Jared Carter Poetry

Yarrow Interview

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, poet and critic Harry Humes published the influential poetry journal Yarrow from his base in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. In 1987 he introduced a series of Yarrow interviews with contemporary poets. The first interview, "Jared Carter: A Special Issue," was subtitled "Landscape and Literary Ancestors."

Harry Humes: Do you write a distinct kind of poem—one that could be set apart in some way from the work of your contemporaries? The word "voice" might be relevant here. Is your voice different from the voices of other serious poets around you?

Jared Carter: It may be that my poems bear traces of the older literary tradition out of which I write. I'm a product of the Midwestern agrarian school of American writing, and it probably shows in my work.

Humes: Would you talk a little more about that heritage?

Carter: Well, it got started back during the Populist period of the 1890s, and it flourished into the 1920s. It includes writers on the order of Dreiser, Cather, Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay, and probably the greatest of them all—in terms of influence—Sherwood Anderson.

Humes: Is this an early branch of twentieth-century modernism?

Carter: No, it's more like a parallel root system—something that fed into modernism, at least as it is understood in this country. But in some ways it bypassed modernism, too. Sometimes you'll see it referred to as the Chicago Renaissance, and Chicago definitely was its center, at along about the time of the First World War. Harriet Monroe and Poetry magazine and Margaret Anderson and the Little Review came out of that movement. And of course that connects with Eliot, Pound, Williams, even Yeats— the quintessence of the modern.

The people I'm talking about published in Poetry and the Little Review, but they're not quite "modern" in the canonical sense. Their antecedents are older than Poetry magazine and what it represented. As native Midwesterners, they didn't go along with modernism whole hog. Part of what they did involved early experiments with literary realism—Hamlin Garland, for example. And part of it came out of naturalism and the influence of Zola—Dreiser, for example.

When you look back on it today, the Midwestern school is simply a list of texts, a set of assumptions, a group of names. But at the time, it had a great deal of vitality. Geographically, it involved a much greater area than Chicago; things just sort of fed into Chicago. New York was a long train ride away.

Humes: Can you define what it stood for?

Carter: In a very broad sense, it was a struggle to identify and often to indict the conditions and the implications of industrial capitalism. For their central metaphor, most of its members chose to explore the myths and realities of the small rural town as it reeled under the impact of twentieth-century economic conditions. It was the world they knew best, and they found it was serviceable for asking larger questions—questions that held true outside the Midwest. That are still with us, in effect, even today. They asked their readers to consider: was the small town the last bastion of the old Jeffersonian principles? Or was it the first outpost to fall under the onslaught of the twentieth century?

I don't think the writers themselves were convinced they knew what was happening. They simply realized that one could make good literature out of all the rifts and tensions. It's the old "machine in the garden" problem, one that first occupied Thoreau and Hawthorne even before the Civil War. During and after World War I the Midwesterners launched a "revolt from the village," a questioning of all the old genteel values represented by Howells and James. This put them on the literary map almost overnight. The country was ready for a change.

Humes: Were these writers political activists? Orthodox radicals? Members of any sort of party?

Carter: No, not at all. They were too contrary for that. And quite a few of them were conservatives—Tarkington, for example. But I think you could say they were involved with the politics and the economics of their times. They were able to dramatize the conflicts of labor versus capital, farmer versus railroad, manufacturing versus old money, in their work.

The political context was originally Populist, then Progressive, .and then later on, Farmer-Labor. It was radical in the same way that Jane Addams and Frank Lloyd Wright and Thorstein Veblen were radical, for their time and in their day. Up north, you had the LaFollettes and the Lindberghs. The Wobbly headquarters were in Chicago; the Socialist Party was founded in Indianapolis. There were traditionally radical towns—Milwaukee, Madison, Terre Haute, Toledo.

In strictly literary terms, the Midwestern movement was a network of people in the midwest who knew each other. A lot of them were newspapermen who had worked in Chicago at the turn of the century. And yet they weren't all writers. You had people like Louis Sullivan and Clarence Darrow and Eugene Debs, and they in turn knew other people, like Marion Reedy, down in St. Louis, who first published Masters.

George Ade and Dreiser were cub reporters together. Ade knew Riley and Tarkington, down in Indianapolis. Riley knew Paul Dunbar, over in Dayton, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, up in Wisconsin. And so on. There was an organization called the Society of Western Writers that was wonderfully effective in its day. Riley was one of its founders. Tarkington was the first president of PEN American Center, incidentally.

