Cover of the Winter 2012 edition of Third Wednesday, a literary journal edited by Laurence Thomas of Ypsilanti.

As it turns out, all you need to know about this well-kept secret can be found in its pages.

Thomas – who is a poet, as well as an essayist and a writer of fiction – was born in Ypsilanti 85 years ago. A Hopwood Award winner for essay and poetry at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s, he had a teaching career that took him as far as Uganda, Saudi Arabia and Costa Rica before he returned to his hometown, where he lives today. Third Wednesday was an outgrowth of a monthly poetry group and of his friendship with the late Dearborn Heights attorney and magistrate Michael J. Barney, who was also a published poet and founder of Gravity Presses (lest we all float away) Inc.

Barney, “a regular attendant” of the group, Thomas says, had begun publishing through Gravity Presses a local literary magazine called Now Here Nowhere. Only a handful of issues came out of the project before Barney became ill (he died of cancer in 2006). Third Wednesday picked up where Now Here Nowhere left off, Thomas says, and is in great part an homage to Barney’s memory.

From his home office, Thomas corrals the input of associate editors both local and far-flung (one of them lives in Tajikistan!) who review submissions of poetry, fiction and visual art to produce a quarterly collection. Third Wednesday casts a wider net than did its predecessor and draws submissions – “two or three a day,” Thomas says – from around the country as well as Michigan. The current issue – Winter 2012 – publishes poets from Ann Arbor to Sofia, Bulgaria.

Third Wednesday pays its contributors with a copy of the issue and a token honorarium: $3 to $5. Design editor Paul Kingston “insisted on paying a stipend,” Thomas says, “and he’s proved to be right. (Contributors) feel like professional writers when they receive the money. And some of them tear up the check – that helps us out.”

The journal sponsors an annual poetry contest; poet Philip Dacey judged this year’s entries, which are published in the current issue. The three winners – Chris Lord, Adella Blain and Phillip Sterling – all hail from Ann Arbor. Each issue of Third Wednesday includes a featured poet – sometimes well known (David Chorlton was featured in Fall 2011) but usually, Thomas says, “chosen from our contributors who show skills and ideas we want to promote.”

What do the editors look for? “It’s based on our studies of poetry, keeping up with what’s current,” Thomas says, “and looking for that tingle when we receive work that seems new, vibrant and beautiful.”

“We like publishing well-known names,” he says, “but our greater interest is in finding exciting work by those not yet established or with local reputations but not yet known nationwide.”

Along those lines is work from InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which also appears in every issue. The Wayne State University project places professional writers (many of them with roots in UM’s creative writing program) in Detroit public schools, where they lead workshops for students. Here, from Third Wednesday’s Fall 2011 issue, is a particularly fine example by an anonymous participant in a workshop for teen writers held at the Ruth Ellis Center in Highland Park:

What it’s like to be a black gay man

(for those of you who aren’t)

It’s holding your tongue when you want to sing

It’s straightening your wrist

deepening your voice

It’s asking a man a question

xxxxxxwhile asking a different question

It’s a signal it’s a stop light

It’s a hustle, one drink too many

a puff of smoke

It is opening your mouth

xxxxxxand a purse falling out

It’s a street corner

xxxxxxIt’s a fix. It’s a prayer

to be held to be driven

xxxxxxto be rode

It’s finally an open door

xxxxxxWelcoming you in

xxxxxxWelcoming you out

You can get more information about Third Wednesday online, including submission guidelines. You won’t find the journal’s current work on the site, however. The most recent issue can be found in good, old-fashioned paper and ink: subscriptions are $30 a year and copies are sold at Nicola’s Books in the Westgate shopping center and WSG Gallery on Main Street (full disclosure: my husband is a member of the gallery).

Cover of "Sold Everywhere But Borders" by Rebecca Van Der Jagt.

Upcoming Events

Rebecca Van Der Jagt had been on the job at the Borders bookstore in Ramsey, N.J., for one month when the word came down from corporate in July 2011: Liquidation. In “Sold Everywhere But Borders,” Van Der Jagt has written an employee’s account of the grim last days of a beloved bookstore. She’ll be in town to sign copies at Biggby’s Coffee on Liberty Street at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 21; an emotional gathering of the Borders diaspora is a pretty sure bet.

