John Walser

John Walser, associate professor of English at Fond du Lac’s Marian University and co-founder of Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective, was honored at CWW’s May Awards Banquet as winner of the 2015 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. 

Walser’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Barrow Street, Nimrod, the Evansville Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, Fourth River, the Hiram Poetry Review, Bird’s Thumb, Lunch Ticket and Quiddity.

The Niedecker judge said of the five poems that comprised his entry, “John Walser’s poems are the pure music of an anxiety his speaker manages to translate into a kind of joy: “Thirty-six degrees/is a crocus bulb shoot/breaking the top soil/of our hibernation.”  Walser believes in the power of image as representation of consciousness, and his poems speak to the power of nature when it is understood in its unity with humankind.”

Following are the remarks he made when he received the Niedecker Award at the May 14 banquet:

“Thank you to the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

Knowing the poets who have won this award in the past, all I can say is that it is a great honor to be receiving it now.  Receiving it when Susan Elbe and Ron Wallace, two of my favorite poets in the state, are also being recognized makes this doubly special.

Thank you to Jericho Brown for his amazing words about my work.  I don’t even know what to say about what he has said.

I want to thank Spillway, the Pinch, Connotation Press, the Superstition Review and the Evansville Review for originally publishing these five poems.

I’m thinking today of my late mentor, my late mensch, a great man, Jim Hazard, whom I miss greatly and wish I could share this with.

Most of all, though, I would like to thank the person who helped me choose these poems, the person who kept me from ditching “Still Life” completely.  (I was about to throw it out, and she said to me, more or less, “What’s wrong with you?”)  She’s my first reader; she’s my best reader; she’s the absolute love of my life, Julie Pallowick.  I couldn’t do this without you.”

These poems are two of the five he included in his entry:

 

IN FEBRUARY, THE UPPER MIDWEST

 

Despite the cigarette burn sky

the covenant of ice

 

despite the frayed crocheted shadows,

the exposed lip of the sliced burlap sack

stiffened around top of the root ball

 

despite the draughts in the walls

the hypnosis clock that clicks

in the other room

 

despite this morning’s thin arbor vitae

willow-bowed at its waist

 

despite the cherry pit buds

that we know were fooled by

the weakest grey warm spell

 

we embrace the lying sun:

 

the afternoon thaw

of heavy snow melt limp

cedar bough collapsing.

 

Our shortening shadows

believe the run-off, the slush.

 

Thirty-six degrees

is unzipped jacket jubilation.

 

Thirty-six degrees

is a crocus bulb shoot

breaking the top soil

of our hibernation.

 

STILL LIFE, LONDON:

WATCHING DINNER SERVICE AT BALFOUR AFTER A DAY AT THE TATE

 

The macramé of her spine, mallet and chisel

shoulders rippled museum smooth:

the waitress’s dress, black strapless, splits

in the back like a weld failure, like metal fatigue.

 

Behind glass, Bloomsbury constant shuffles –

hearts and knaves against the lights.

 

Brow thick, mainly salt, he sits across from her.

She walked in using a single crutch, her narrow face

like a pillar, eyes as large and dark as angel fish.

She’s wrapped mustard silk around her throat

like a loose wind pennant pole draped.

 

The waiter pulls out a chair, sits elbow rested

with them to take their order.

She drinks bottled Coca-Cola through a straw:

he is as distracted as a Russian father:

they are regulars.

 

In the streetlamps, black taxis stop

like movie extras waiting for cues, their sides

reflecting the legs along the sidewalk.

Nonchalant as cats, they drive off, replaced by others.

 

When the waitress at the bar ballerina long reaches

at the top shelf for a lager glass: her wrist silver

and knotted twine green as a holiday, on her neck

a delicate cigarette burn birthmark.

(Tell her she is beautiful, someone, please.

In ballet flats, in short skirt, in knit tights,

her bra strap loosedipped over her biceps,

she is beautiful.)

 

In the silvered sunflower backdrop of the mirror,

I lean against cool tile:

red raspberry, green apple, some fruit

from a South Pacific island – a deeper green:

their colors like a riddle that promises an answer

for pollination, for a wash of sun that turns skin to water,

turns skin to white wine.

 

If I shift my brush focus, what sideground

will be foreground now?

 

But the couple:

 

He drinks his red wine slowly.

His shirt: blueberry striped candy.

She eats from his plate as though they are lovers.

She asks for parmesana.  The waiter nods.

The night smells of dill, garlic, pork fat, the brine of shellfish.

She holds her fork like an obscene gesture,

takes a tomato wedge with her tongue.