Dog
The way you buried
your nose in my hand
made me unable to forget you
that cold morning
at daybreak.
Skin and bones you were.
Perhaps a boot to your neck,
or starvation
sent you fleeing to my gate,
asking for help.
So I let you in.
Four Windows Press has released a major anthology of English-speaking poets, No More Can Fit Into the Evening, A Diversity of Voices. The volume contains a healthy sampling of work from 39 poets from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.
In the “Introduction” to the volume, the Editors, Thomas Davis and Standing Feather, both poets, say that “an early decision was made to invite poets either they knew about” from their years participating in multiple poetic communities “to submit ‘the ten best poems they had ever written.’” From the hundreds of poems submitted over 250 poems were included in the final publication.
Among the notable poets in the volume include Terence Winch, winner of the American Book and other awards; John Looker, an important British poet; Kimberly Blaeser, an Anishinabe poet with an international reputation who is a former State of Wisconsin Poet Laureate; Michael Kriesel, former President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and James Janko, winner of the AWP Novel of the Year and other awards.
According to Davis and Feather, what they are hoping “as they bring this project to press is that readers might find themselves on a mesa top where grandmother junipers spread their branches out beneath a full moon, remembering poems that stuck in their spirit after this volume has been read. We are hoping they might have that experience in Door County, Wisconsin where Lake Michigan is tossing wild, white capped waves at the dark dolomite escarpment that runs through Door Peninsula, or maybe in the timeless moment when they are communing with Taliesin, the ancient Celtic bard, in a time before time as he chants beauty and the world’s beauty into the deep starlight of a Celtic night.”
Tribal College Press has launched Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings! The book went up on their site, https://tribalcollegejournal.org/buy-meditation-on-ceremonies-of-beginnings, yesterday. I have emphasizing the Tribal College Press site for purchases because any purchase here goes to help the tribal college movement out through work that the Tribal College Journal does with all of the colleges.
To me, at least, this is the most important book I have ever written, as accidental as it is in some senses. It represents decades of work for all the tribal colleges and specifically for the colleges that I worked directly for over much of my life. Imbedded in the book also are all the sacrifices Ethel and my children, Sonja, Mary, and Kevin, made during the years when I was working so hard to make so many things happen of American Indian communities and students in individual communities and nationwide. I also want to celebrate Ethel’s magnificent pastel the press used for the cover.
I received my first copy of the finished book at the house yesterday, and I was surprised at how much emotion it generated in me. The tribal colleges and universities and international indigenous controlled institutions of higher learning are so important! All of us need to reach out, if we are not American Indian people, to the original people of this land and celebrate them and feel the power of what they and their communities have to offer the world. I hope that in the pages of this book of poetry both Indians and non-Indians can find the spirit of the tribal colleges and universities and then become inspired to support them in some concrete way. They are still among the poorest funded colleges and universities in this country even though they are doing God’s work in some of the poorest places in the United States.