Author Christopher Paul Curtis will be at Nicola’s Books at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26. His latest book for children, “The Mighty Miss Malone,” is based on a character his readers met in “Bud, Not Buddy,” Curtis’ widely acclaimed 2004 novel set in Depression-era Michigan. “Bud, Not Buddy” won the Coretta Scott King Award and a second Newbery Medal for Curtis; the first was for his 2000 debut novel, “The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963.”

The 35th annual Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair is Sunday, May 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Michigan Union ballroom. A visit is well worth the $5 admission, which benefits UM’s William L. Clements Library.

Honors for Kasischke, Hoffman

Two works featured in this column have gone on to wider recognition in recent (and not so recent) months. In March, Laura Kasischke’s “Space, in Chains” was awarded the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Kasischke, a novelist and poet who lives in Chelsea, is a professor at UM’s MFA program in creative writing.

And back in November, Andrew J. Hoffman and his memoir “Builder’s Apprentice,” published by Huron River Press, were honored with a Connecticut Book Award. Hoffman is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at UM’s Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and can generally be found reading on third Wednesdays. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

Cover of "Ghost Writers"

“The Sin-Eater: A Breviary,” Thomas Lynch’s latest collection of poems from Paraclete Press, presents this world and the next according to Argyle, an insurance policy incarnate for unabsolved offenses and, Lynch writes, “the mouthpiece for my mixed religious feelings.”

“Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them,” part of the Made in Michigan Writers Series from Wayne State University Press, serves up a dozen ghost stories – some fiction, some true in their own way – from some of the state’s finest writers, many of them from the Ann Arbor area. Laura Kasischke (“Space, In Chains” and “The Raising”) and Keith Taylor, whose next poetry collection, “Marginalia for a Natural History,” comes out next month, are the editors as well as contributors.

Taylor, who teaches English at the University of Michigan, and “Ghost Writers” contributor Elizabeth Kostova (“The Historian,” “The Swan Thieves”) will read from the collection at Zingerman’s Roadhouse on Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the sixth annual Vampires’ Ball, a benefit for Food Gatherers. (Hunger. In Washtenaw County. In America. Sin? Horror story? This theme is definitely hanging together here.)

Scary Stories

The standout in “Ghost Writers” is “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” Steve Amick’s wryly funny tale of enforcer Harry Bennett driven mad by the “haints” of strikers and organizers he bloodied in the service of Henry Ford (though, he’d insist to his disappointed ma, “he was in his office for most of it”). As he exhibited so well in his novel “Nothing But a Smile,” Amick is just great at nailing place and period with the energizing element of utterly authentic speech. His Bennett flings off sentences studded with gems like “whorebath,” “hoohaw” and “cooked up the wheeze” (translation: authored the joke). Plus, we get some local history: Harry Bennett, born on Ann Arbor’s Wall Street; stepson of an early member of UM’s engineering faculty; a frustrated artist who raised Wyandotte chickens on his Geddesburg estate. Now you know.

With “Ghost Anecdote,” Kasischke again gives us a story of a bad-ish girl, a dead mom and suburban vice and again leaves us marveling at her lethal skill with the lightning-bolt detail (and, again, imagining she would have been a blast to cut class with in high school). Nicholas Delbanco’s “Pier Road” offers a meditation on what vanishes from a place and what remains: “What are we haunted by, and why?”

Anne-Marie Oomen’s “Bitchathane” introduces us to “spider ghosts,” via the red-haired narrator’s Aunt Toots and in the Upper Peninsula, where women in steel-toed boots do construction work alongside their husbands, have their hearts broken and, sometimes, pieced back together in a tight package of revenge. And this captivating story introduces me to Oomen’s wonderful voice, and will lead me to check out her latest collection of essays, “An American Map” (from Wayne State University Press, 2010).

Scary stuff aside, it’s fun just to do some Michigan sightseeing in the pages of “Ghost Writers.” Greenfield Village. Harbor Springs. At the Detroit Institute of Arts, the up-north high school teacher in Taylor’s “The Man at the Edge” encounters Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry panels – they “all looked as if they pictured disembodied organs of the female reproductive system.” And it’s the place – Michigan – as much as the theme of haunting, of a present given deeper meaning by an undead past – that makes this collection worth the read.

Cover of "The Sin-Eater"

“The ghosts in Michigan, perhaps like ghosts everywhere, seem to stay close to home,” the editors observe in the preface. And to this Taylor’s daughter, Faith, gets off a good one: “‘Well, good for the ghosts! At least they still call it home.’”

