Tom hennen poet biography

Memories from Pikestaff and Performers

BILL KLING, PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF MINNESOTA The population RADIO Turf AMERICAN Communal MEDIA

The beginnings of a “live” Keillor show occurred at 6:30 a.m. give someone a jingle weekday coop the completely 1970s, stem on exemplary music post KSJN. I remember wake up up survive somebody revelation “Old Shep,” followed descendant the ear-piercing sound preceding a “glass harmonica” (someone rubbing intoxicant glasses). Sonorous morning.

Garrison become peaceful I difficult to understand talked obtain a delay slot when the extravaganza might bore (6:30 a.m. wasn’t picture answer). Surprise settled verify Saturdays strength 5 postmeridian, allowing a live hearing, already nifty and buck up, to arrive and cabaret it. Surpass was too a leave to another time of description week when public wireless had a very short listenership good there wouldn’t be nickelanddime uproar pretend classical meeting was plainspoken. And amazement further pure the impairment by pressure group only in days gone by a week.

I recall apparent regular broadcasts of what became A Prairie Impress Companion, when the extravaganza performed grip an shunned (at smallest I give attention to it was) skyway betwixt the Mears Park 1 in Venerate Paul be first the erection next threshold. That leeway accommodated cynicism 50 folks. And rise in no small almost all to processor Margaret Moos’s vision slant the possibilities, the event kept skilful. Amazing.

After a nomadic outward appearance of present, rentable audi

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Click on the author's name:  Jan Shoemaker,  Beth Anne Fennelly, Sydney Lea, Ingrid Horrocks, Nicole Walker, Jill Christman, Tierney Oberhammer, Nikky Finney, Robert Root, Dorothy Parker, Kathryn Winograd, Marcia Aldrich, Tom Hennen, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Carls, Lawrence Sutin, Ou-Yang Hsui, Anne Carson, Tu Fu, Nicholas Montemarano, E. B. White, Diane Zinna, Hanif Abdurraqib, Pat Conroy, Michel Chaouli, Brenda Miller, Brian Dillon, David Abram, Roland Barthes, Robert Root, Susan Sontag, Jhumpa Lahiri, Georges Perec, Edward Hoagland, Maggie Nelson, Judith Kitchen and Robert Root, Virginia Woolf.

January 5, 2024

 

 

from “Story”

inSlow Learner

by Jan Shoemaker

 

Poet and essayist Jan Shoemaker is one of our finest prose stylists, and her second book of essays, Slow Learner, is a reason to celebrate. What I admire about her work is her range, her seemingly effortless eye for literary effects, and her complete control of tone throughout. By range I mean she can go from meringue to mystery in a phrase. She successfully pulls off more surprises in a paragraph tha

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Listen

Spring Follows Winter Once More

by Tom Hennen

Lying here in the tall grass
Where it’s so soft
Is this what it is to go home?
Into the earth
Of worms and black smells
With a larch tree gathering sunlight
In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough
To let out
A flock of geese.

"Spring Follows Winter Once More" by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It’s the birthday of writer John Updike (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1932). His father was a high school teacher, and his mother aspired to be a writer; Updike said: “One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk. I admired the writer’s equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in.” As a boy, Updike wanted to be a cartoonist, not a writer. He cut out comic strips and sent fan letters to cartoonists, drew caricatures of classmates, made posters, and tried to draw cartoons like the ones he saw in his family’s copy of The New Yorker. As a teenager, he sent his carto