📣 I wanted to let y’all know this book of poems is now available at @wiseblood_books_press , arriving in your mailbox this February. All 3 of my kids also arrived in February, but they didn’t arrive in the mail, so this should be easier on all of us. The link is where you’d expect. Cover art by the incomparable @baumwerkj .
#poetry #texas #writing #poem
Sunday Best Reads
Poetry both amazes and frustrates me. I’m not quite sure what makes a good poem. When I read a book of poems I feel like a 10-year-old asking my Dad how will I know when something is good? His reply was, you’ll know it when you see it. I believe Call Out Coyote by Seth Wieck is such a book.
I like that some of the poems are dedicated to people, and it makes me wonder what they did to deserve a poem, especially one about dung beetles. But what I love is Seth speaks my language, or perhaps I speak his. Maybe that is because we both live on stretches of the plains separated by wind.
He writes about things familiar, like cottonwood trees, taproots, grackles, rattlesnakes and grama grass. The exhilaration of finding an arrowhead along the river, although I have yet to find mine. Regret about hurting a hawk, and the fleeting laughter with young friends that turns into bitter memory.
In a poem called Favorite Names of Crops, he writes “Dropping his hand, he named grainheads as red as the sun-red arm which assayed their weight by the acre, twin sin tree wait maze. Twenty-century-weight. Maize. Milo. Sorghum. Each a name for the same thing for which I had no name.” That drew me back to summers standing in the harvest field with grandpa, never quite understanding or appreciating the variety of golden wheat scratching my bare legs.
I don’t know poetry, but this book is not trying to be anything, and that’s perhaps what I like best about it. It’s good, like the land that inspires it. It feels like iced tea on the porch where you can sit in silence with someone and still have a nice conversation.
Call Out Coyote, Seth Wieck, Wiseblood Books.
Thanks to @hppr.membership in Garden City for hosting a reading of Call Out Coyote, and especially the honorable @poetlobmeyer for organizing the shindig and bringing her friend Ramona McCallum to read a few. The crowd was kind and attentive. The big event for me though was seeing my friend @baumwerkj , who made the cover art. He brought the original prints for growing collection of Jack Baumgartner work. cc:@wiseblood_books_press
If you’re on Route 66 in Amarillo, @aunteeksbooks_curiosities has a few copies of Call Out Coyote. Angela has been a champion of my poems for years, so I gave her a shout out in the book. Go grab a copy, and pick up a few other books while you’re there. I got a hardback compendium of Chandler’s novels.
Thanks to everyone who came out for poetry on a Thursday night in Amarillo, and to @burrowingowlbooks for hosting the reading. It was good to see friends, old students and teachers, and a bunch of new faces especially that group from Tascosa.
If you don’t have a copy of Call Out Coyote, Burrowing Owl has a couple of copies left over.
One morning in the summer of 1999, I stood on the wedding cake step back scraping paint from the window frames while a crane hoisted the repaired letters and set them in place.
I attended the Refugee Language Project banquet this evening. I’m amazed at the river of people who find their way to Amarillo. Miraculous, really.