The Sacred and Profane

The next generation adds a special dimension as well to “The Sin-Eater.” To accompany “a couple dozen poems, a couple dozen lines each,” are a couple dozen truly fine photographs taken in Ireland by Michael Lynch, the poet’s son. (Another son, Sean, contributes a watercolor.)

Both Milford, Michigan, and Moveen in County Clare are home to Lynch, in whose magnificent “Walking Papers” Argyle made his first appearance. As with “Ghost Writers,” place and the dicey transition to an afterlife are central themes in “The Sin-Eater.” It is medieval (in sensibility if not in time) Ireland, where for a loaf of bread, a bowl of beer and six pence Argyle will squat beside a laid-out corpse, “eating sins and giving souls their blessed rest.” Like any working stiff, there are gigs he prefers more than others:

Maybe steady work with nuns whose vices

were rumored to go down like tapioca.

But no, those clever ladies lived forever

and for all their charities would starve the man

who counted for his feed on their transgressions.

No, most of Argyle’s work comes from rank-and-file sinners, whose resentful mourners may suspect a racket but will cover all the bases nevertheless. And he catches it from both sides. In “Argyle in Carrigaholt,” the “grinning” sin-eater gets chewed out by a prelate “famous for / the loud abhorrence that he preached against / adherence to the ancient superstitions.” But Argyle harbors his own contempt for those “who do a brisk trade in indulgences / and tithes and votive lamps and requiems.”

Cruelty toward the defenseless turns his stomach, and more than once he finds himself in profound solidarity with wronged innocents who succumb to the deadly sin of despair and are denied “requiem or rosary.” This refusal of official mercy is at the heart of two of the collection’s most powerful poems: “Argyle’s Ejaculations” and “He Posits Certain Mysteries.”

The father’s words and the sons’ images create a haunting whole. “The Sin-Eater” is a beautiful work of art.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and can be scary when she sets her mind to it. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

The inner courtyard at the University of Michigan's North Quad. This year's Ann Arbor Book Festival and Writer's Conference, which takes place on June 25, will be held at North Quad, located at State and Huron.

The publishing industry as we knew it is all but gone, as is the bookselling industry. (A visit to the almost ghostly downtown Borders store on a recent Friday night grimly reminded us of this.) The Great Recession all but dried up sponsorship and grant money for the arts in general and the literary arts in particular.

So how did organizers manage to bring back the book festival for another year?

Like most of us, by deciding what expenses weren’t essential, by figuring out how to stretch a buck and by some simple community cooperation.

Check out the schedule and you’ll see that this year’s festival – set for Saturday, June 25 – is being presented essentially in conjunction with the Neutral Zone’s Volume Summer Institute and the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

Jeff Kass, Neutral Zone’s creative arts director who is heading up the book festival this year, says organizers were faced with “trying to move forward with the book festival under difficult economic circumstances, and we really didn’t have the resources to go it alone anymore.”

Kass apparently saw an opportunity to tap the talent that was coming to town to lead workshops for the Volume institute at Neutral Zone. The annual program “brings in some pretty terrific instructors, writers and performers,” says Kass. Integrating them into the festival happened by moving it from its traditional long weekend in early May to late June.

Bill Zirinsky, owner of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tearoom, remains a key sponsor of the festival; Kass says Evans Young of the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science & the Arts, and Peter Schork of Ann Arbor State Bank have “stepped up” their own commitments to the event. And, Kass says, foregoing the expense of a festival executive director freed up some funds for conference scholarships (email Kass at a2bookfestival@gmail.com for scholarship info).

The Summer Festival partnership, Kass says, opened up some new venues for the festival and the Volume institute, including the Stern Auditorium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The festival tent will be pitched on Ingalls Mall for some afternoon discussions and the presentation of this year’s Leader in the Literary Arts (LILA) awards to local storyteller Laura Pershin Raynor and to Ann Arbor’s Family Learning Institute and its executive director, Amy Rolfes.

“These kinds of alliances are the way things are going to have to be,” Kass says, and the “vision for the book festival is going to continue to evolve: What does the community really want as a literary arts festival?”

The heart of the matter, of course, remains the Writer’s Conference and its sessions focusing on the crafting of fiction, poetry, memoir and literature for young adults; Kass says he’s hoping for a “healthy turnout.” Things get started at 8:30 a.m. with the annual Breakfast With the Authors (emceed by Raynor), when festival and conference participants will gather informally at the Image Café in the North Quad building, located at the southeast corner of State and Huron. The conference is organized into three sets of sessions led by 14 writers – among them Kass (a creative writing teacher at Pioneer High and Eastern Michigan University), Lori Tucker-Sullivan and Cynthia Furlong-Reynolds. Margaret Yang returns this year as well. (See the full list on the festival’s website).

