DRY CRIK Journal

I got to know John first on the page. I was living at Davis at the time, working on a Humanities project in the Valley bringing poets and photographers together in small events in our rural towns. Someone told me about Dry Crik Review, so I contacted them. "Them" turned out to be him.

He sent me several copies of that lovely journal, which published cowboy and cowgirl poets from all over the western states, work that earned him the Wilbur S. Shepperson Award from the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada. Eventually, he also started sending me small chapbooks of his own poems, which I loved immediately. Here's one from Cattails (1993), "a true story" John adds every time I mention it.

In Rust We Trust

Unwrapping the Great Blue Heron
from a trout line
of twenty #4 Eagle Claws
took two men and a boy
to wrestle still

hoping
that Iron-Eating water
of the Kaweah
might oxidize
the effort.

This new book, Poems from Dry Creek: New and Selected Work (published by Starhaven in London with next year's date) is a collection of some of his best work, old and new together. Many of the poems are set in the foothills along Dry Creek where he's lived most of his adult life, and they speak of the glories and hardships (often bound together) derived from ranch life. See this beauty:

Ides of August

                Coyotes are circling around our truth.
                           - William Stafford ("Outside")

Time before the calves come
to fill the canyon
with the scent
of limp placentas,
wet hides licked
to stand and suck
for the wobbly first time -
time to smell milk
on their faces.

Time to find the rifle,
oil the dust away,
locate that brutal place
and stow it
with a box of shells
in the pickup
until they're big enough
to fend for themselves.

But some of his poems are also from his childhood on the Valley floor. Reading them altogether shows us so much more the connection between these two sub-regions of our watershed. Hear this one from Exeter:

I Owe My Soul

Few secrets in a little town, kids
brooming sidewalks after school,
fat-tired Schwinn's slung with bags

three dirt streets of clapboard shacks
with broke-down wrecks looking-out
so helplessly that we all sang along.

What I love most about reading John's poetry is feeling the tenderness of this poet's heart as we look through his eyes. That tenderness makes him (and me) laugh and cry sometimes, and sometimes it makes us both rage. But it is a heart that has come to know over time that loving a place is the only way to truly live in it.

And the result is worth the price. In the notes at the back of the book, he ends with this clear statement:

"I have been blessed, despite battles, by investing my life on Dry Creek, being spiritually and physically dependent on its well-being. This ground owns me; the poetry has offered other eyes by which to see it."

This collection allows many more of us to bear witness to that kind of life. Here's to the hope that more of us will become so owned.

-Trudy Wischemann is a landless but not homeless poet and writer who works at the Book Garden in Exeter. (Sun-Gazette, December 5, 2007)