Essays

"A Few Worries About Being a Poet"  (Dreamseeker Magazine, Winter 2004)

"Poetry as Argued Seduction" (Mennonite Life,
December 2001)

"My Mother's Lists" (Snakeskin, February 2002)

"My Father's Shirt" (Penchant, Winter 2001)

Academic Work

"Assembling Community: A Conversation with
Carolyn Forché." (The Nimble Spirit Review. August 2001). Reprinted in Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois.

"The Beloved, Ambivalent Community: Mennonite Poets and the Postmodern Church." Mennonite Quarterly Review 76.4 (2003). 511-518. (excerpt-pdf)

A conversation with poet Julia Kasdorf in Avatar Review.

"Modernism and Region: Illinois Poetry and the
Modern." (The Midwest Quarterly 34.2 (1998). 215-227.)

"Community, Theology, and Mennonite Poetics in the
Work of Jeff Gundy." Mennonite Quarterly Review
72.4 (1998). ). 625-38. Reprinted in Migrant Muses: Mennonite/s     Writing in the U.S. Eds. Ervin Beck and John D. Roth. Goshen, IN: Mennonite Historical Society, 1998.145-58.

Reviews

Poetry, Prayer, and Parable
The playful provocations of Scott Cairns
Philokalia, (Books & Culture's Book of the Week)

A review of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's Becoming Ebony (The Nimble Spirit Review)

The Power and Pettiness of Poets: Poetry's Very Human Century (The Avatar Review, Summer 2003)

A Noise of Purpose: John Kilroy's Torque (The Avatar Review, Summer 2003)

Allison Gresik's Brick and Mortar (The Nimble Spirit
Review)

Wendell Berrry's Life is a Miracle (re:generation
quarterly, Winter 2000-2001)

1) Place is not my "subject matter," any more than, say, human life (or married love, or grace, or grief) might be said to be what a poet writes about. Poems play with and re-present experience, insight, places, of course, but that does not mean what we write about exists for the pleasures of our writing about it. Milton did not take up justifying the ways of God to men as "subject matter." Instead, he waded fully into the necessary work of imagining God's epic presence in Creation, into viscerally arguing us through the tragic consequences of humanity's fall and separation from God. We read and re-read Milton to experience and re-experience the internal (infernal) logic of sin and to feel for ourselves the ruptures between God and humans, between (and within) humans themselves, and between humans and Creation. Sometimes this experience eludes us. Often it grips us. Always it is MORE than mere subject matter.

In fact, I think to look at places as subject matter is to separate them too much from poetry and from living. Wendell Berry pointedly decries poetry that "degrades the subject to `subject matter' or raw material, so that the subject exists for the poem's sake, is subjected to the poem . . . He [the poet] mines his experience for subject matter."

We exist because particular places sustain us, and those places go on existing long after we expire. What I hope for as a writer is to enter into the life of a place through poetry, and to invite readers to inhabit the poem as evidence of the beauty, terror, blessing, and power of places to shape us and involve us in their shaping. The poems that matter most to me (as both writer and reader) seek dialogue with the lives and habits and histories of a landscape and its inhabitants, for their own sake as well as for the sake of the poem. I don't want to artistically strip mine a location for its poetic resources and then move on to the next likely site. I want to write in such a way that I might live in that place again, for a long time, and live in the poem with some kind of continuous music, insight, or longing.

2) A dialogic relationship with places requires that we change our habits. Instead of moving "through" the world, we must live "in" the world with a consciousness of how our living either damages or stewards that place. For a writer, this means that my language about a place must give evidence of its complexity, not simplifying or commodifying the landscapes I write. Local color writers, at their worst, do not allow a place to have both its bold fall colors AND its gullies full of refuse. The chamber of commerce cannot permit such complexity. And writers who are tourists cannot see the place as it has been and will be for generations hence, but only as a set of "sights." By not staying put, being "in" a place, writers risk smoothing a place into nothing more than cement, or poetically colonizing (or postcarding) it for images.

Instead, I seek to enter into a dialogue, a conversation with all the levels and layers of a place. This means that instead of seeking attention, I must pay attention.

3) My life in place has not yet lived up to my ideals about place. Though I've spent all my life in the Midwest, I have moved six times in my 11 years of marriage. I have owned and cared for only one home. I am now teaching at my fifth college. For all my desire to "have a place / be what that place requires" (to steal from William Stafford), I am transient and caught between places. Perhaps that's one reason I work so hard to poetically inhabit particular landscapes:"I want lines to tether us to something / after all" and the best I've been able to do so far is make those lines from language and memory and hope.

4) One of the temptations of place, for me, is making it a retreat from complexities, making it a panacea for problems and worries that cannot be solved simply, a kind of vacation home away from chaos. I sense this temptation on political and theological levels, as well as poetically.

While I am committed to being enfolded within particular places and regions, my gaze must always be as upward and outward as it is downward. Only by understanding one region's interdependence on and difference from other regions can we begin to rightly situate ourselves. Perhaps most obviously in a postmodern world, where places and distance collapse through email and appear endlessly on television screens, we must be conscious that real places are not easy or isolated. They exist in fluid ways that require us to constantly pay attention to how and where we are located.

If we realize the complexity of any place, we will avoid the risks of being provincial in the most pejorative sense. We will know when we travel or read about another country or city that we have just begun to glimpse it. As poet Carolyn Forche puts it: "A tourist is someone who takes in the world, or appropriates from the world what he or she can find useful. But tourists don't really effectively change in themselves. They go to a place, and they come home. They may have some experiences to talk about, but they are fundamentally unchanged by them."

The quality of our engagement with other provinces will depend in large part of the complexity of our engagement and dialogue with those places with which we are most familiar. The poet of Ecclesiastes asks, "That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?" (Eccl. 7:24). Finding out the wisdom under foot must begin under foot if we are to see farther and deeper.

5) Poetry may not be the best way to literarily engage with place. Fiction, especially longer works, allows the writer to more extensively wonder and critique the qualities of places as they accrue around and within characters. Faulkner, Stegner, Jewett, Haruf, Berry, Russo come to mind as writers who have their particular places wrapped vividly around their language and characters, writers whose places seep literally into the plot and become characters themselves.

Or perhaps creative non-fiction offers the best possibilities for substantive interaction with places. Berry's essays, Annie Dillard's natural observations, Kathleen Norris worrying herself into the Dakotas--these may best offer contemporary ways to position the self in a community bound by love and care to specific locations. The honest (even if constructed) ethos of the essay and meditation speaks to contemporary readers in ways they can hear. Poetry's utterly self-conscious language and seeming foreignness frightens the reader.

But if places are to be seen as complex, then they may require the intricacies of writing and reading poems. Whatever the case, I am a poet and must work with music, image, line, suggestion, and allusion, all ways of inviting the reader into dialogue rather than asserting a polemical or narrative necessity. But as a poet I am in good company. "The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place which thou didst appoint for them," writes the Psalmist. "Thou didst set a bound which they should not pass" (Ps. 104). Until I find or am found by a different voice, imagining (imaging and singing forth) those bounds and appointed places in poetry will have to do.