Poem in I-70 Review

One of my poems appears in the recently released 2025 issue of I-70 Review. The release party was held last night, the night of September 26. My poem, "Nights of Less Darkness," is the title poem of my full-length collection that is currently seeking a publisher. Clicking on the image makes it much easier to read.

Wild Flowers_Summer 2025

Even though I didn't have much time to devote to gardening over the summer, apart from cutting out the weeds and watering somewhat regularly, I was still happy to see how well my native flowers did. I need to make a point of planting more echinacea seeds next year. I would also like to grow wild sunflowers as well. 

I loved stepping outside to see the black eyed Susans and to smell the phlox. I had transplanted the black-eyed Susans from another part of the yard a few years ago. When I am driving around and see wild flowers beside the road, I lament not having a shovel so that I could add the flowers I discovered to my yard.

Sunflowers_2025

I made my annual trip to a nearby sunflower field shortly after the labor day holiday. The blossoms opened a little later this year because the month of August was so dry.  We were having a lot of rain up until the end of July.

Link to Video of To Maggie

Because of my teaching, I am less involved in the day-to-day operations of the press that my wife and I run--Choeofpleirn Press. Always busy in promoting the press, my wife has created videos for each one of the chapbooks that we published, in the hope of attracting attention during the Sealey Challenge. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, we published Christine Andersen's chapbook To Maggie Wherever You've Gone, the winner of our annual chapbook contest, earlier this year. A video describing the chapbook and offering a sample poem can be found at the following link: https://youtube.com/shorts/aSUH0xJizKc?si=kRaIOIrKh9RQe3ik

Harvest Harmonies, Beginning in September

Beginning on September 1, Choeofpleirn Press will be accepting poems and stories for its Harvest Harmonies. Eight poems and/or stories will be accepted in October and featured on our webpage. Last year, we devoted Harvest Harmonies entirely to poetry; this year we will be accepting both poetry and stories. We are looking for poems of 12 lines or stories of 100 words. Each work submitted should be devoted to autumn, harvesting, or any other autumnal activity. Beginning in September, submit your work to choeofpleirnpress@gmail.com. For more details, refer to our website at this link: https://www.choeofpleirnpress.com/harvest-harmony

As an example, I wrote the following poem last year. My poem is slightly longer than 12 lines, however. We do make allowances. 

Clicking on the picture makes the poem easier to read.

AI Description of Chapbook

 

Although I am not an advocate of AI and regularly have to deal with essays written fully or partially by AI as a college professor, I have used the AI Mode in Google to describe my chapbook. The summary is fairly accurate, I thought. 

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James P. Cooper's "Listening for Low Tide"

"Listening for Low Tide" is a collection of twenty-five poems by James P. Cooper, published as a chapbook in 2022. It explores how sound influences our perception and experiences.

Key themes

The poems are set in various locations including Kansas, Oklahoma, Northern Ireland, Montana, England, and Adak, Alaska. The diverse settings are linked by the prevalence of sound, revealing how past experiences and places can commingle through our auditory perceptions. Cooper highlights both the natural sounds around us, like insects and birds, and the noise pollution prevalent in our modern world.

The poems also delve into themes of connection and belonging, with the speaker exploring the meaning derived from relationships with a significant other and a child. The collection begins with images of darkness, suggesting a time when sounds become more noticeable, and concludes with images of sunlight, representing an appreciation of life balanced by an awareness of mortality.

Critical reception

"Listening for Low Tide" received an Honorable Mention for poetry chapbook in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Judges described the poems as "metaphysical yet modern," where the boundaries between dreaming and waking, as well as geographical and existential borders, become blurred.

Availability

The book is available through Amazon and as an eBook from Barnes & Noble and Everand.

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This summary does not alter my perception of AI, however.

Sealey Challenge Video for Listening for Low Tide

My wife created a video featuring my chapbook, Listening for Low Tide. The video can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho6YBOuMlJQ

Choeofpleirn Press Winning Chapbook for 2025

 

Christine Andersen's To Maggie Wherever You've Gone was the winner of the Choeofpleirn Press chapbook contest.

Our judge made this comment:

To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone is a chapbook-length elegy to a young woman who committed suicide by hanging herself. While these poems contain specific details, the poems often end with resonant images and metaphors, allowing the “words [to]…hit the floor screaming” before the poet, in visiting the hill where this woman's ashes were scattered, believes that "the earth /  had swallowed my folly, / entombed my grief." These poems move from grief to bewilderment before repeating these steps. Ultimately, the poet reaches a kind of recognition in that the desire to kill ourselves may sometimes exist, and it takes “feel[ing] the noose / tied taut against the neck…to be absolutely sure that we / would never jump.”

This book is available at Amazon and through bookstores like Barnes & Noble. Electronic copies are available as well.

Poetry Chapbook Contest 2025

Choeofpleirn Press is offering a chapbook contest for poets who have not yet published either a chapbook or full-length collection. Deadline is April 30, 2025.

For more details, go to choeofpleirnpress.com/poetry-chapbook-contest

In previous years, the contest has been judged by Laura Read, Anita Skeen, and Steve Brisendine. This year's contest will be judged by the editors.

Early Attempts at Photography

One of the few things that I enjoyed in high school was learning to develop pictures. My father had an old Voigtländer 35mm camera that he let me use. I was limited to using black and white film because it wasn't possible to develop color film at that time in the darkroom available to me. The process for color film was much more complicated. 