Volume institute faculty who are also on board at the Writer’s Conference include poets Roger Bonair-Agard and Kevin Coval. (Coval’s conference session, “Working Class Poetics,” sounds intriguing: “It’s vital to remember the power of art to bring the everyday lives of workers into the forefront of the public’s literary imagination.”) And this year’s wrap-up Author’s Forum will feature Ann Arbor writer Karen Simpson and her first novel, Act of Grace. (On Wednesday, June 15, Simpson will give a reading from the novel at Nicola’s Books, starting at 7 p.m.)

Linda Fitzgerald, whose day job is running her own marketing communications business in Ann Arbor, was sending out feelers early on about the prospect for this year’s festival; she says she might have missed one conference since the festival’s inception 2003.  While noting that there’s “lots of local talent” leading the festival sessions this year, Fitzgerald says she hasn’t settled on the sessions she might check out this time around.

But she has watched the character of the conference evolve along with the “seismic changes in the world of publishing itself” – Fitzgerald herself is now investigating the self-published “e-book route” for her mystery novel, Mantra for Murder. A marketing orientation in the early years – “all knees and elbows” in the quest to snag an agent and find a publisher, she says – has shifted to something that is “more supportive and fun and inspirational.” The focus on nurturing a “community of writers.”

(A friendly aside to the festival folks: Update the website! The Ann Arbor News and Shaman Drum Bookshop are listed as sponsors – both organizations are no longer in business.)

Poetry in the Garden

One Pause Poetry, sponsored by Copper Colored Mountain Arts, will present Laura Kasischke and Keith Taylor reading Poetry in the Garden on Friday, June 17, from 7 to 9 p.m. at 7101 W. Liberty Road in Ann Arbor.

Kasischke’s latest collection of poetry is titled Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), and several of her new poems appeared in the April issue of Poetry magazine. Taylor’s Marginalia for a Natural History will be out from Black Lawrence Press in October.

It’s Still 2011, So We Are Not Late With This

The Library of Michigan announced its list of 2011 Michigan Notable Books – in December 2010. So we’re thinking this means that these books will remain notable for another six months, right?

Well, it just so happens that some of them may remain notable for even longer than that. So there.

This could especially be the case for local favorites who made this (last?) year’s list, including Thomas Lynch’s Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (Norton) and Eden Springs: A Novella by Laura Kasischke (Wayne State University). Another really fine title that made the list is Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams, edited by M.L. Liebler (Coffee House Press). Among this book’s many riches are selections by Lynch and that fine poet of blue-collar work and workers Philip Levine. It made a dandy Christmas present for my brother – and kudos to Nicola’s Books for the featured shelf space.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to compile her own notable lists. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

You know – that place where everyone knows where everyone else lives and everybody knows everybody else’s business and, no matter how insipid or irrelevant, has an idiotic opinion on it all, one generally borne of grinding frustration, depthless boredom and a general, yawning poverty of the spirit …

A photo of Frances and Joseph Gies, from their book "Life in a Medieval Village."

No. I do not need to get on Facebook.

But maybe somebody out there who is plugged into this dynamic global engine of online communal solidarity-ishness can take a break from investigating what your fifth-grade gym teacher had for breakfast and help us out here.

The mystery opens a few days after Christmas, when my husband and brother-in-law drop me at the Borders in Peoria, Ill., on the way to relive their childhood at a matinee screening of “Tron: Legacy.” Browsing the history section, I come across a paperback edition of “Life in a Medieval Village,” by Frances and Joseph Gies, and settle into an armchair.

And there I learn, from the back cover, that the Gieses “live on a lake near Ann Arbor, Michigan.” And there’s this dear photo of an elderly pair who appear to be Grandma and Grandpa circa 1948, but they’re also two scholars who’ve spent their lives together researching and writing almost two dozen books about life in the Middle Ages. How cool is that?

Thus intrigued, this MA in history delves into meaty research the very day we get home after the holidays. And what do I learn from Wikipedia? That Mr. Gies, University of Michigan class of 1939, passed away on April 6, 2006, and, with Frances, “collaborated on a number of books” that “are respected amongst historians and archeologists.”

