It isn’t an exaggeration to say this fellowship is life-changing for me. The resources the Academy of American Poets has provided will let me expand my Poet Baseball Cards project in ways that would have been inconceivable otherwise. And those resources will also let me pursue my own art with opportunities I could never have dreamed possible. I’ve spent my whole life balancing literary pursuits with teaching and librarianship, and I’m used to squeezing water from stone to bring my ideas and my own creative work into existence.

The last ten months have been surreal, from the Poet Laureate appointment to open heart surgery and recovery to this fellowship so soon after learning about the Notable Career Award from my alma mater. It has been almost a year of continuous reflection and gratitude.

I need to thank Mel, first of all, for more things than could ever fit in one post. Also my colleagues at Mexico Public Schools and North Callaway R-1 for all the ways you helped make the teaching and librarianship so meaningful over the years. Thanks to all my students for allowing me to be part of your growth. You helped me develop so much not just as a teacher but as a person. Thanks to my professors from MacMurray and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and to all the poet friends I’ve made over the years for the lessons and the literary companionship. And thanks to Karen Craigo and Sean Thomas Dougherty for writing recommendations for me. You’re both upstanding literary citizens.

Thanks, also, to the readers, libraries, bookstores, schools, arts organizations, and communities across Missouri and beyond who have welcomed me over the past several years. Every invitation, conversation, handshake, and shared poem has genuinely meant something to me.

And finally, thank you to the Mellon Foundation for the funding and to the Academy of American Poets for seeing promise in me and what I’m trying to accomplish.

I can’t wait to share with all of you what’s ahead.

Friends, as you might know, last fall I collapsed at school and learned I’d have to have open-heart surgery to replace a faulty valve I’d lived with my whole life. The alternative was, basically, to die. I had that surgery on January 28th, and friends, family, fellow poets, colleagues, and plenty of strangers carried us through with hands-on help, prayers, and financial support.

Today I’m releasing THE HUMBLE APARTMENT OF MY CHEST as a free chapbook from Dim Headlight Editions (more on Dim Headlight later.) This book is my thank you. So many are responsible for me still being here to release these poems; it wouldn’t be right for me to charge you for them.

You can download your copy here: https://BookHip.com/FDGHMBL

Enjoy these fine feature poets and bring a poem to share in the open mic.

Register for the zoom link here (it will be emailed out a week or two before the event): https://forms.gle/Xz762qSVKFBZ1Djn8

from Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols

from James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”

from George Orwell’s Animal Farm

My father spent forty-plus years as a journeyman carpenter. He was damn good. It helped that he possessed an innate sense of pride in work done correctly and well. And then there was the motivating pressure of my mother’s addictions, which would pull us down again and again financially. Mainly, though, the old man just couldn’t stand to have any sort of boss, and if you plan to live one hundred percent by your own hustle, and expect to survive, you need to be a lot of things. ‘Damn good’ is right at the top of the list.

Almost a half century as a carpenter—often working six- and seven-day weeks—destroys the body. He’s weathered concussions, an air nails through a palm, frozen shoulders, upper back pain, lower back pain, neck and spine surgery, the possibility of losing an eye to debris, multiple falls from roofs, two obliterated knee joints, and more crazy-glued gashes than he could ever remember.

He’s in his sixties now. It’s a struggle to carry in the groceries sometimes.

This photograph of him was taken in a local grease-pit cafe in my hometown, where working-class people get together for a cheap breakfast. I had a vintage 50mm Pentax 1.4 adapted to fit a Sony a6000 mirrorless camera. Sometimes when I’m waiting at a restaurant, I’ll shoot a few close-up shots of whatever I see, more from boredom than any desire to make a good picture. One of the shots I took this time was my father’s arms, crossed and in isolation from the rest of his body.

When I looked through the pictures on my LCD in real time, that image tugged at me enough that I showed it to him and asked him if he would mind if I used it.

