John Lehman, aka The Village Poet, has a new chapbook showing up around the Cambridge-Rockdale community. Free copies can be found just about everywhere, from the library to the state bank to the Piggly Wiggly. John says he’ll send out free copies to anyone interested, far and wide. Email name and address to John@VillagePoet.com.
Local residents abound throughout John’s work. I myself was honored to discover on returning home last year from a family vacation at sea that a commemorative poem had been issued. Reprinted below exactly as it appears in the Village Poet chapbook:
John Lehman’s The Writer’s Cave: Why Writers Write What They Do has seen several incarnations over the last few years. First as a two-part essay in Rosebud issues 39 & 40. Then as a two-person theatrical piece presented last year in Madison’s Frederic March Play Circle as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival. This summer Lehman went into a recording studio and produced an audio version of The Writer’s Cave, now available on CD. It’s Lehman’s own voice sharing his homebrew memoir and writer’s handbook, with fascinating forays into film criticism (touching on Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman) and literary biography (about the great Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker).
Prairie Fire Poetry Quartet: John Lehman, Robin Chapman, Richard Roe, Shoshauna Shy
Coffee Spew had a front row seat at Avol’s Books in Madison on March 12 for a reading by the members of the Prairie Fire Poetry Quartet: John Lehman, Robin Chapman, Richard Roe, and Shoshauna Shy. The night was dubbed Stage Left in honor of John Lehman’s new chapbook, Acting Lessons, recently published by the University of Wisconsin’s Parallel Press.
Enjoy these audio clips of the evening:
*
Abundance / Robin Chapman
Yes, write of it, here right now,
in the middle of winter, snow
pock-marked with tracks
of squirrels and the backyard rabbit,
mice that spiral the long grass
into nests, the pair of cardinals
who own the house and all the trees
surrounding it, the raccoon family
from the water drain at the end
of the block (their eyes gleam
through the sewer grate on cold
night walks) who stop on their own
nightly rounds to pour the feeder seed
down their throats, the housefinches
from the front porchlight, heads
soaked in berry-red, foraging leftovers,
the chickadees dry and two-note calling
in the arborvitae, finishing off from a claw
the single sunflower seed that each
takes to a branch: we are wealthy,
wealthy in the black oil of seed, the gold
of cracked corn, the brushy thickets
of security from cats, the abundant lives
of our neighbors.
Last night I heard the whistle of a distant train.
Today instead of going to work, I walk down
a block to talk with the garbage man who is
waiting inside his truck for the drizzle to let up.
It’s not one of those two-story, Frankenstein
giants with weightlifter arms that hoists trash
over its head to dump it with a grunt, but a
sports car-sleek garbage truck, flaunting sort-
at-the-curb bins that are politically correct. I’ve
the urge to break away from my life for a while.
And sometimes in the rain, strange alliances
are made.
At the next stop the driver shows me how to
lift a can—most are plastic now—and deposit
its bags of spilling guts, then swing it ‘round
and grab another to a banging beat. I put my
feet on the running board, he shifts the gears
and when he brakes, I play it solo. I catch the
rhythm. He nods. Garbage men are not the stuff
of TV shows, but that’s their mystique. They are
everywhere, unnoticed, but aware of everything.
From magazines we read to hair we’ve lost,
to the degree that our discarded underwear
is frayed.
They are anthropologists studying a world we
furnish with debris. They smell our smells, taste
what we taste, feel the cans and boxes that
contain the food that shapes our shapes. And
here’s my house. What waste our lives become.
Once I was in an experimental drama. Tom,
a mid-level accountant, and I played hobos. He
needed a release from the minutia of the “day
by day.” To prepare for our roles we went to the
freight yard. I was chicken, but he hopped into
the open yellow boxcar of a slow-moving train.
I never saw Tom again.
Imagine the tallest tree in a forest
and you looking past clouds and mountain peaks.
Grip like a hawk and breathe until you sense
the tree’s roots, trunk’s length, the sap
rising, and push off. Feel the top of your skull
pulled by a taut string into sky’s depths,
you shushing the wind; laugh in short bursts.
Fall and rise, ride to the knife-sharp edge of a draft,
giving the ride voice, calling you, you, and we
to anyone who could listen.
Believe you have a third eye, a space
sound rushes to like water from a pump.
Release that sound and draw lip-crisped
air past your teeth, form your abdomen
like the roundest of hills. Push your midriff
at the hard wood of your backbone, release,
letting an egg rest on your tongue
like the hollow space of a nest.
This is your sound. You are ready
to begin your first song.
Richard Roe’s books include Knots of Sweet Longing (Wolfsong Publications, 2001), What Will You Find at the Edge of the World (Fireweed Press, 2001), and Bringer of Songs (Fireweed Press, 1994).