Kenneth Rexroth was growing up in South Bend during this period—he wrote a superb book about it—and the first chance he got, he ran off to Chicago and got involved in the literary scene there. It was a heady time; there was a great deal of strength in the movement, and it produced some fine books.

Humes: As I recall, the original impulse was finished by the end of the First War, but it continued to influence younger writers who were just coming on.

Carter: You're right, in the sense that the first generation—people like Dreiser and Anderson—published their best work just before and after the war . But it was based on their pre-war experiences and their long periods of apprenticeship. In the 20s you had a second generation starting to publish—Kay Boyle, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Janet Flanner. As younger people usually do, they reacted far more literally, mostly by deciding to go live in Europe. But Red Lewis didn't. He stayed in this country and wrote about Minnesota. Glenway Wescott, an expatriate from Wisconsin, was another member of that younger generation.

Even into the 1930s, Chicago retained its ability to attract good writers. Think of Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. For that matter, think of Vonnegut. He was a reporter in Chicago, early in his career. If you read him carefully, you'll see that he's very much a product of the tradition I'm talking about. He got that from his family and from growing up in Indianapolis. He's from the Progressive branch of Midwestern writing, rather than the Populist. But he belongs.

Humes: And you're part of it too?

Carter: Whether I deserve to be is not for me to say, but strictly in generic terms, I don't think there's any other way you could classify my work. In that sense, I'm a third- or fourth-generation Midwestern writer, and I'm wired into the old traditions, as far back as you can go.

My ancestors were Scotch-lrish people who came up into Indiana from the Carolinas in the 1820s. They were later versions of the sorts of mavericks and frontiersmen who came up from Virginia with Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark in the l770s—the ones who explored the Old Northwest, who took it away from the French and the English during the Revolutionary War. Then they surveyed it and laid out the first towns.

There are other important strains of immigration too: all those Quakers who trekked up from the Carolinas in the 1820s and 1830s because they wouldn't go along with slavery. My wife identifies with that stream. Then there were all the dissenting Germans in the 1830s, and the politically radical Germans who came over after 1848. The Vonneguts were part of that second group, like the Willkies. I think Roethke came out of the same stream.

In the nineteenth century immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia and Eastern Europe contributed a great deal to the cultural and intellectual underpinnings of the Midwest. And all the ideas and attitudes these people brought with them added to the great head of steam that built up in the l890s—the period of Coxey's Army, the Cross of Gold Speech, the founding of the IWW, and all those wild-eyed populists. Remember "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman? And Mary E. Lease, the "Kansas Pythoness"? She's the one who advised the farmers to "raise less corn and more hell!" Not a bad suggestion, even today.

So that's my background, and those are my ancestors, literally and figuratively. For me, it's still a viable tradition. It still matters. The books are still in the libraries. People out there still read them. There are certain touchstones—Spoon River Anthology, for one. Winesburg, Ohio, for another. Hemingway's early stories, Sister Carrie, My Ántonia, Main Street, Raintree County, Cat's Cradle. Every literate person growing up in the Midwest reads those books, even today. If you didn't, you wouldn't know who you are.

If I may be said to have a distinct voice, I would hope it is because some of these older voices have found a way to speak through me. Or to modulate the way I speak.

Humes: You've convinced me that the tradition is still alive in a literary sense. But what about politically and socially? Hasn't it been leveled by television and the Interstates and mass culture? And in spite of what you've said, doesn't the Midwest still have this reputation for being rather reactionary?

Carter: I don't deny it. We've still got our share of cultural yahoos and bible-thumpers and book-burners. We've also got a full complement of college-educated experts speaking intellectual psychobabble and political bafflegab. But they don't own the Midwest. The rest of us have got something to say about how things are run, too. Besides, there are newer strains of immigration being grafted onto those older progressive traditions all the time, and these work in our favor, and against the yahoos and the phonies.

Black immigration from the rural south to the industrial cities in the north during and after World War II: that gave us writers on the order of Gwendolyn Brooks and Etheridge Knight. Then there are all the Spanish-speaking people who have come north since the war. Revista Chicano-Riquena started out in Gary, Indiana, for example. We've got a writer like Dee Brown, over in Champaign-Urbana, writing about the traditions of the native American. And now we've got the Vietnamese, the Thais, and the Cambodians coming in. They're going to make their contributions.

