Poetry books arrived this week. The first was “In the Soup,” the second book of poetry by John Calderazzo. John lives in the foothills outside the tiny town of Bellevue, Colorado just north of Fort Collins and Colorado State University. John taught literary nonfiction during his time in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at CSU. He was one of my faculty mentors and I enlisted his expertise as a literary fellowship juror during my time at the Wyoming Arts Council. He still writes and teaches in that genre but explores poetry in retirement.
John writes of many topics but travel is a big
one. He is a world traveler so writes about trips to Peru and other overseas
locations. His U.S.-based poems are set on Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain
National Park, Elk Mountain in Wyoming, and Santa Cruz Island in
California. He dedicates some to friends
and colleagues. “Kraken” is dedicated to Richard Jacobi, whom I knew in Casper,
Wyo. John hears from Richard and his wife, retired University of Wyoming professor
Vicki Lindner, about recent falls which, at a certain age, leads to
complications, something this person of a certain age knows only too well.
After watching a video of his Peru nephew’s toddler son falling over as he
tried to walk, John writes: “I sense
what’s reaching out for him—gravity, the Kraken,/tentacled monster of the
deep—already taking/his measure.”
The natural world has always featured heavily in John’s
writing. In “Gathering Voltage,” he’s in the mountains again, this time in a
summer lightning storm. He and his brother-in-law crouch as a bolt hits nearby
and he feels “the fatal breath of the sky.” On another day, he rides his
mountain bike in a storm: “Shivering as I fly, I sense a lightning/bolt moving
into position, gathering/voltage, checking its GPS, its terrible/book of
names.”
The author is not always in the wilderness.
Sometimes, “The Retired Professor Reads in the Library.” He’s researching a
travel essay and is in the aisle with his books and “old-time reporter’s
notebooks.” He moves aside to let a student pass and wonders if the young man
just sees “Him again—the old guy.” Thing is, he’s “as happy as I was at
10, freed from class to roam the school library.” I know the feeling, the old
guy with his walker, crowding the aisle, as he reads a book pulled from the
shelves but not sitting instead at one of the tables reserved for the elderly.
If asked, I might tell you that some of the glory in the library is being there
in the crowded aisle with my friends, the books.
"The Darker Moods of My Father" took me back to my own youth in the 1960s and '70s. He contemplates his father's "darker moods" and his rants on Vietnam and antiwar protesters and "priests drunk on holy water." Meanwhile, the writer remembers "this thing/that wanted to cannon me into jungle mud/since I'd turned eighteen." The poem ends with a revelation about his parents, about how his mother cautioned her husband about going too far with his his diatribes and the father looks sheepish, "knowing he'd gone too far, back in those days/when it was still possible to go too far." Suddenly we're back in 2025, when every day is a lesson on going too far.
John’s book is published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio: The Literature of Human Ecology. A fine-looking book, printed in a large and very readable sans-serif type. The publisher is based
in Pueblo Mountain Road in Beulah, Colorado, which is located between Pueblo
and the mountains. I mention this because there are many fine small publishers
tucked into many small places. My old friend Nancy Curtis runs High Plains
Press from her ranch near Glendo, Wyoming, just a few miles off I-25 down a
rutted dirt road that can turn into gumbo during a heavy rain. Anhinga Press has
two co-directors in Tallahassee but founder Rick Campbell supervises from his windswept outpost
on the Gulf of Mexico (MEXICO!).
One more thing. Some small presses receive support through their local and state arts agencies or some get National Endowment for the Arts publishing grants. I should say they used to get grants but not anymore from the battered NEA and not anymore in Florida where the Governor is on a scorched-earth campaign against the arts and the liberal arts education.
A sad state of affairs. My career was based on connecting local arts groups and publishers to government funding which they had to match 1-to-1. Most of the time, the government dollar was matched many times over. The U.S. government is now in the hands of a wrecking crew that wants to demolish poetry and prose, arts and education. They want to destroy everything I hold dear.
John Calderazzo writes about everything I want to preserve and protect.
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