*
Wife / Shoshauna Shy
He wanted to want her
but being able to have her
at any given time
diminished desire.
It was only in sleep he was aroused
as he tilted through dreams where she became
the Kwik-Trip cashier, Eddie’s sister-in-law
or the sub from sixth grade.
Her plumping of pillows, her mashing potatoes
sang of aprons and Mama and pink medicine
which left him as flaccid as a fish on a dock
till the evening he happened
to be hosing the begonias
while she was undressing
at their bedroom window.
Out of her slip he saw her shimmy,
spread her skirt on the wingback chair,
the parted lace curtains a picture frame
to their dark yard that fanned
like a bellows behind him.
He watched as she leaned
and brushed loose her hair,
then he raced inside ready
to shuck off his trousers.
Now she ponders why he disappears
following the finish of NewsLine at ten.
He claims he forgot to fertilize the roses.
Recorded exclusively for Coffee Spew, here’s Wisconsin poet John Lehman reading from his work. First, from Acting Lessons (Parallel Press, 2008), a film noir reverie:
Things More Distant Than They Appear / John Lehman
Let’s say that you had just two choices. The first, to leave
Rick’s Club, walk the six blocks down to your girl’s place
and apologize. The second, to stay and finish your drink.
The entranceway—stark, mail on the floor, broken buzzer
and unlocked door—with a little Scotch, takes on a movie
musical glow. A set where you tap dance up the staircase
into the arms of someone who is young and silken-robed.
In fact, the place is shabby. One, two, three stories of fried
onion smell. Then, of course her apartment door is locked
and at this time of night, why would she answer anybody’s
knock? So, it would be back to Rick’s anyway, right? No,
not quite, because you see the door is inexplicably ajar,
though all is dark inside. Now there are two more choices:
to call out “hello”—the only sensible thing to do—or push
the door open and, very quietly step within, the idea being
that you’ll make your way to her room, kneel beside her
bed and whisper your affection in her delicate ear as she
dreamily awakes. In you go, for this is the night of fools,
feeling furniture with your toes stealthily as a cat. Each
step takes days, each day is a week. Your lifetime passes
as you breathe through the doorway to her bed which is
—What did you expect?—empty. All you know for sure,
is that you’re tired and drunk and sad. You want to tumble
on top of that bed for a minute’s rest. You do, and dream
that you are back at Rick’s, and this time she comes in.
She puts her fingers to your lips; there’s no need for you to
speak. “My place or yours,” she smiles and since you already
smell the lavender candles of her room and feel the softness
of her pillows on your cheek, there are no choices, anymore.
But you’re not in her dreams, like she’s in yours. You don’t
need to leave Rick’s to discover that. So you sit and listen
to Chet Baker’s trumpet on the jukebox, to remember and forget.
*
Next, from Dogs Dream of Running (Salmon Run Press, 2001), an affectionate encounter with the late, great author:
John Updike Spills the Beans Riding through New Jersey / John Lehman
It was about this same time of year. We
were driving through a rural New Jersey
night, the wife of a Princeton Italian pro-
fessor, Tom Kennedy and me. She had
organized a day for us to conduct writing
workshops and now after the culminating
event, a lecture by the legendary John
Updike, we were headed to a reception
at the house of a dean. “Wasn’t Updike
something?” we all asked, remembering
the eloquence of his extemporaneous
words as they blended seamlessly with
excerpts which he read, like some vast
swelling on a literary sea, to raise us, not
to truth or beauty, but to a profound, new
level of sleep. Tom admitted to nodding
off several times and I to once awakening
with a start. Even our hostess could not
deny, “with the warmth, the lights, the ‘oh
so busy’ day …” But now how deliciously
refreshed we were, ready over cocktails
and hors d’oeuvres to impress each other,
all over again, with cleverness and wit.
Later, in the Cadillac en route to the motel,
we three were joined by the man himself.
He proved humble in a way the successful
are humble, dismissing their genius, though
mindful the rest of us be sure to disagree.
A lanky man slightly bending an enormous
head, he said, “I couldn’t help but notice
there was one person who … fell asleep.”
Was that the engine or his rising voice that
roared? He continued, “All I could think of
was how I might rouse this poor soul in the
third row from her stuporous dreams.” At this
pronoun Tom and I exhaled, and our driver
let us know, from where she was sitting in the wings she didn’t see anything. “Well,”
he sighed, “that reminds me of when T.S.
Eliot came to Yale. We had waited hours
in line to hear him speak. Student seats
were high in the balcony and amidst the
rising radiator heat …” And here the courtly
Updike chortled to himself, like a spent
wave tickling the sand on a distant beach.
“Can you imagine,” he said, “I fell asleep.”
Coffee Spew 