What you get, over the decades, is a region of the country that's fundamentally tradition-oriented. Conservative, maybe, but not necessarily right-wing. Its basic myths are still agrarian, and it still has its roots in this old-line radicalism and backwoods individualism. So when a crisis develops, the strength is there: people are willing to speak out for the basic Jeffersonian principles. I noticed this during the Vietnam War.

During the 1960s the protests didn't all take place in Berkeley or at the Pentagon. The old Midwestern populists and Quakers and Catholic ecumenicists and decent progressive folk came out of the woodwork. To change the metaphor, they put their shoulders to the wheel. You didn't see it on television, but there were people in every middle-sized town and village in the Midwest, arguing on principle against the war—barbers, small-town editors, teachers. They weren't about to keep quiet. If they had, the ghosts of their grandfathers and grandmothers would have come back to haunt them.

Humes: If we focus only on literature, though, is there a kind of language, a code, that sets the Midwestern writer apart from the writer on the east or west coast? You used the word "region" a moment ago, and I'm asking about that, though I don't mean to use it in a negative sense.

Carter: No, I don't think you are. And I think it's more philosophical than linguistic—it's a certain set of assumptions, about who you are, and where you're located on the face of the planet, and how your ancestors came to be there. That affects much more than your accent, your diction, your preference for the active or passive construction. It affects the way you look at reality—your assumptions about life.

Seen this way, "regional" is a misleading term. It's much more than that. We're talking about an area that in geographical terms is much larger than Western Europe. The Midwest is a big place, with some long rivers and some enormous lakes. As I've indicated, a lot of different immigrants poured into it to make it what it is today.

So it's a far less definable region than—say—New England, or southern California. And more like a country within a country. It's natural that people living out in the middle of it should have different attitudes, different ways of thinking and speaking—different from people on the coasts, or in the South, or the Far West. Is a Breton different from an Alsatian? Of course. Then a Midwesterner is not the same as a New Englander, even though they speak approximately the same language.

It's a distinct place—it's the Midwest. Karl Shapiro says somewhere that "it's the part of the country that holds the crazyquilt of the United States together." It begins after you leave Pittsburgh, and by the time you're gone past Kansas City, it's starting to become something else. But by that time you've driven almost a thousand miles. You've just gone through the Midwest. That's the voice—the place—that shows up in what I write. Not because I put it there intentionally. Because that's what I am.

Humes: Are you saying that when you write you're not consciously aware of using Midwestern themes or elements of the Midwestern landscape?

Carter: What is a theme—does it belong to the Midwest, or to New England, or to the Southwest? I think there are appropriate themes and inappropriate themes. As for writing about the landscape, what other landscape could I write about? It's all around me. To write about a landscape I wasn't in would be pretentious, as far as I'm concerned. I will admit, though, that I wrote about the Midwest even while I was living in France. But that only underscores what a diehard Midwesterner I am.

Humes: You can't characterize what it is that affects you about the landscape, for example—what draws you to it, consciously or unconsciously, when you write?

Carter: Let's take a different example—a writer we Midwesterners would like to claim, even though he's from a bit farther west: Wright Morris. He's from Nebraska, out where the real West begins. But Nebraska is a big state, and it's a border state too, like Kansas. The eastern half is Midwestern; the western half is more like the Far West. Morris worked in Indiana, incidentally; he took some wonderful photographs there in the 1940s.

Morris's attitude toward landscape—his sensitivity to it, the way he draws it into his work—is, I think, supreme among living American writers. When he looks out across the Midwestern landscape he doesn't see much: a grain elevator here, a watertower there, maybe a windmill. All functional elements. They stick up above an otherwise featureless horizon. It's a spare, austere landscape, and we made it more spare because of all the trees we chopped down during the last hundred and fifty years.

The Midwest is not mountainous, by any means, and it is not even hilly in many places. You can be fooled by this, fooled into thinking that it's not impressive, because it lacks the topological grandeur of the far west, for example, or the historic connectedness of the East Coast.

What it offers, instead, is an atmospheric world—a world of light and distance and far horizon that is constantly changing with the seasons. In the course of a year it shows many different textures and colors and moods. You have to be patient to notice this. You can't just drive through the Midwest in two days and expect to understand it. Or fly over it and look down from thirty thousand feet and think you know what's going on.