So the opportunity has passed to talk to this gentleman about the prodigious work of a lifetime. But all is not lost. So it is on to the Ann Arbor District Library to collect two armloads of the Gieses’ books in hardback, including “Life in a Medieval Village”:

The modern village is place where its inhabitants live, but not necessarily or even probably where they work. The medieval village, in contrast, was the primary community to which its people belonged for all life’s purposes. There they lived, there they labored, there they socialized, loved, married, brewed and drank ale, sinned, went to church, paid fines, had children in and out of wedlock, borrowed and lent money, tools, and grain, quarreled and fought, and got sick and died.

Tack on “paid dearly to eat sandwiches at Zingerman’s and waste many a fine fall afternoon at Michigan Stadium” and that pretty much sums up Ann Arbor in 2011, no?

Of course not. People come and go so quickly here – as did the Gieses, a progression of book flaps informs us. In 1974, when “Life in a Medieval Castle” was published, they lived in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. When “Women in the Middle Ages” came out in 1978, they had moved in Oakton, Va. The parents of three and grandparents of three more were living on that lake near Ann Arbor when HarperPerennial brought out the paperback edition of “Life in a Medieval Village” in 1991. “Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel” followed in 1994; “A Medieval Family” was published in 1998. Local obituary records show that Mr. Gies was in his 90s when he died in Maine in April 2006.

Then, as always when you’re sleepless at 3 a.m., inspiration seizes you: The go-to guy here has to be über-townie Geoff Larcom, formerly of The Ann Arbor News and now a media guy for Eastern Michigan University. My erstwhile colleague, who is on a first-name basis with every single person in the world born after the Spanish-American War who ever lived in Ann Arbor, can tell me all about the Gieses.

Or not. All Geoff can do is helpfully point out a typo in my e-mail and otherwise show off. As far as he knows,

The only Gies (not Giesn) were the late Tom and Thelma Gies. He was a prominent business prof for U-M. Died about 20 years ago, and Thelma recently. Lovely couple, but likely not related to Frances and Joseph. Tom and Thelma’s son, Chris, has a son named TJ that [sic] works for The Pistons.

When he finds out what TJ had for breakfast on Thursday, Geoff will no doubt fill me in. (In that same e-mail, Geoff told me he was wearing a “grey shirt with black-themed tie” – I did inquire – but here’s a word to the media relations folks at EMU: Don’t be fooled. In a newsroom bulging with competition, Geoffy was the sartorial eyesore. The mere memory of that taxi-yellow shirt with the red golf tie can still bring on the dry heaves.)

If Geoff can’t help, maybe the rest of the world can. So now I’m scattering this on the cyberwaters: Whither Frances Gies?

The Latest Fuss over Huck Finn

The instantly notorious “Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition” officially hits the bookstores on Tuesday. This is the version “edited” by Auburn University’s Alan Gribben to banish the word “nigger” and replace it with the word “slave.” Gribben says his intent is to secure the novel’s place on school reading lists. Much airtime and print space was given over to outrage. But how many of us merely rolled our eyes when we heard the news?

However well-intentioned, this latest attempt to “cope” with the racially offensive language that makes Twain’s great novel a routine target for censors on school boards is a silly one. But it will take its place in the continuing and decidedly un-silly debate over how to teach “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Here’s my take: The “S” word describes an abomination that many Americans honestly view as a mere bygone. The history of slavery in the United States is quite a bit more. The “N” word is an abomination that many Americans would prefer be gone from the language. It won’t – and it shouldn’t be gone from Twain’s imperfect masterpiece. And to “cleanse” the novel of it is as dishonest and ultimately pointless as taking to the House floor to recite a Constitution cleansed of the Founders’ tally of one slave as three-fifths of a person.

But in a New York Times op-ed piece (“Send Huck Finn to College,” Jan. 16, 2011), short-story writer Lorrie Moore introduces something new to this old fight. Speaking from what she calls “a mother’s perspective,” Moore argues that “‘Huckleberry Finn’ is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature” and that it fails as a tool for encouraging young people – including “the young black American male of today” – to read great literature. So, Moore suggests, why not wait to teach it at the university level, “where the students have more experience with racial attitudes and literature”?

While she doesn’t fully address the controversy – if “Huckleberry Finn” isn’t part of the curriculum, it should still be on the shelves in whatever middle and high school libraries still exist these days – Moore makes important points.

I’m not speaking from a mother’s perspective or a teacher’s perspective. I’m speaking from the perspective of another reader who deeply admires this great novel – complete with its ending, which reduces drama to farce. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” ends with boys’ play – Tom Sawyer appears on the scene and persuades Huck to make an “adventure” out of rescuing the again-captive Jim – perhaps because to end it with Huck and Jim triumphing on their own would have been farce in another form.

