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These Trespasses

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By Kevin Woster, Journal columnist
Rapid City Journal 9/30/07

...As usual, the South Dakota book festival also allowed me to make a personal discovery. This year, it was Jim Reese. When I arrived at the Deadwood Public Library Saturday at 11 a.m., there were seven people in their seats. I made eight. A woman arriving late topped off the crowd at nine. Such is the poet's life. But Reese seemed to think the turnout was fine. He's an English professor at Mount Marty College in Yankton - a non-practicing Lutheran teaching at a Catholic school, married to a Catholic wife, learning to appreciate the power of Catholic nuns. I'd guess there's a book of poems in all that, someday. But on Saturday, Reese read mainly from "These Trespasses," a jarring collection of real-life poetry that kicks like an old pump-12 gauge. As noted Nebraska poet Don Welch says in praise of the collection, "If you want poems smooth-tongued or surrealistic, don't look here." Welch is right. Rather than self-indulgent esoterica gone soft around the edges, Reese offers sharpened words about tough people and hard lives and landscapes. In a style that's rugged as washboard gravel, he introduces people like Harold Cummins, who never learned to drive because he never had anywhere worth going. He takes us to a Main Street bar where you can "in one corner listen as Harold Tahatchenbach, blinder than a coon in headlights, bends the truth," and watch as Linus Cummins prances around with antlers on his head. And he travels the lonesome byways of Cedar County, Neb. - "blasted country" populated with tough people who have been "pounding the dirt since they could first stand." People like that are worth meeting. Trips like that are worth taking.These Trespasses

In the second line of the first poem in this collection, Jim Reese compares a line of parked trucks to a used car lot. You think I'm kidding. You think a published poet would devise a more insightful, imaginative simile. But here are the opening lines of "Euchre at Two":

Picture Main Street.
Pick-ups in a row like a used car lot,
Chevy vs. rusted Ford--late November after harvest.

The story progresses into a group of old men playing cards in a local dive. Maybe the poet meant the trucks to convey some truth about the old men, but if so, it passed me by. Instead I'm faced with an author who took the noble goal of writing poetry in a working-class vernacular, and pushed it to the reductio ad absurdum of informing us that a line of parked cars is essentially similar to... a line of parked cars.

Imagine the comparisons curbside parking could elicit. Soldiers besieging a fort; a marching band on parade; graves in a churchyard; a border outsiders dare not cross. But no, the author compares a line of parked cars to a line of parked cars. Did Reese hope to attract a non-poetry-reading audience by use of banal symbols? If so, I hate to say that few Nebraska bookstores even carry poetry. If he hopes to sell, it will be to people like me with higher expectations.

Perhaps you fear I'm overly concerned with a single figure of speech. But it eats me because it's emblematic of much of this book. Reese's first full-length collection tries to capture working-class Nebraska vernacular. Which is admirable, but the result is language stuffed with incidental words that don't serve the heightened purpose of poetry. If not for the line breaks, I wouldn't know that most of these pieces weren't meant as short reflective essays or flash fiction.

Not to say all the poems pitch at this same low level. A few of them are quite good. Poems like "Ten Penny High" and "Saturday Night at the VFW" use vernacular Nebraska speech to hint at the words people don't say, truths we don't admit to ourselves. Reese's poems about Vernon and Felice are surprisingly insightful. But every time he builds up such poetic capital, he squanders it on a dud like "Welcome to the World," which I quote in full:

Willow Elizabeth.
Born February twenty-second
two thousand and four.
Six pounds, eleven ounces.
Nineteen inches long.
Beautiful blue eyes
like your mother.
Not much hair,
but lashes, by God,
that'll break a million hearts.

I wouldn't pay a buck fifty to send a friend such vague sentiments in a Hallmark card. I can't imagine an event more stirring than the birth of one's first child, and I expect a poet to express that event in language that is intensely personal, opening his heart to speak the truth about himself. Instead we get the contents of a cardboard yard sign, or a general announcement in the church bulletin.

I wanted to like this book. I wanted it to tell the truth about Nebraska life with intense, incisive language. But it aims so low that I can't imagine which readers Reese hopes to attract. I know Nebraska vernacular makes for good poetry. Twyla Hansen and Ted Kooser have used Nebraska vernacular to good effect for years. But Reese sets his standards embarrassingly low, then pats himself on the back for meeting them. This book should be better than it is.