Being sensitive to these changes has a bearing on your ability to understand the literature coming out of that world, too. Let me use a different example here. When I was younger, I was fond of the work of Sisley; and of course, like everybody else, I liked the paintings of Van Gogh's last few years. But I really didn't understand either of these artists until I lived in France for a couple of years in the early 1960s.

Sisley did a lot of work along the Seine southeast of Paris. And when you go there, in the summer, on a sunny day, and see that world, it looks just the way he painted it—not a photographic representation, but rather an imaginative capturing, with early impressionistic technique, of the essence of the light that is already there, coming off those hillsides, reflecting off that water.

It's even more pronounced for Van Gogh. People wonder about the significance of all those tortured cypresses, that twisted vegetation, those rippling fields. But if you go to Arles in the spring, or anywhere along the lower Rhone, you see the way the Mistral blows up that valley, and the way it swirls and tortures all the vegetation in sight, for hours on end. You can't help seeing it and even feeling it, because you're engulfed by it—and you realize Van Gogh was simply painting what he saw and experienced, the landscape that was all around him.

So to get back to the Midwest: to live out there on the land can provide a heightened sense of cyclical, seasonal change. I think of the upper Mississippi watershed as a vast mirror for an amazing range of annual climactic changes. You can be struggling in two feet of snow in March, and by late May it will have turned into the most lush, green, leafy world imaginable. Follow that with a traditional summer full of sunlight and white thunderheads and semi-tropical evenings, and top it off with the kind of autumn that makes you want to go out with a friend and pass a football back and forth all afternoon, until it gets dark.

In the Midwest the cycle of the seasons is more pronounced—more beautiful, more invigorating, more challenging—than in any other place I have ever been. Which is probably why I came back to it, why I live there, why I write about it.

Humes: But what about you as a writer—and what about this distinctive voice? I mean, I understand the background, but can you point to a feature of your work that develops out of it? Or are there some key poems we might look at?

Carter: Let's go back to Wright Morris for a moment. When it comes to writing he talks about "shearing off"—and by this I think he means shearing off the superfluous adjective, the rhetorical flourish, going for the metaphor rather than the simile. He points out that the typical southern writer tends toward the baroque, the gothic, the ornamental—Faulkner being the supreme example. The Midwestern writer sticks closer to the bone. Maybe it's a result of living in a world where the freeze-and-thaw will shear it off for you anyway, whatever you do. But you incline toward a spare, subdued style of writing.

Humes: Hemingway.

Carter: Exactly. Or Cather. A lot of people think that's a flat, plain style, that it doesn't have many valleys and peaks. But they're not listening to it. It's not flat; it's conversational and personal rather than rhetorical and public. Think of Anderson's style, say, in "Death in the Woods." He almost seems to be whispering in your ear. Another word for it might be "laconic." Less is more. Recently someone said of my poetry that it doesn't have an ounce of fat on it. I took that as a genuine compliment.

Humes: You spoke of listening.

Carter: Yes, because after all, we Midwesterners are still storytellers. We share that with the South; we share that with some of our Yankee forebears from New England. But we have our own way of doing it. It's like the difference between—say— Ted Kooser and Fred Chappell. Ted is from the Plains, Fred is from the Piedmont. They're both masterful storytellers. At the same time, they represent two different worlds, two different ways of writing.

Humes: And you're in between?

Carter: The Midwest is what's in between. You asked about key poems. Maybe you can see it there. A good introduction to my world, my style of writing, would be the five poems dealing with the construction of the Mississinewa reservoir. There were two in my first book and two more in Fugue State. A fifth, "Isinglass," just came out in Seneca Review.

Humes: That mythical county of yours certainly strikes me as a believable place.

Carter: Once in a while some reporter will call me up and say he's been studying the Indiana map and he can't find Mississinewa County. Is it somewhere north of Marion? Is it down near Scottsburg? When that happens, it's a real tribute. But I never intended the county to be exclusively Hoosier. It's a Midwestern county.

Humes: Part of that verisimilitude, that sense of authenticity, has to do with your first book, Work, for the Night Is Coming. and the way it was put together. I sense a great deal of care went into the selection of those poems.