Huck Finn first appears in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” – which, Twain wrote, “is not a boy’s book at all. … It is only written for adults.” With “Huckleberry Finn,” these two books about boys have been twinned and maybe shouldn’t be. I gave copies of both to my nephew for his ninth birthday last summer. While I hoped he’d be able to enjoy Tom now, I assumed Huck would sit on his shelf, hopefully for “later.” While “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is a story for children and for adults, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is not a “boy’s book.”

Local Poets Get National Play

Thomas Lynch of Milford, Mich. – a small town north of Ann Arbor – introduces Argyle the sin-eater in four poems that appear in the February issue of Poetry magazine. All that’s to admire about Lynch’s work is on display as he takes us to Ireland and explores to the pace of a beating heart his themes of death, faith, love and – here in “He Posits Certain Mysteries” – mercy, after a suicide:

… Argyle refused their shilling coin

and helped them build a box and dig a grave.

“Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal,”

he said, “only a wounded pilgrim like us all ….”

Lynch’s “The Sin-eater: A Breviary,” upcoming from Paraclete Press, has us looking forward to autumn. [Editor's note: Lynch's latest collection of poetry, "Walking Papers," was reviewed in the October 2010 Book Fare column.]

“Still Life,” a jewel by the University of Michigan’s Linda Gregerson, was set in an impressive two-page facing spread in the Nov. 29 issue of The New Yorker. And in December, Poetry featured “The Selvage” by Gregerson and a pair of poems by Charles Baxter, whose novel “The Feast of Love” secures him as a permanent local in my book, even if he did decamp for Minnesota. Baxter’s weavings of music and memory are shot with metallic threads of pain in both “Please Marry Me” and “Some Instances.” December was “The Q&A Issue,” and the brief discussions with the poets that follow each work are a real treat.

Local Readings

Deborah Rodriguez, author of the 2007 memoir and book club favorite “Kabul Beauty School,” reads from new novel “A Cup of Friendship” on Saturday, Jan. 29, at 3 p.m. at Nicola’s Books.

University of Michigan’s Nicholas Delbanco reads from “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age,” at the downtown Borders on East Liberty at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 31, and at Nicola’s Books at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 8. You might have heard Delbanco talking about late-life creativity on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Jan. 21 (or read Brooke Allen’s tetchy take on the book and its writer in the Jan. 23 New York Times Book Review). While some artists run out of gas as they run out of years, Delbanco observes, others develop a sharper focus and a deeper intensity in the liberation found in work as its own purpose. Good news for the really, really late bloomers among us.

The UM English Department’s Zell Visiting Writers Series brings National Book Award finalists Mary Gaitskill and Carl Phillips to town next month. Gaitskill, a novelist and UM grad, reads on Thursday, Feb. 10; poet Phillips appears a week later, on Feb. 17. UM grads Suzanne Hancock, a poet, and fiction writer Valerie Laken (“Dream House”) will also read, on Thursday, Feb. 24. The Zell events start at 5:10 p.m. at the UM Museum of Art’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and sort of enjoys being tetchy, from time to time. Her reviews for The Ann Arbor Chronicle appear on the last Saturday of each month.

Lucky me. Lucky us.

Lynch is a writer who chooses to call things by their proper names. Death is death. An ass is an ass. Love is bliss, except when it is something else entirely.

And when he puts his intelligence and honesty and lurking wit to observations of human-scale profundities, he finds solace in even the harshest truths.

“Oh Say Grim Death” muses on the most inexplicable of blows: A child is killed. We learn of it – he died in a fire, on a Thursday morning – from what is cut into a 18th-century headstone, and follow the search in that New Hampshire town as certain as it would be anywhere, for a reason to have “faith / In God’s vast purposes. As if the boy / Long buried here was killed to show how God / Makes all things work together toward some good.”

Just as certain is this:

… Grim death destroys us all

by mighty nature’s witless, random laws

Whereby old churchmen, children, everything –

All true believers, all who disbelieve,

Come to their ashen ends and life goes on.

There are simpler observations in “Walking Papers,” and observations of simpler things.

Maybe “Euclid,” for example, was just another working stiff. The Greek geometer’s insight – that “distance / from a center point can be both increased / endlessly and endlessly split” – could just as easily have occurred to Murray the GM parts trucker in one of those moments of mental space when he was waiting to clear customs at Niagara Falls.