It isn’t flattering. Prominent are a number of work wounds that haven’t healed due to diabetes. His arms aren’t nearly as thick as they once were, either. But it captures something very real. Even if I hadn’t taken the picture, even if I had just come across it in a book forty years in the future, I’d know these arms were my father’s immediately.

~ ~ ~

The Carpenter

Sawdust drifted
against his bootsoles

Fingers calloused,
palms ghosted white
with drywall mud

Who knows vibration
of circular saw
and router

Who knows
the hieroglyphs
of practical geometry

Whose pencil pins
stray hairs
behind his ear

Who also grasps
the cold algorithms
of construction

The utter violence
in his tools

The slicing
and the striking

The ripping
and the binding

All necessary
to build or repair

This knowledge
too
lives quietly
in his hands

I used to worry a lot about attendance at events and rate the success of a reading almost exclusively by the number of people who showed up. Even if it felt great, earned money, and connected with the audience, I felt lousy if the attendance was low. Any positives were just a line I was feeding myself to soften the blow.

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to perform for some big crowds. I’ve also had almost no one show up. What I learned from the fullish rooms and the nearly empty rooms is that, barring a complete shutout, attendance is sort of irrelevant to the success of a reading. We really only need a single someone to breathe the poems for. When I read, I’m reading for one person at a time anyway. It’s just that sometimes I’m reading for a lot more or a lot less one-persons-at-a-time. Once you come to understand this, all the anxiety about attendance or the embarrassment of empty seats falls away.

(Artwork by Octavio Quintanilla)

The smallest crowd ever to attend one of my readings

was a lone grandmother in futuristic spectacles 
who I worried had wandered in by mistake. 
But she was a keen listener who sighed and placed 
her hand to her chest at all the right moments.

God bless her. 

In fact she was only a hair less enraptured 
than the folks at this birthday party I once attended 
where an admittedly gifted clown sat on a stool, 
blinking his makeup-caked eyes and twisting
balloons into strange shapes from every kingdom, 
phylum, genus, and species ever to feature
in a special on the Discovery Channel. 

He was quite good.  Even the adults were hopeless 
with admiration, lifting their souvenirs to the light, 
whistling, grinning and shaking their heads. 
“He’s an Artist,” somebody’s dad or uncle proclaimed,
and a murmur of agreement circled the room. 
On a nearby table a coffee can overflowed with tips. 

I’m not really bitter. I have always believed 
jealousy can be a fine teacher, if we allow it. 
From my distant corner, I nudged the cat away 
with the toe of my shoe. Wiped the green
frosting from my mustache and began to write 
everything down in my pocket notebook 
under the heading “ideas for future readings.” 

Marriage (Detail #1)

She wakes me unexpectedly
in the dead of the night,
panicked, breathing hard,
asking, ‘Is she talking to me,

is she talking to me?’
‘Who?’ I say.
“The doll,” she says. “The doll.”
Then immediately begins
to snore again, leaving me alone
to contemplate that
while staring into the darkness.

Federico Garcia Lorca Blues

These blues are lunar, blues of the moon

and the moonlight and the white spell

the moonlight casts on tree-stubbled hills.

They belong to Andalusia, yet I have seen them too

folk-dancing the streets of Chicago in a gale

and smelled them over the insulin bottle

my grandfather tilted every evening

before needling out the potion

that staved off the duke of all shadows.

These are blues that incubate in the eager

throats of scavenger birds latched

to the crumbling brick silos of the Ozarks.

But most of all, they are the blues of the four

varieties of human sleep--three of them defined,

the fourth still to be discovered.

One day the last person to ever rent a movie from family video
will stumble off the bottom step and into the afterlife
the world won't even know it happened
by then our children will wonder what the word hummingbird even means

One of my responsibilities as Missouri Poet Laureate will be to write an official Missouri poem as all my wonderful predecessors did before me. I haven’t started that yet, but I HAVE written a Missouri SONG with music and performance from Matt Lundquist of Otto & the Moaners. The is a demo of “Stick Around Missouri” from a series of Country/Folk/Americana songs we worked on this summer.

Missouri Arts Council #mopolaureate