A literary renaissance across the Great Plains, bolstered by distinctive regional presses, ambitious creative writing programs, well-attended city and state-wide literary festivals, and receptive fans, makes this part of the American West particularly vital right now for American letters. Additionally, Ted Kooser's two-year appointment as Poet Laureate has helped garner national attention to the Plains and its poetic traditions. Among the new voices poised to make a significant contribution to this region's literary culture is poet Jim Reese. In his new collection, These Trespasses, Reese trains his attentive, discerning eyes and ears to those telling details of life lived in place. From the porches, dank apartments, diverse bars, and vehicles of his personae, Reese inspects surprising, clarifying moments of poignancy and honesty, trespasses into connection and forgiveness.
There is a hardness to Reese's vision that does not flinch at tragedy. His poem "13 County" declares, "This is blasted country. / Tough country" (5). In country that turns to hardpan, "it may just be the wind that's left / to echo a true family call," Reese observes (5). In "The Salesman," he witnesses a struggle between a chicken hawk and a sparrow, a portentous "dodge and push" that seems emblematic of Reese's men and women, dodging and pushing against their own demons, external and internal. Like the salesman who "blows by," Reese sees that we are all "running from time and place," waiting for "[f]ast answers [that] don't come quick" (32). Watching over his dreaming daughter in "Premeditation," Reese remembers the rape, torture, and murder of a friend, Christine. Tragedy trespasses into the pleasure of a parent's love, unsettling the surface of things, like a chicken hawk attacking a sparrow. Such moments are discomfiting, sometimes reminding us of our own complicity in sorrow. In "Homegrown," Reese recalls a summer when he worked to dismantle a falling barn for a local couple, foster parents to a boy, George. Some days George helps Reese; other days, George disappears into the house, curtains pulled, "the sound of piano keys . . . echoing in the air" (8). Later Reese reads that the foster parents were "arrested for tying / the child to his bed for days on end" (9). Not once, Reese regrets, did he stop "to ask him: is everything okay?" (9). Social contracts fray in such country and death is a permanent neighbor.
Yet Reese's poems celebrate as well, at times with a raucous humor. Reese's fondness for friends and dogs, his deep love of his wife and daughter, and his affection for misfits and eccentrics give counterweight to the grim cadence of survival. In post-modern Whitmaneque mode, his poem "Nebraska Bumper Stickers" energetically catalogues the plethora of political, personal, and commercial statements plastered to passing cars (including the sly addition of Reese's own Logan House Press motto, "Books are Heavy"). One senses the wide embrace of humanity in such poems. In the section "Ten Penny High," Reese honors the salt of the earth, poor folk living and singing the blues. Mustang Dick philosophizes, in "Backstage Pass--Interviewing Mustang Dick," "It's not the money we're after anymore. / Just one more dance / on a bright light shine" (48). Reese's people drink, eat, gamble, dance, and noodle for catfish, seizing small moments of joy from life's difficulties, making even leftovers and German bologna boiled in beer ("and throw in some onions and kraut") sound like a feast for princes ("Ring Bologna and Beer" 56).
Whitman's ghost haunts these poems (Reese even calls the Mutter Museum to discover the fate of the poet's brain), as well as Bukowski's, but perhaps Reese's biggest nods go to regional mentors, David Lee, J.V. Brummels, and William Kloefkorn. A tradition underscores his lines, but Reese's voice adds new impetus and direction. Hardpan and salt-licked country can still be fertile ground for a talented poet. Like Mustang Dick's songs, Reese's poems "just taste like more" (48). One can forgive these trespasses that bring such luminescent news of life and love.
--Susan Naramore Maher, University of Nebraska at Omaha

By God, Jim Reese gets it.

He knows that this life is what we've got. That it is not something to be bragged up, nor to be made fun of. Yet it should be sung. And Reese sings it in plainchant, without filigree and ornamentation.

Reese's collection of poems, These Trespasses,was recently published by Backwaters Press, Omaha. Some of the poems in the book appeared as "Saturday's Poems" at The Middlewesterner, so you know I liked Reese's work before I ever saw this book. I do not know much of him beyond that, except what comes in the standard bio-notes: that he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, that he teaches there and is on the editorial staff of Prairie Schooner, that his column "Nebraska Bookshelf" appears in the Lincoln Star-Journal, that he is co-publisher of Logan House Press (which re-issued William Kloefkorn's Alvin Turner As Farmer earlier this year).

One can ascertain that Reese has lived among real people, has walked in their shoes, sat with them on their stoops and in their taverns, and listened to them. Listened well. Heard their stories and their speech patterns.