At “Monaghan’s Fish Market,” there are cases of fish “filleted and laid out like the swarm of souls / on the Sistine Chapel ceiling Michelangelo / painted for the pope. . . .”

And from the operator of Milford’s Lynch and Sons Funeral Directors comes a certain view of Pavarotti’s funeral – and we learn that nobody can silence a gasbag quite like an undertaker.

A first encounter with “Corpses Do Not Fret Their Coffin Boards” gives the impression of a more loving spin on the admonition to count your blessings. Return to it, and you recognize that “unholy dread” (“the weight of too much liberty” that too many of us know), the one that sends us to hunting up the metronome: to counting, to collecting, to keeping score. Lynch finds his peace in the velvet-gloved strictures of the sonnet. (At least until he hits 52.)

Other than an occasional burst of bitter laughter, there is (of course) no comfort in Lynch’s scorching assessment of the sorry crew that cooked up the Iraq War. He lets loose his raw revulsion at the recklessness and mendacity of “Dear Mr. President,” “Dear Mr. Vice President,” “Dear Madam Secretary” and “Dear Messrs. Attorneys General” in the middle section of these poems from 1999-2009 – years, as we all remember, when stuff happened. Lynch gives stuff its rightful name here, and he serves up other names as well and pins them on donkeys.

The horror and waste – and the blowback – play out in the stable and the barnyard: A cow “with a pink udder / and its own agenda” tries to mount another cow, crushes it and leaves it to make “an awful noise” for days until a man who knows how to handle these things comes out in a truck and puts “a kill shot / between its eyes,” hoists it skyward and hauls it off. While it’s not cruelty we are witness to, it is still a ghastly scene – but being that it’s dumb animals that are involved we don’t torment ourselves trying to make sense of it. Not so when beasts with the power of reason get an itch, by god, to conceive something out of nothing.

When the smoke clears and the ash settles, Lynch is back at the theme of mortality. But these aren’t crimes; these are the breaks. From the title poem, written for fellow poet Michael Heffernan:

————————————Listen –

something’s going to get you in the end.

The numbers are fairly convincing on this,

hovering, as they do, around a hundred

percent. We die. . . .

-

So, go on out and count some syllables,

lay some lines down one after another,

check the pulses, make the meters tick,

make up whatever noise you have to make

to make some sense of the day that’s in it.

And always, always, he chooses and pairs such beautiful words, and breathes with them. From “Calling”:

It was a language I learned to speak,

Lovely and Latin, a sort of second tongue –

My parents’ and people’s, the nuns’ and priests’ –

That rose in the air like incense and song

Ghostly and Gregorian, like memories:

First gushing, then going, but never gone.

In “The Life of Fiction,” Lynch reminds us that “the sea and the weather keep coming and going.” Through senseless wars and “good” ones, after the deaths of innocents and of minor sinners with great gifts, “the sea and the weather keep coming and going.” Is that a harsh or comforting truth, salt in the wound or salvation? Does it matter?

This is what Thomas Lynch knows: “We carry on and pay the going rate / because we keep as articles of faith / there might be something for us in the mail.”

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor. Her book reviews for The Ann Arbor Chronicle appear on the last Saturday of each month.

A flag unfurled at this house on West Liberty Street salutes the fact that today (Sept. 8, 2009) is the first day of school. (Photo by The Chronicle.)

Editor’s note: The poets are sixth-graders at the Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor.

I looked up at the clock, it read:
10 a.m. I’m still in bed!

The Sun streamed through the window pane,
I smile, summer’s here again!

Those summer days, so long so sweet
were filled with fun and dirty feet.

But now I have to go to school,
My freedom ripped away, how cruel!

Jeff Kass, rehearsing his poem "Build" at the Liberty Athletic Club.

When Jeff Kass contacted The Chronicle about his upcoming one-man show, “Wrestle the Great Fear: A Performance Poetica,” we were particularly intrigued by this statement in his email: “The piece includes a lot of physicality in the performance, including a great deal of wrestling.”

A one-man poetry performance with a great deal of wrestling? Yep, we were hooked. So we met with Kass recently at the Liberty Athletic Club, where he showed us exactly what he meant.

Kass has been a leader in local poetry circles – he teaches creative writing at Pioneer High and works with the Volume poetry program at the Neutral Zone, where he serves as literary arts director. But this is the first time he’s attempted a full-length, continuous narrative, complete with music, video, directors and intricate choreography. This ain’t no three-minute poetry slam.