Carter: Well, when it came time to assemble the manuscript, I had been writing about Mississinewa County, in prose and verse, for almost twenty years, so I had a lot of material. Again, it was a process of shearing off, cutting back. Taking only what I thought was best for the book. But every book is different, even the chapbooks. On the one hand, the editors and I were able to put some of them together in a few weeks; on the other hand, a couple of them took more than a year to figure out.

Humes: Do you see those smaller books eventually ending up in one big book?

Carter: They have that potential. But few of the poems any of us publishes for the first time are really worth reprinting. It's like salmon migrating upstream to spawn. Thousands start out but only a handful will make it to the top. They all have to go up the ladder. First you write the poem. Then you decide if you're willing to let it out of the drawer. Magazine publication is next. From there, maybe a poem will make it into a chapbook. Depending on the response it gets, it can leap up and land in your next full- length collection. And so on. It's a long journey and it's against the current all the way. There are all sorts of grizzly bears and mountain lions waiting to grab at each poem as it goes by. Waiting to grab at you, for that matter. So it takes time.

Humes: Someone once told me that a poet almost has to publish a book every two years. Do you agree?

Carter: Depends on the poet. It's certainly not been my experience. I tend toward Larkin's solution. Maybe a collection every ten years. If I could stay on that schedule, I'd feel I had accomplished something. In the meantime, the chapbooks keep me busy. I get to design my own books and to tinker with them until they satisfy me. That keeps me involved over the long haul. Every book I've done is still a source of wonder to me. It's a mysterious business.

Humes: Speaking of mystery—how do ideas for poems come to you? Could we talk about that for a moment? Do you believe in any sort of triggering mechanism, for example?

Carter: I think Dylan Thomas said it best. The "poetical impulse" is a kind of sudden coming on of energy and insight. Everybody experiences such moments. The poet—the artist, the writer, the craftsman—simply learns how to recognize them, and knows what to do with them. "The laziest workman receives the fewest impulses," he said. "And vice versa." In other words, the harder you work at writing, the greater the likelihood that you'll get better at it. There's no mystery. It's just practice and hard work. And belief and dedication.

Humes: Everybody's a poet? Anybody can become a poet?

Carter: There seems to be no conclusive answer to that old nature-versus-nurture question. All I can say is that a poet is blessed among mortals in that it is his job to be receptive to the primal impulses—to the flights of birds, to the sound of water in the fountain, to the way the old house creaks in the wind. He makes it his business to pay attention to such wordless moments of beauty or strangeness. And he or she develops the craft to refine such impulses and insights, to make something out of them that can bring joy or peace or enlightenment to others. It's a wonderful calling.

And yet, as you well know, the main drawback is that none of this happens on command. You may be out for a walk in the woods, or down a city street, and you may encounter an image, or a sound, or a connection, that won't turn into a poem for another five or ten years.

Rilke talks about this in Malte Laurids Brigge. There's that wonderful passage about having to let it go. It has to become blood, he says, it has to become a city sleeping, it has to go underground, it has to go off into space. And then it comes back as a poem. But there's no managing it, no controlling it. It can't be willed. It's a dance with the universe. I think being constantly alert to such possibility is almost the best part of writing.

Humes: Are there any worst parts? Take, for example, the common argument that this country neglects its poets. Even worse, that it kills them—by ignoring them.

Carter: That hasn't been my experience, but maybe that's because I had the good fortune to win a prize with my first book, and the book was well received by reviewers. In my case, too, I've been sustained by my connections with this Midwestern literary tradition I've been talking about.

I've been cushioned by my quirky notions of history, my belief in what literature can really do for a people or an era. I think it can help to create a lasting sense of identity and purpose. Back in the Midwest I can go into any bar, any church, or any school chili supper, and when the everyday people I meet there find out that I'm a writer, they're very pleased and very supportive. They'll talk to me, ask about my poems, tell me about the books that they've liked and learned from.

In the Midwest there's still this appreciation for storytelling, for the oral tradition, for many of the writers I've mentioned. It's not affected by television or the automobile or corporate-model arts management or any of the other distractions and corruptions of mass culture. So I feel at home there, and encouraged by the fact that people like to read what I've written. They tell me that when they meet me.

Of course, the minute it becomes self-conscious and willed, and you start having poetry festivals run by people with advanced degrees in body language, and you start granting PhD's in creative writing and that sort of thing, the air starts going out of it.