I had hoped to pursue photography when I enlisted in the Air Force. The recruiter said that it was a possibility. I didn't learn until I took my physical that I was colorblind, which limited my career choices.

I am adding a few pictures from when I was in high school. I was going through the drawers in my office over Christmas break and discovered these pictures. The last picture here was an occasion in which I placed one negative over another one.

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Downloading Music Simply by Having a Library Card

 

Over the past few years or so, my local library offered patrons the option of streaming music and downloading music using a program called Freegal. Originally, patrons were allowed five downloads of songs per week; later the number of downloads was reduced to three songs per week. If some songs were too long, that is, longer than eight minutes, they were not included as downloadable. It took nearly a month to download a complete album. The downloaded music from Freegal consisted of a lower bitrate than the music downloaded from Bandcamp—256kbps as opposed to 350kbps. For me at least, there wasn’t a noticeable difference once the music was burned to a CD. My computer is old enough to still include a CD drive.

From what I hear, my local library will be ending its subscription to Freegal in January, so downloading music for free will no longer be an option for patrons at some point.

The best things I downloaded from Freegal are Jan Harbeck’s Balanced, Yuri Honing’s Bluebeard, and Matt Carmichael’s Marram. I have to admit that I feel guilty for not paying for this music. I can only hope that the musicians were compensated in some way by Freegal.

Reading in 2024

In frequenting my local library a lot during 2024, I bought some of the books that were being discarded, such as Mary Oliver’s Devotions. My library only charges a quarter for each book. I once suggested that the library should sell some of its discarded books online, but I don’t know whether they enacted such a venture. I have ordered discarded books from other libraries over the years. I regularly look at used options when I am thinking of buying a book from Amazon.

As someone who regularly completes surveys for YouGov and earns a bit of money after about six months of surveys, I spent some of the money I earned during the year on books of poetry by Faith Shearin, George Bilgere, and Laura Read. I originally had read these books by using interlibrary loan, which is another benefit of visiting my local library.

I added twenty-eight books to my account at LibraryThing in 2024, ten of which were published by Choeofpleirn Press, the press that my wife and I run. We decided to stop publishing our literary journals after 2024 because of budget issues. We are concentrating now on our poetry chapbook and nonfiction book contests.

Early in 2024, before I had to return to teaching, I reread The Bedford Incident, a novel that captures the paranoia within the military during the Cold War.  This novel was made into a movie starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. I found the novel to be much more misogynist than I remember when I read it previously. The misogyny wasn’t as apparent in the movie. After reading that novel, I also reread Ten Hours Before Dawn, an account of a small boat sinking during a storm off the coast of Massachusetts. I have nearly an entire shelf devoted to accidents at sea, and this fascination or fixation can be attributed to my being raised as a Navy brat.

Another interest of mine is jazz. I probably have enough books about jazz to take up two shelves in my home library. I enjoyed reading The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music a bit more than 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool. 3 Shades of Blue, I thought, devoted too much attention to the heroin addiction of these musicians. I ended up only reading those parts of the book that appealed to me—the description of the recording session, for example. The Blue Moment would have been better if it had devoted more attention to the rise of contemporary jazz in Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular.

Another book that I read in the year was Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains. The topic of water in western Kansas is one of my interests. Much of the book describes the writer’s memories of growing up in southwest Kansas, his mother’s own research, and his experience visiting his father while researching the Ogallala aquifer. His first-person account of the water that used to exist in southwestern Kansas and that is now threatened makes the book worth reading. I just wish that the final chapter were less abstract. The author treats the concluding chapter as if it were an academic treatise.

My wife published her screenplay titled Mrs. Nash during the year. She wrote this screenplay while earning her PhD and has only now published it. Mrs. Nash is the first known account of a Euro-American man who chose to live his life as a woman during the 19^th century. Libbie Custer makes reference to Mrs. Nash in some of her writing. I hadn’t read my wife’s screenplay before it was actually published. I have been encouraging my wife to publish it because of how topical the story of Mrs. Nash is. I enjoyed reading the screenplay but would much rather see it as a movie. There are visual cues that I miss and would like to see when Mrs. Nash encounters other women for the first time, for example.

My local library discarded Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, a collection of essays, recently. Although the book is a bit dated, having been published in 2002, I enjoyed reading the essays on Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens.

Otherwise, the time that I usually spend reading went toward my own writing. As a kind of preface to putting together my own collection of poems, I read both Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems and Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, neither of which were extremely helpful for me, having put together a collection of poems for my thesis and my dissertation. Diane Seuss admits in one of these books that there is no formula for putting together a book of poems. During the few months that I devoted to assembling my current collection of poems. I was arranging poems, revising poems, thinking about my poems, and writing new poems. The entire process took a lot of time.

At the moment, I recently completed reading Sanora Babb’s An Owl on Every Post, a memoir of living in eastern Colorado during the early years of the twentieth century. Many of the books that I read pertain to the Great Plains. Any education in the literature of the Great Plains needs to include Sanora Babb. I liked Babb's descriptions of the prairie, the sky, the animals, the weather, and the sounds she heard in An Owl on Every Post. I have The Lost Traveler, another memoir of hers, and the collection of essays Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb on order at my local library. It generally takes a week or two for interlibrary books to arrive. I hope to start reading one of these two books before I have to grade another batch of essays. I have been looking for her novel Whose Names Are Unknown among the thousand or so books of mine, but I cannot place my hand on it. I have been hoping to reread it.