These are "plain poems" in the best sense: sturdy and beautiful both, like Amish furniture. We only pass this way but once, and the journey is what you make of it, and Reese has chosen to make these powerful and moving poems out of the stories of our lives. He might be studying for a PhD yet his poems are "unstudied;" they are not the work of a naif, nor of a sophisticate pretending to be naive. Reese has the tools and he knows the tricks, knows the tricks well enough he doesn't have to use them. He can let things be themselves; that is the beauty of simplicity. He is not clueless, but neither does he come off as hipper than those he writes of, nor hipper than his readers. As I say - authentic. Middlewestern. These poems are grounded in the stuff of this world, yet are never very far way from the music of our dreams.

These Trespasses is divided into three sections, "Noodles and Pretzels," "Ten Penny High,"and "Feel Us Shaking." The poems in "Noodles and Pretzels" seem more rural than those in "Ten Penny High," more rural and more a record of Reese's observations and experience. The poems in "Ten Penny High" are portraits of a sort, often using the words of the person portrayed. The poems in "Feel Us Shaking" seem more domestic: now the poet is married and has a daughter.

In "The Paper Boy," the chronicle of a young man's first day on the job bundling newspapers coming off the press and hauling them to their various post offices for delivery, we find that this is not a perfect world, and we find something of a middlewestern way of dealing with that imperfection. This is the boss talking, giving the kid instruction:

This truck will get you there if you got faith
in the Lord - but the Lord
didn't get the spare fixed yet,
so watch out for them potholes.

When Floyd Knipplemeyer died in 1993, he left a will. In it, Reese informs us, old Floyd gave one son the land and the other son the cattle; the daughter got her mother's diamond ring and the household appliances and furniture. What did the neighbor get?

Floyd Sr. grants permission to finally move fence at the south end of Snake Creek. You're welcome you son of a bitch.

In "Homegrown" we hear of the narrator tearing down an old barn, getting some help from the boy who lives on the place, George, "peculiar and quiet, from a broken home." Then, two years later on the local news:

... a reporter tells me
about the foster parents,
arrested for tying
the child to his bed for days
on end - feeding him
homegrown habanero peppers.

All this education, I think,
and I never stopped once to ask him:
is everything okay?

In the poem "Ten Penny High," Reese starts drawing portraits of Vernon ("and don't be taking advantage of my wife, you hear?") and Felice ("Some sugar is through that bedroom door"). The boys would drink beer at "707 Florence Boulevard" until the night Felice

... asked Chuck Schmal to feel her up,
and he didn't - the night she stabbed
Vernon in the stomach because he couldn't
get it up....

Reese reports the wisdom of Bella at the bar:

"Wedding cake and funeral ham
are my two favorite kinds of food.
I'm serious," she said. "Think about it."

He writes of the pathos of "Saturday Night at the VFW:"

She talked about old relationships.
I smiled and poured her more.
Then she asked,
"What are you thinking?"

I told her,
"Your eyes are still pretty white
for all you've taken in."

The final sectionn of the book is, as I say, a little more domestic, with poems like "Welcome To This World" for daughter Willow Elizabeth, who has her mother's beautiful blue eyes, and

Not much hair,
but lashes, by God,
that'll break a million hearts.

We see the narrator's wife in "Wound Dresser;" she works night shift in the burn unit and finds solace in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass each morning as she sits in the bath tub.

In "Feel Us Shaking," Reese ponders this business of love, of being married. He ponders, and "I know you know what is running/through my heart and head."

I take the rock I gave you off the dirt road
when you said yes - look over at the artillery shell
we fired that night for a bright light shine,
and I hold on.

That's what these poems do - they hold on. The characters we meet, they hold on. The language of these poems holds on.

Jim Reese knows that this old mudball is all we've got, and he holds on; and his poems invite us to hold on, too.

An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the Plains Writers' Tour at Mount Marty College, Jim Reese demonstrates and documents his undeniably talents as a poet and wordsmith with the compilation of his work comprising "These Trespasses". This is a poetry that doesn't have a delicate bone in its whole literary body. Here are a series of highly recommended and distinctive poems that are vivid, blunt, candidly descriptive, and compelling in their engagement with the reader. `At The Bar With Bella': "Give me a shot of Cuervo/with training wheels," she said./"And fill this guy up."//That's all it took. She had me./I watched her hammer one back and then another./She sucked on the limes, tore them to their rind,/then ordered a bloody beer/and slid to the stool next to me.//"Wedding cake and funeral ham/are my two favorite kinds of food./I'm serious," she said. "Think about it."//So I thought about it./And she made all the sense in the world.