Humes: But you do teach, nonetheless.

Carter: Sure, and like everyone else who teaches, I have my doubts about its effectiveness. Anyway, I'm not involved with MFA programs or graduate students. I'm quite outside that world. I've had more experience working with prisoners, high-school kids, people in adult education programs, regular undergraduates. People who aren't all puffed up and hell bent on teaching creative writing themselves. People who are willing to approach writing as a way of knowing, a way of encountering the world.

Humes: Who do you recommend they read among contemporary poets?

Carter: They usually don't know much about contemporary poetry, so I always try to pass out copies from my own library—Robert Francis or Ruth Stone or Robert Hayden—to those who seem to be interested. Most of them need to become more familiar with the classics, with Whitman and Dickinson and Shakespeare. A lot of them are operating on assumptions about poetry they remember from their high-school days. Those aren't bad assumptions. But they can't take you very far.

Then, too, the writers you and I might admire at the moment are seldom meaningful to them at all. It sounds peculiar, I know, but in the real world, away from the writing programs, Rod McKuen is a far better known writer than Ray Carver. There is no getting around that, and no reason for complaining about it. It's the way things are. It's what you start with when they first come into the classroom.

Humes: What about poetry readings—do you like them?

Carter: Yes, very much. I feel best when I'm reading to others; that's probably my true element, the time when I'm the happiest.

Humes: Performing?

Carter: Let's call it reciting. It's not the same as a dramatic performance. It's not like what an actor would do if he were handed my work and asked to treat each poem as a script. Nor is it simply reading aloud. Again, it's somewhere in between. I think reciting is a good way of describing it.

Humes: Do you remember your first reading? Where it happened? How it went?

Carter: Not really. It was in an inner-city nightclub in Indianapolis, a placed called the Hummingbird Cafe, where they had jazz and bluegrass and poetry and lots of different things, and my becoming a small part of it was a gradual process. On certain nights you stood up and read a poem here, a poem there, but you were never really introduced. I like open- mike readings. They're great places to learn. Every community should have an open-mike stage where poets and writers can find out what it's like to work in front of a live audience.

Humes: What do you think of the small-press scene? Are we publishing too much these days? I've met people who tell me that they've published six hundred poems. That's probably more than Wallace Stevens wrote in his entire life.

Carter: I'd certainly congratulate anyone who had published that many poems. It shows they're working hard. But I'd be curious to know how many good ones they had published, too.

There's a wonderful statistic I've always liked—the fact that during his lifetime Chopin only performed in public on thirty-two occasions. The far greater part of his career he spent composing and playing in private for friends. Quantity is one thing. Quality is quite another .

Humes: And the future—of American poetry. Where's it all going? We're told modernism is over, and something new is just around the corner .Do you agree? And are you optimistic?

Carter: I agree. And I'm completely optimistic. It isn't postmodernism, either, that concerns us. It's something a great deal more important—a sense of the new millennium, of new possibility and change. Let me end our conversation with a quote from one of the wisest of Midwestern visionaries, the architect Louis Sullivan. This is something he wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. I'll just substitute the word "poetry" for "architecture." See if you don't think it describes our present situation:

We are at that dramatic moment in our national life wherein we tremble evenly between decay and evolution, and our poetry, with strange fidelity, reflects this equipoise. That the forces of decadence predominate in quantity there can be no doubt; that the recreative forces now balance them by virtue of quality, and may eventually overpower them, is a matter of conjecture. That the bulk of our poetry is rotten to the core, is a statement which does not admit of one solitary doubt. That there is in our national life, in the genius of our people a fruitful germ, and that there are a handful who perceive this, is likewise beyond question.

About the Interviewer

Harry Humes's most recent collection is August Evening with Trumpet, from the University of Arkansas Press. His previous volume, Butterfly Effect, was selected by Pattiann Rogers for the 1998 National Poetry Series, and published in 1999 by Milkweed Editions. Earlier collections are Ridge Music, The Way Winter Works, and The Bottomland, all published by the University of Arkansas Press.

Poetry Northwest awarded him its Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize for his poem "Calling in the Hawk." His poem "Butterfly Effect" was selected by James Tate for Best American Poetry of 1997. He is a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Poetry Fellowship and several poetry grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is a professor emeritus at Kutztown University.