[Tim Murphy]

I met with the editorial page editor of my hometown paper, The Fargo Forum, this morning, and proposed writing a monthly column, The Poet's Corner, for him and the fifteen or so other midwest papers owned by Forum Communications. He loved the idea, and now it just remains for me to discuss compensation with the publisher. I expect each column to be a prosimetrum focused on local concerns, farming, hunting, oil and gas, faith, community, etc. Each to be about half prose and half verse. Not just my verse, but that of my friends as well, so long as they are on point for the audience. We're going to try to sell it some of the big city papers in the midwest too. I gave him Ploughshare, an entire book of prosimetrum, three sample columns, and a little bag of frozen dove breasts. Good meeting. It looks like it could be a great way to reach a very large audience and get them thinking about formal verse.

[Martin Rocek]

Congratulations, Tim!
Sounds very exciting (and like a lot of work!)

Martin

[Stephen Collington]

That's fabulous news, Tim. Congratulations!

If any of it gets posted online, you'll have to keep us updated.

All the best with the project.

Steve C.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Good thinking. Best of luck with this venture.

[Catherine Chandler]

Tim,
This is very exciting news! I hope it all works out.
Cathy

[Tim Murphy]

Thank you, friends. Martin, it's not a lot of work. I know my subjects cold, so no research is involved, and the poems I've had for years. It's just a matter of inviting the reader into the poems with a prose construct. Here's a sample column:

Buffalo Commons

The good Drs. Popper proposed that we solve the problems of depopulation of the High Plains, of our chronic oversupply of food, by finishing the job. Relocate the people, put 1 million square miles to grass, and restore the buffalo to their primeval range. In my twenty-five years of dry-land farming and animal husbandry, I have been animated by a similar pessimism.

No Place For Trees

A few scrub oaks survive
droughts, blizzards, and disease.
Spurge and loosestrife thrive.
This is no place for trees.

Let the returning bison,
gathering like a storm,
darken the bare horizon
of a land unfit to farm.

Although I was only an investor in and chronicler of agriculture, I have lost literally millions, betting on North Dakota, on its farmers, on the mercy of God. The late Richard Crutchfield wrote a great book, Trees, Why Do You Wait? In it he chronicles the bleak future of his people’s home village in Iowa and in the village of Harvey ND. He interviewed a brilliant, unnamed ag banker in Harvey, who explained the grim economics of wheat and beef production, the gobbling of the small by the large farmer, the social darwinism destroying small towns. I was sure that banker was my loan officer at First International Bank, which had just come from Watford City to the big town of Fargo, just to survive. Sure enough it was he.

But most of my poems were a lament for what we were losing, the backbone of Red State America, the virtues that make my state the largest per capita contributor to our National Guard. Right after Frank Popper made his outrageous proposal I wrote such a lament, using for music’s sake, the names of villages near which I have hunted.

Buffalo Commons

In Antler, Reeder,
Ryder and Streeter,
stray dogs bristle
when strangers pass.

In Brocket, Braddock,
Maddock and Wheelock
dry winds whistle
through broken glass.

The steeples are toppled
and the land unpeopled,
reclaimed by thistle
and buffalo grass.

Now we have $7 corn. In December, wheat reached the parity we have dreamed of since 1918. The Bakken Formation has been re-estimated to hold billions of barrels of $100 oil. Our long sufferings appear to be over. The world is out of food and running out of oil. Since our population peaked in 1934, North Dakota’s greatest export has been our youngsters. Now perhaps we can keep them home. As the world’s billions, particularly those in Asia, grow wealthy and clamor for the food we produce more efficiently than anyone on earth, I return to a poem written in one of my optimistic moments as the wheat turned gold on my slopes near Gwinner.

A Farmer's Prayer

Spirit of the wheat
brush every beard
turning green flaxen
with a wave of your wand.
The wind is your oven,
the hills your loaves.
Dry husks rustle,
flag leaves furl,
heads curl earthward
as kernels harden.
Your garden is golden,
your larder laden.
Feed a hungry world.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Wow, Tim, that's excellent news. I hope we get to read some of these pieces -- sounds like a lot of fun.

[Clive Watkins]

Good luck with this interesting project!

Clive

[Tim Murphy]

We intend to put it on line. The Forum owns a lot of TV and radio stations too, so they'll be having me tape the pieces, which will also be available.

[Roy Hamilton]

That is great news, Tim! It will be an interesting and fun endeavour and possibly lucrative as well. If you throw out a few subjects as a challenge I know you'll get lots of feedback. I'm in and enjoying reading a new author right now, you.

Regards, Roy