In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. I aspired to be a writer.
The prevailing mood in Winona was, let’s just say, sincere. Besides Orwell, Kerouac, and school assignments, I was reading an anthology called 25 Minnesota Poets #2. The cover featured cream type against a brown background on sensible matte paper. It might as well have been printed directly on wheat. A few lines describing an oppressive shop teacher, excerpted from poet Stanley Kiesel’s contribution, give a sense of the tone: “Pop could see—plain as pliers— / poems swimming in my fingers.” The collection included some excellent poets, but it lived and died by the heartfelt declarative sentence. Even the local humor—think A Prairie Home Companion—was about as edgy as a quilt. Without knowing exactly why, I was unhappy with the literary culture that the anthology represented and yearned for something else.
Read Full Article »