
• To What Strangers, What Welcome (1964)
• Some Salt: Poems and Epigrams (1967)
• Let Thy Words Be Few (1986)
• The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1997) ISBN 978-0804009980

Prose

• Tradition and Poetic Structure (1960)
• The Journal of John Cardan, [with] The Quest of the Opal [and] The Problem of Form (1964)
• The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham (1976)

Other

• A Bibliography of the Published Works of J. V. Cunningham, Charles B. Gullans (1973)
  

THE PRIVATE EUCHARIST - Michelle McGrane

The old woman behind the pharmacy counter
passes forward a brown paper packet, her
shrivelled hands mottled, liver-spotted;
the accusatory, tight-lipped mien pronounces,
You young women destroy your health.

Listen Ouma, you're tempted to explain,
you don't know the half of it.
Instead, you smile, fade to nothing,
concentrate on crackling paper, your fingers
fidgety, thin-skinned animals.

Consecrated capsule on outstretched tongue,
squatting in a darkened room, you receive
the Holy Sacrament for Hungry Girls;
a private Eucharist to appease
your bare boned God of Reduction.

Give me this day my daily resolve,
the grace not to let a single morsel
pass through these lips,
amen.

After mass, spiritual ebullience: dry mouth
dizziness jaw-clenching palpitations…
Clutching the rosary of your martyrdom,
speedy strong in occult absolution,
you shrug with the insouciance
of the pardoned penitent;
every true believer pays a price.


Michelle McGrane

THE SUITABLE GIRL - Michelle McGrane

The suitable girl is not temperamental,
does not throw tantrums, have rages
in public places,

or swear.

She does not take drugs or
stay out late, she is the daughter
of family friends.

She does not 'phone you drunk
in the middle of the night or ignore
your calls, she does not

make you happy.


Michelle McGrane

ON RECEIVING A BOOK OF BUKOWSKI'S POEMS - Michelle McGrane

goddamn, he was ugly,
I thought, lying in the bath
looking at the picture
on the
back cover.
I'd never seen his
photograph before.

sure, I'd have fucked him,
even at 73,
but would he have
fucked me,
even drunk?
hell, probably
not.

I reached for the towel,
smiled to myself.
lit another cigarette,
got the
carpet
wet.

Michelle McGrane

A GIRL LIKE THAT - Michelle McGrane

The newspaper report said
the young woman was
repeatedly raped, kicked,
beaten within an inch
of her life, while her mama
cried behind the door.

Two manly relatives decided
to straighten her out
once and for all, give
her strong medicine down
on her knees, the cheeky
cunt had it coming.

A girl like that, what did
she expect? Shameful lesbian
bitch brought dishonour
to the family name,
refused to come round
to their way of thinking.

Michelle McGrane

SKIN OFFERINGS - Michelle McGrane

you surprised,
no - terrified -
me,
when i visited the hospital.

you'd committed yourself -
after all -

i'd thought you wanted
to get better.

sullen silence, anger, despondent tears,
i was prepared for any eventuality,
except
sharp-edged, smiling, anorexic resolve.

your body, turned cannibal,
is devouring itself.

i wonder, elf-girl,
where you find
the strength, determination,
to starve yourself
when there is
so little
of you left.

with shadowy satisfaction
you tell me
you are still
refusing to eat;
the nurses have threatened to
put you in "lock-up".

you proudly exhibit mutilation marks:
angry red welts, fluid-filled blisters,

sin-offerings, skin-offerings,

on bony wrists, on
your neck, for god's sake!
you've burnt patterns
on your skin
with a lighter.

your religion: concave stomach,
protruding bones;
offered prayers: laxatives &
valium.

dying to be thin,
an emaciated sacrifice
to a relentless god -
this crucified flesh is innocent,
it's the mind that is not.

Michelle McGrane

US Poet Edgar Lee Masters 1868 - 1950

Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868, Garnett, Kansas – March 5, 1950, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania) was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.

Biography

Born on August 23, 1868 to Emma J. Dexter and Hardin Wallace Masters in Garnett, Kansas, his father had briefly moved to set up a law practice. The family soon moved back to his paternal grandparents' farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois. In 1880 they moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where he attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. The culture around Lewistown, in addition to the town's cemetery at Oak Hill, and the nearby Spoon River were the inspirations for many of his works, most notably Spoon River Anthology, his most famous and acclaimed work.

Masters attended The Knox Academy from 1889–1890, a defunct preparatory program run by Knox College, but was forced to leave due to his family's inability to finance his education.

