| A to Z | Calendar | Search UWRF |
|
|
|
|
Keynote Speaker David Lee About David Lee David Lee honored at the New York Pubic Library's "25 Books to Remember" What about the famous pigs? In Praise of David Lee's Poetry David Lee: In His Own Words The Books So Quietly the Earth Books by David Lee The Poetry Paragonah in the Rhythm of Birdsong Idyll: Found Poem While Walking Cedar Breaks Sonnet on the Sun, Rising Cedar Breaks Matins Parowan Canyon On the Drowned Town of Thistle Aspen Pole Fence Dead Horse Point Tomorrow's Artifact: a Short Essay on Anthrpocentric Mythopoeia Requiem So Quietly the EarthAbout So Quietly the EarthFor the past thirty years David Lee has been writing narratives in the voices of the people of the rural southwest. In this new collection he turns to odes and landscape meditations to explore and braid his theological, philosophical, and environmental beliefs. Set in the American southwest, the book is divided into four sections following the archetypal elements of earth, fire, water, and air. Each section begins at dawn and works its way through the day using the motif of a walking journey. A book of elegiac geography, So Quietly the Earth opens and closes with requiems and explores the beauty, grace, and destruction of a planet pushed towards extinction. David Lee honored at the New York Pubic Library's "25 Books to Remember"Poet David Lee was a guest of honor celebrating the "25 Books to Remember" list, the New York Public Library's compilation of outstanding books (poetry, fiction and non-fiction) from 2004. Lee's new book, So Quietly the Earth, was selected as one of the twenty-five titles. Other guests include writer Robert Sullivan and journalist Neely Tucker. The event took take place at the New York Public Library's landmark building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. What about the famous pigs?There are no pigs in So Quietly the Earth. For those who love David Lee's pig poems, we are re-releasing The Porcine Canticles and the haunting Driving and Drinking. About David LeeSince the publication of his first book of poems, the Porcine Legacy (1974), David Lee has written a poetry unlike any in American letters. His poems are informed by a background that is unique to the world of poetry: he has studied in the seminary for the ministry, was a boxer and is a decorated Army veteran, played semiprofessional baseball as the only white player to ever play for the Negro League Post Texas Blue Stars and was a knuckleball pitcher for the South Plains Texas League Hubbers; he has raised hogs, worked as a laborer in a cotton mill, earned a Ph.D. with a specialty in the poetry of John Milton, and recently retired as the Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at Southern Utah University.David Lee was named Utah's first Poet Laureate, and has been honored with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has received both the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award in Poetry and the Western States Book Award in Poetry. The recipient of the Utah Governor's Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, he has also been honored as one of Utah's top twelve writers of all time by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities. Books by David Lee
In Praise of David Lee's Poetry"Lee joins the ranks of Frost and Hayden Carruth as poets whose treatment of rural life in lines cast in genuine vernacular goes far beyond what we often mean by 'regional poetry'.""Reading Lee's poetry is like sitting on a wide porch in the summer with a favorite uncle you don't see often and listening to him ramble along with tales of local townfolk. Lee captures the grit and authenticity of 'country' speech." "Lee's splendid ear for idiomatic, vernacular speech imbues his work with a kind of red-dirt, hog-wallow lyricism, with the direct and uncompromising impact of common talk, and it isn't surprising that his readings tend to be standing-room-only affairs." "Lee writes the kind of poems that might find poetry readers in the most unlikely places." "One can only wish for more poets like David Lee. Not poets who write the same way he does…but more poets willing to make their own music…He doesn't have time for small talk, he's to busy with real and vital things to say: he entertains us, enlightens us, makes us laugh and feel good laughing, makes us taste the sadness of our world." "Lee's calculatedly simple narratives are wonderfully wrought." "Lee's evocative use of dialect preserves both the tragic and the humorous." "For Lee, humor is the secret of sanity." "He shapes the characters of the rural American west, and their memories, their versions of things, into tales of recognition and redemption." "Lee...makes a universe out of the world around him." David Lee: In His Own WordsFor me, poetry is the most serious thing in the world - it's my own form of religion - but I just don't believe in a God who frowns. I want to get back to the original traditions of what poetry and art are - storytelling. Art does not imitate life. Life imitates art. Art sets the model, and if we accept the model, then we change our lives to fit that. What I'm trying to do is create a blueprint for a pattern of dignity. We try to create beauty out of the raw material of our lives. But I think somewhere behind all of that, there has to be a sense of vision. There has to be an ultimate meaning that we want our work to aim toward. In Utah, people don't have children, they have young Republicans, and they don't have college funds, they have mission funds. Everybody's expected to go out and spread their own version of their gospel. I see this as my mission. Poetry, in a sense, is my form of religion. The poet's first preoccupation is with language. Language is divinity; language was the inventor of man. This is the sacred trust. The poet's job is to somehow find a way to capture the eternal from the transitory, form the effervescent. The poet must locate that bull's eye where we find self. We map the moment of epiphany where self is found and then we speculate on it. And we're supposed to bring that moment to a sense of common understanding. Poetry is not a spectator sport. It cannot work unless we have active engagement between the poet, the poem, and the reader. All three are equally responsible for what is going to happen inside the poem. I hear poets all the time say, " I just write for myself" That's absolute garbage. I rarely just write a poem. All right, I do. But nobody sees those. I put them in a drawer. I often burn them. Art is a conservative tool, a stabilizing tool. It shows what our society is at the moment. But while art itself is conservative, the approach to art must be radical. The