“As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration.  I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.” 

 –John Adams

“The deepest American dream is not the hunger for money or fame; it is the dream of settling down, in peace and freedom and cooperation, in the promised land.” 

– Scott Russell Sanders

I grew up near water, in the Mohawk River valley where my ancestors, Bavarian Palatines, came to live following the disastrous European winter of 1709-1710. They traded the Rhine for the Mohawk primarily to escape persecution. Three hundred years later and only a few hundred miles away, I’m trading the shores of Lake Ontario for the banks of the Genesee. For me, this is about entering into a deeper, more formal commitment as a writer, reader, and teacher; as a pilgrim on the faith journey; and as a member of a community through my work on campus and citizenry in my town. In the fall, I begin a new career as Assistant Professor of Writing at Houghton College for the 2010-2011 academic year. We are moving to a rural part of New York known as the Southern Tier. We’ve chosen the village of Angelica, a hamlet situated along a river, not unlike my hometown.

The Southern Tier has long been home to the native people of the Iroquois Confederacy, and, geographically at least, has changed very little. It is a rugged, sometimes bleak, hill country that stretches from the Allegany Reservation south of the Finger Lakes and east to the Catskills.  I’m excited for the rich natural setting we can engage as a family, for the opportunity for our kids to grow up exploring the outdoors. I did, and it shaped me as a person and a poet. (For a compelling study on the topic, read Richard Louv’s excellent Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.) We know that time spent outdoors has the power to balance the image- and communication-saturated, TV/video game/Internet/cell phone culture our children (and we) inhabit daily. Emerson tells us: “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

While living happily in urban settings most of my adult life, I admired people like Scott Russell Sanders, who wrote about a subject many hipper folks would dismiss out of hand: staying put–in Indiana, no less. The full title of the book is Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, and in it, Sanders describes “fashioning a life that’s firmly grounded in household and community, in awareness of nature, and in contract with that source from which all things arise.” In choosing a rural setting, Sanders, Wendell Berry, and others experience what Berry has called “the grace of the world.” He writes, “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be—I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg, who farms upstate but goes into the city weekly, writes of the ways in which the city and the country can inform and enrich one another for those who would take notice and time to deal in both. This approach works best for me, too. As I read Anna Karenina this past year, I strongly identified with Levin’s need for open spaces, his hunger for the chastening work of the outdoors (and the working out of his spiritual dilemma), as well as his discomfort with urban sophisticates and their collective superiority complex. At the same time, I sympathize with Vronsky’s desire for the great cultural centers–in his case, St. Petersburg and Moscow–where he enjoys fine cuisine, attends the theater, and experiences the range of cultural amenities a city affords (not the least of which is the company of the aristocracy). Anyone who knows me knows that I can’t go more than six months or so without at least a quick weekend in New York. Just ask the friends and cousins and cousins’ friends in Brooklyn whose couches I sleep on. Like everyone I get restless for the bright lights and the unparalleled artistic opportunities.

For me, it has never been an either/or, but always a both/and, and that’s how it will continue to be, only now I’ll choose both from a home base in the country. Like Adams, I adore “the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.” When I’m being honest I find in myself the dream to settle down in a promised land. But, Sanders suggests, promised land does not ultimately speak of a physical place but rather a kind of spiritual calibration that helps us live in “peace and freedom and cooperation.” And yet one must be careful not to idealize a new job and a new home or even pristine nature (or for that matter, the romance of the city). One must expect—and respect—reality. As Paula D’Arcy reminds us, “Reality is God’s greatest ally.” I look forward to the realities of the Southern Tier, the village of Angelica, Houghton College, and all the people with whom I will enter into community.

*            *            *

 Stay tuned for Part II of this three-part reflection, in which I freak out about my course syllabi and inadequacies as a teacher, and ponder the unique issues associated with teaching at a Christian college.

New poems coming out in Istanbul Literary Review!

The journey continues…

Updates on Beggars in Heaven coming soon. Stay tuned.

You’ll need to crank up the volume.

Seeing Keb’ Mo’ at Tall Stacks in Cincinnati a few years back was one of the highlights of my concert-going career. Brilliant.

Just got news that two of my poems have been accepted for publication in what I think is one of the finest new literary magazines in the world–Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. I am thrilled about my first international publication. Cha is one of the only literary journals in Hong Kong.

It has been my constant goal to engage more and more poetry from the international community.  Most of my models–my heroes–are not American poets. I fell in love with poetry when I encountered García Lorca. The reading list I’ve built for my MFA program includes many poets that reflect my love for work from different parts of the world, including Adélia Prado (Brazil), Jaime Saenz (Bolivia), Shuntarō Tanikawa (Japan), Georg Trakl (Austria), César Vallejo (Peru), R.S. Thomas (Wales), the invaluable Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, edited and translated by Michelle Yeh, and many others.

Last year, I discovered a Japanese poet named Kimura Nobuko, whom I wrote briefly about here. I spent a great deal of time with her collection The Village Beyond, and was deeply moved by it. It inspired a series of surreal poems that I dedicated to her, using a line of hers from an interview as the epigraph: “A dream is not just a set of images but an actual experience.”