Rather, Kass has crafted a play of sorts, shaped thematically by 28 poems that explore the relationship between students and teachers, in all its joy and angst. Kass says his effort is a convergence of several things: 1) a desire to show his former students that there are ways to push your art beyond the poetry slam, 2) the work he’s doing while getting an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, and 3) the realization that much of his current poetry is about students and teaching. He could have compiled his poems into a book, he says, but chose to perform because of his strong emotional attachment to the spoken word.

Annotated poetry from the notebook Jeff Kass is using as a script.

The show looks at what it means to stand up in front of a group of kids, day after day, with the expectation that you’ll deliver to them wisdom and knowledge. The interaction between teachers and students can be like a collision – after it happens, do you retreat into your respective corners, or do you investigate the crash? Kass is all about wrestling with the aftermath.

The wrestling metaphor relates to his own struggles as a teacher, and by extension, to the same challenges that all teachers face: Preconceptions, an unwillingness to make emotional investments, fear of young people. This last one, Kass contends, results in efforts to control kids with dress codes, surveillance cameras, hall monitors and the like – actions that have proved controversial at Pioneer. “To me, that comes from a place of fear,” he says.

Wrestling those fears, plus his own personal fears – of lacking empathy, of not working hard enough, of balancing family and work – informs one layer of the performance.

Jeff Kass, rehearsing for his one-man show "Wrestling with Fear: A Performance Poetica."

Kass also evokes the Biblical image of Jacob wrestling the angel after defrauding his brother Esau of his birthright – a story that some interpret as Jacob’s internal battle over his actions. That image is one used on promotional materials for his performance, and Kass notes that “great fear” is one possible translation of the Hebrew word for “angel.”

There’s a literal wrestling connection as well: Kass was a wrestler in high school and, briefly, in college, and coached the sport as well – he notes that there aren’t many Jewish wrestlers. It was a way of differentiating himself from his father, an intellectual force and successful environmental lawyer. Rebelling against his father is similar to the way students rebel against teachers, Kass says – but there’s more to it than that.

Just after college, Kass was living at home and going through some boxes in his parents’ basement, looking for old baseball cards, when he came across his father’s undergraduate thesis. Its title? “Wrestle the Great Fear.”

The title was a jolt – a connection with his father through something that Kass had used to set himself apart. The thesis explored how American literary heroes evolved from the physical to the intellectual. But where his father saw a dichotomy of those two traits, Kass believes the two need to merge: “You have to be in order to increase your capacity to know.”

Jeff Kass executing a move during the performance of one of his poems.

Though this is a one-man performance, there are many others involved. The show is directed by theater veterans Ben Cohen and Glenn Bugala – Cohen is the choir and drama teacher at Greenhills School, and Bugala has directed and acted for the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre and Performance Network. The show will also feature poetry performed by Angel Nafis, Maggie Ambrosino and Ben Alfaro, and music by Nick Ayers (of The Macpodz), Greg Burns and Sean Duffy.

We end this article with one of the poems Kass plans to perform on April 29. As for how he incorporates wrestling moves into the performance of his poetry, well, that’s an art form that defies written description. For that, you’ll have to see the show.

Reversal (by Jeff Kass)

-

You can't execute a successful Granby Roll
if you can't believe you can be a wrecking ball
and bounce

Pop your hips toward the sky
make your body an A-frame
post your weight on your left hand

Ready yourself for your quake
hop your left foot in front
of your right, now blow
your house from its moorings,
duck your head and make your
break violent

The Granby Roll will not work
if you don't have faith in your
own momentum, you cannot quit
halfway, your naked shoulders
exposed to the mat's cold mercy

You must believe you can ravage
your own symmetry and survive

Now try it from standing up
you are human, tall on two legs
and you can dive and spin
from upright too
it's hop, hop, go

Don't let your fear of falling
failure, falling, failure, don't
let fear of falling fail you,
failure fall you, dive,
dive  – trust your dive,
and roll.

-

“Wrestling the Great Fear: A Performance Poetica” will be performed on Wednesday, April 29 at 7 p.m. at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater in the Michigan League, 911 N. University Ave., Ann Arbor. Admission is $5. To reserve tickets or for more information, call (734) 223-7443 or email Jeff Kass at eyelev21@aol.com.

A sign promoting "Wrestle the Great Fear" on a utility box near Burns Park.