opposite of conservative is not liberal. It's radical. The artist must retain that radical approach. Difference rather than sameness. Sameness is easy. It allows us the opportunity to define. Good poetry comes from within. The poet's job is to write from the inside out, not the outside in. The author has an obligation to make him- or herself not the star, only the point of view. Silence is a major part of both the composition and the delivery of poetry. Poetry is compressed language, and the reason it is compressed is so we can contain silence in it. Poetry is a spiral to the heart of the reader from the heart of the poet. It flows not just from the poet to the reader, but from poet to poem, poem to poet, and line to line. Then from the poem to the reader, beyond the poet. Poetry lets us seize the moment out of the flow of time. That's what we achieve. The eternal. Paragonah in the Rhythm of BirdsongMeadowlark call trilling softly,a moving sky at my doorway. Jan's mountain ash huddles by the back porch. Its fallen leaves in the yellow grass cling to the quiet earth. Idyll: Found Poemon coming upon a slow childsquatting by a hawkmoth drawn by the nectar of an Oenothera on the path to Calf Creek Falls What I meant to say have you found? Look he shouted clearly what I discovered! While Walking3 John 4The wind is happy today. How do you know? Listen. She's singing in Spanish. Cedar BreaksIt began as silt deposits in shallow freshwater lakes. The earth shuddered, began a slow climb, a swelling. A piece uplifted, slid apart from the old lakebed, rose. Then a great sea covered the land. A million years later, naked strata loom on the eastern horizon as if waiting the perpetual thrust of a copper moon, tilting the autumn sky. Geologic debris. At Sunset Point, 10,000 feet above sea level, it is a short walk through a petrified oyster bed to bristlecone pine, perhaps the world's oldest living things. Farther down the lip, a cluster of gnarled ancients, one a warped bifurcation. In the cleavage a hummingbird's nest, two tiny eggs. Far below in a grey tangle of city, a young woman closes her eyes to the warm half-light, her breast exposed, kissed.Sonnet on the Sun, Rising Cedar BreaksCold. Last night a skiffof snow. So I'm up at five, make a fire. Watch the sky unbuild. I mean, I'm drinking coffee by myself. Shivering. And I'm cold. So it's time, you wonderful son of a bitch. Get on up. I'm ready. Now. MatinsSueños o recuerdos?Me gusta cuando los cerdos vuelan despacio sobre mi cabeza slowly birdsong fills the room sunlight pours liquid and golden over the sill morning rushes past dawn day wakes and stretches its long arms and pigs float slowly back to earth beneath the crystal knees of the gods Parowan CanyonWhen granite and sandstone begin to blurand flow, the eye rests on cool white aspen. Strange, their seeming transparency. How as in a sudden flash one remembers a forgotten name, so the recollection. Aspen. With a breeze in them, their quiet rhythms, shimmering, quaking. Powder on the palm. Cool on the cheek. Such delicacy the brittle wood, limbs snapping at a grasp, whole trees tumbling in the winds. Sweet scent on a swollen afternoon. Autumn, leaves falling one upon another, gold rains upon a golden earth. How at evening when the forest darkens, aspen do not. And a white moon rises and silver stars point toward the mountain, darkness holds them so pale. They stand still, very still. On the Drowned Town of ThistleBeneath the Lake Caused by the Great MudslideThere is another world and it is in this one. —Paul Eluard Something in me wants to go there and stand in the doorway of a small house where a man and woman inside who I know I've never seen before tell me they remember me as a child and I remember them just as I knew I would once beneath a time in Thistle. Inside the gush of cold mountain water I see blue and white columbines. The mountain huddles above and ducks paddle and mutter in its reflection. There where light is swallowed by the pouring stream and the village betrayed by the transparent skin of sky hovering above and below I listen always for the invisible voices that bind the dual world and without which all is black lakewater. Aspen Pole FenceThe aspen poles criss-cross, a zig-zag lineslicing the dry belly of the meadow, five high at one hundred twenty degree angles compounded. Such waste in a pragmatic sense. Consider materials: five aspen poles per section at, say, twenty feet per pole. With angles, six sections builds approximately eighty feet of fence, a net loss of two sections, ten aspen poles. But the gained strength. And durability. Chester said the old Horse Valley fence stood seventy years, which means fifty, until Forest Service knocked the east side down, let Job Corps put up sheep mesh, which went over in the second year's snow. And the aesthetics. Gods. The beauty of a cross pole fence in autumn. But the trees. The beautiful aspen cut wholesale for such a piece of geometry: five poles per section when one pole equals one tree once living now one pole. Chester said there are plenty of aspen in the first place and in the second some things have to be sacrificed in the name of progress and in the third that land belongs to him. Which means the trees. Unless they can find a way to leave. Which is why he built that fence in the first place: so things wouldn't be getting away. They're only trash trees. You can't get rid of them when you try. Why is it that for some things there is partial sacrifice, while others are required to give up all? At night I can believe shadows of aspen trees grope along the far side of the fence. I have not gone to see. In autumn, when aspen spread the earth gold, I can think the grey skeleton sprawling across yellow grass is a good thing, Chester's fat sheep mindlessly following its confines from one corner to the next, to water, and back out toward the fence. A completion, a perfect holding pattern. Then always I see its direction: the aspen grove flowing down the west hill, a twisted grey arm stretching out toward the glistening splash of autumn color. Dead Horse Point
the river burned. The earth leaned toward night. Shadows ran red and naked like unwinged gods, humiliated and disheveled, sunbleached hair wild and electric, limbs stretching toward any shelter, ditchbank or arroyo. Dusk fingers the dried streambeds as the light disassembles, reaches down the desert gullies and avenues already filled with the shed leaves of a dying season. Overhead, the wild stars flash their hoofs and flowing manes, trapped in the space between shadow and night, staring at the cliffedge into a larger darkness. Tomorrow's Artifact: a Short Essay
Today: |
|
|
University of Wisconsin–River Falls |
