Poet Sheryl Noethe

Poet Sheryl Noethe, winner of the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award, has a new book, As Is, coming from Lost Horse Press. (The book is so recent it's not yet listed on the publisher's website: follow the link above to inquire.)

Here is a bio of this remarkable, under-read, ever-emerging and enduring writer:

Sheryl Noethe is both Artistic Director and a writer-in-residence for the Missoula Writing Collaborative. She is co-author of the teaching text Poetry Everywhere, reviewed in Kliatt and English Journal as an informative and tremendously valuable resource for teaching poetry, now in its third printing. A recipient of a Montana Arts Council Fellowship, she also has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the CutBank Hugo Prize in Poetry, the Emerging Voices Award from New Rivers Press, a McKnight Prize for Literature, and an American Academy of Poetry Award, as well as an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a 2004 Cultural Achievement Award from the Missoula Cultural Council for her work in Missoula schools. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, and she has published two collections of poetry, The Descent of Heaven Over the Lake (New Rivers Press, 1984) and Ghost Openings (Grace Court Press, 2000), which won a Northwest Publisher's Best Book Award. Her latest collection, As Is, will be published by Lost Horse Press in 2009. She teaches at Hellgate Middle School for the Missoula Writing Collaborative.

I knew Sheryl years ago, when she and I gave our first poetry reading (with writer Mary Karr) at the Weyerhauser Chapel at the campus of Macalester College. I remember creating a broadside with a drawing I made of 3 women pouring water from a jug out a window. While I eventually stopped trying to make my way through the world as a poet, Sheryl continued on that arduous path: transparency – and a life in poetry – is not for the squeamish.

Lyle Daggett has written a thoughtful, very insightful tribute to Sheryl, talking about the impact of her work on his own, at his blog A Burning Patience. I am not surprised that Sheryl continues to inspire children and others to write poetry: she has a spectacular gift for that. She has co-authored a book with Jack Collum called Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry in School and Community. She says "Writing is a grip on existence, an empowerment, and a way to listen to the inner truth of the self. " It's a way to pour water out of a jar, out of a window, into the road, to see where those rivulets go..

Lyle's piece, "The weight of dreams", takes you to a few of Sheryl's fluid, incandescent poems. (They mention water, too, it turns out.)

25 Random Things: Funding for the Arts

I feel very passionate about the need for funding for the arts.

Mike Wilkerson, who used to manage Ragdale with writer Deborah Galyan, now teaches arts management at American University, writing blogposts to a site called 1/2 Mile Outside the Beltway. There is a sequence of messages there now on the subject of arts funding, including this one from February 12th:

We need new arguments

The elimination of the arts from the stimulus bill -- and the chorus of "who needs the arts" that followed even on liberal sites like Huffington Post and Daily Kos, suggests that we have so spectacularly failed to make our case that the arts are important. The popular imagination doesn't buy the "arts create jobs" concept, even though it's true. People generally understand roads, rails and buildings as ways to employ people. They support (sort of) education, especially when the President talks about crumbling school buildings and the need for science labs.

One of my students last night rather brilliantly linked the beleaguered cause of the arts to the sciences, which, under the previous administration and in the chorus of global warming-deniers, has become a somewhat partisan cause. Who knew that the search for objective truth would become a liberal cause, when even many if not most scientists aren't liberals?

Artists, academics, humanists, scientists -- we're all in the same boat, drifting further and further from the mainstream's perception. Obama's election helped, but we have to row this boat on our own, not wait for his administration's solutions. How shall we speak up for the arts?

You'll find an interesting comment at Mike's site by poet Lyle Daggett, who writes a blog about poetry called A Burning Patience. Lyle brings together a remarkable collection of voices and views – you'll find an extensive list of links to other writers and magazines at his site, as well as timely posts about specific poems, events and publications.

The image above comes from Funding the Arts, the brainchild of Joanne Deutch. One of the best ways to help fund the arts? Buy small press books, tickets to plays, pay attention to what is happening at the margins of our culture. To keep the arts alive, we need better arguments, better critics, better infrastructures for their survival, and audiences that are engaged.