I wanted to publish those poems in a market that would reach further than most small American literary journals. Cha specifically publishes work from, about, or related to Asia. Since the poems were inspired by, and dedicated to, a Japanese poet, I thought it would be a good match. (In a previous issue, they published four of Billy Collins’ poems about his time in Japan, so there was precedent.) Thankfully, the editors liked my poems and chose two of them for Issue 10. I could not be more excited.

This has been a great year in publishing for me so far. I have work forthcoming in Main Street Rag, and I recently received my contributor’s copies of the beautiful Rio Grande Review, a magazine published by the University of Texas – El Paso’s bilingual MFA program.

Do you read any international literary journals that publish at least some work in English? Let me know. I’d love to discover more poets from around the world, and, who knows, maybe have a chance to see my own poems crossing borders again, too.

“Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.”  ~Raymond Inmon  

I got it into my head this morning  to walk the snowy trail along the Irondequoit Creek. My brother-in-law is in town and always game for a hike, even when it’s 19 degrees with a lake wind that makes it “feel like zero.” And I can’t help falling for the seduction of the winter sun, drawing a false connection between its bright morning light and the heat it would seem to be—but is not—emitting.

After some easy hiking and three successive bridges, the trail is no longer recognizable as such. It deposits you on the side of a muddy cliff, icy water below. The root structure of some evergreens tempted us to go on. There are two possibilities: the high way, clinging to roots and a semblance of footing among downed trees, and the low way, which offers a two-inch strip of bank that could be mud, ice, or dead leaves, likely some unattractive combination. We took the high way.

My brother-in-law slipped at the most dangerous point, but had a good handle on a durable pine root. For a second, though, he pulled a Cliffhanger. It was awesome, though I felt secretly guilty for thinking so while he was at risk. A great athlete and woodsman, he handled it easily, pointing out later, “I don’t think my muscles were bulging like Stallone’s.” Earlier we’d debated turning back. I felt badly for putting him in that position. But it was invigorating to be out deep in the woods when innocuous walk became perilous adventure, if not exactly for me.

By chance, I had enjoyed two breakfasts prior to going out. Per my habit of over-identifying with “Lord of the Rings,” I felt a sense of purpose surge within. While it was silly and indulgent, it also put me in the right frame of mind to enjoy the payoffs the hike would later afford: a male and female mallard drifting together on the current; a father and son fishing quietly; the sudden appearance of a waterfall that looked so much like glass, I could not say for sure it wasn’t; the discovery of a poplar that had split into two equally massive trees, the common trunk of which was twelve or fourteen feet around; and finally the tired, satisfied hamstring muscles climbing the last hill home.

The hike enabled me to receive the gift of a winter day that, if asked, I would’ve said I could do without. My default setting is vague depression/irritability, especially in New York’s long winter. I need to be jolted from it.  Walking never fails to supply the jolt, even quieter walks with no hints of danger.

Do you walk? Where? What do you experience? What do the angels whisper to you? 

This is my clean, well-lighted place. As you can see, where I grew up, such a place is often first a place to come into from the cold. The Empire Diner in Herkimer, NY is a symbol for me. It’s where I want hot coffee and a friendly smile on a gray winter day. It speaks to the Mohawk Valley before Wal-Mart came in and sped up the already-in-progress decline of all the old mom and pop outfits: The Cozy Nook, Aiello’s Market, Big M (once “Foodland”), Shibley’s, The News Room, and many others. 

Beth and I had a very early breakfast at the Empire on our wedding day. It became special to us in part because when we were younger and home from college, we’d walk around Mohawk and Herkimer for hours. Many of those times, we’d end up in a familiar booth, sipping coffee and picking songs from the jukebox at the Empire Diner.

I also like to go there alone, and pull up to a stool at the counter. It’s the kind of place where you can do that and not feel anxious. In fact, hitting the counter might score you some gratis grub: the new owners, I’m told, have retained an old tradition whereby whenever a train is heard passing through, they spin a wheel and someone at the counter wins a free meal.

A few years ago the building sat dormant, which made me inordinately depressed. Every time I go home, it seems another bastion of the old days is gone. I was very pleased when some good souls felt the pull of the classic train-car style diner, and purchased and re-opened it.  I was even happier when I ate lunch there last summer and discovered that the new owners were making spectacular cheeseburgers. I mean, I’ve sought out good burgers all over the country. And the Empire Diner is making really good burgers. But for me, it’s always been about breakfast. The breakfast is at least as good as it ever was.

I love my clean, well-lighted place–and I like to hear others’ stories of their own. I’d like to hear from you. Where’s your clean, well-lighted place? What makes it special? Tell me about it. Show me a picture if you have one.

In case you missed it, Rochester’s Auld Lang Syne was featured in Paste Magazine after highly successful tours with The Avett Brothers.

Check out the article, then go buy their album from Viper Bite Records.

 Juan Rulfo, one of my favorite fiction writers of all time, has the coolest website. Take a look.  Then go read Pedro Páramo.

Check out Replacement Press, a new independent literary press in St. Paul, Minnesota. I like what they’re about and look forward to following their future.

Show your early support and spread the word by becoming a fan on Facebook or following them on Twitter.

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

This is probably one I should pick up this year.

Here is a helpful review of it.

Busy, busy, busy. Will blog something substantial soon (are my blogs ever really substantial, though?)…