After working in his father's law office, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and moved to Chicago, where he established a law partnership with Kickham Scanlan in 1893. He married twice. In 1898, he married Helen M. Jenkins, the daughter of a lawyer in Chicago, and had three children. During his law partnership with Clarence Darrow, from 1903 to 1908, Masters defended the poor. In 1911, he started his own law firm, despite the three years of unrest (1908–1911) due to extramarital affairs and an argument with Darrow.

Two of his children followed him with literary careers. His daughter Marcia pursued poetry, while his son, Hilary Masters became a novelist. Hilary and his half-brother Hardin wrote a memoir of their father.

Masters died at a nursing home on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, aged 81. He is buried in Oakland cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois. His epitaph includes his poem, "To-morrow is My Birthday" from Toward the Gulf (1918):

Good friends, let’s to the fields…
After a little walk and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep, there is no sweeter thing.
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.

I am a dream out of a blessed sleep-
Let’s walk, and hear the lark.

Family history

Edgar's father was Hardin Wallace Masters, whose father was Squire Davis Masters, whose father was Thomas Masters, whose father was Hillery Masters, and his father was Robert Masters who was born c.1715 in Prince Georges County, Maryland.

Poetry

Masters first published his early poems and essays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace (after his mother's maiden name and his father's middle name) until the year 1903, when he joined the law firm of Clarence Darrow.

Masters began developing as a notable American poet in 1914 , when he began a series of poems (this time under the pseudonym Webster Ford) about his childhood experiences in Western Illinois, which appeared in Reedy's Mirror, a St. Louis publication. In 1915 the series was bound into a volume and re-titled Spoon River Anthology. Years later, he wrote a memorable and invaluable account of the book’s background and genesis, his working methods and influences, as well as its reception by the critics, favorable and hostile, in an autobiographical article notable for its human warmth and general interest.

Though he never matched the success of his Spoon River Anthology, Masters was a prolific writer of diverse works. He published several other volumes of poems including Book of Verses in 1898, Songs and Sonnets in 1910, The Great Valley in 1916, Song and Satires in 1916, The Open Sea in 1921, The New Spoon River in 1924, Lee in 1926, Jack Kelso in 1928, Lichee Nuts in 1930, Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma in 1930, Godbey, sequel to Jack Kelso in 1931, The Serpent in the Wilderness in 1933, Richmond in 1934, Invisible Landscapes in 1935, The Golden Fleece of California in 1936, Poems of People in 1936, The New World in 1937, More People in 1939, Illinois Poems in 1941, and Along the Illinois in 1942.

Masters was awarded the Mark Twain Silver Medal in 1936, the Poetry Society of America medal in 1941, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1942, and the Shelly Memorial Award in 1944.

Notable works

Poetry

• A Book of Verses (1898)
• Songs and Sonnets (1910)
• Spoon River Anthology (1915)
• Songs and Satires (1916)
• Fiddler Jones (1916)
• The Great Valley (1916)
• The Open Sea (1921)
• The New Spoon River (1924)
• Selected Poems (1925)
• Lee: A Dramatic Poem (1926)
• Jack Kelso: A Dramatic Poem (1920)
• Lichee Nuts (1930)
• Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma: A Dramatic Poem (1930)
• Godbey: A Dramatic Poem, sequel to Jack Kelso (1931)
• The Serpent in the Wilderness (1933)
• Richmond: A Dramatic Poem (1934)
• Invisible Landscapes (1935)
• Poems of People (1936)
• The Golden Fleece of California (1936)
• The New World (1937)
• More People (1939)
• Illinois Poems (1941)
• Along the Illinois (1942)
• Silence(1946)
• George Gray
• Many Soldiers
• The Unknown

Plays

• Althea: A Play (1907, drama)
• Eileen: A Play (1910, drama)
• The Bread of Idleness: A Play (1910, drama)
• Dramatic Dialogues: Four Short Plays (1934, drama)

Biographies

• Lincoln: The Man (1931)
• Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America (1935)
• Across Spoon River: An Autobiography (1936, memoir)
• Whitman (1937)
• Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938)

Books

• The New Star Chamber and Other Essays (1904, essays)
• The Blood of the Prophets (1905)
• The Great Valley (1916)
• Toward the Gulf (1918)
• Starved Rock (1919)
• Mitch Miller (1920, novel)
• Domesday Book (1920)
• The Open Sea (1921)
• Children of the Market Place (1922)
• Skeeters Kirby (1923, novel)
• The Nuptial Flight (1923, novel)
• Kit O'Brien (1927, novel)
• Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era (1927)
• The Fate of the Jury: An Epilogue to Domesday Book (1929)
• Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma (1930)
• Godbey: A Dramatic Poem (1931)
• The Tale of Chicago (1933, history)
• The Golden Fleece of California (1936)
• The Tide of Time (1937, novel)
• The Sangamon (1942, nonfiction)
• Lucinda Matlock
• Greg Smith