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Jim Lenfestey, award-winning writer and publisher of four poetry collections, seeks out quiet in his life. It is this peace and calm that helps him “unlock his spirit” and create poetry inspired by his teacher, Cold Mountain.

I met Jim at his Minneapolis home to chat about poetry, the craft of writing, and life—though I'm nervous about discussing poetry well before I pull up to his white, picket-fenced house (“the only one on the block,” he tells me). I believe he can sense my nervousness, and lightens the mood by making a pot of tea. While the water is boiling, and before I can even cue up my recorder, he says, “So, Stephen, tell me your life story.”

I'm surprised, as I can't remember anyone ever asking me this before, but I give a snapshot of my life – where I'm from, what I do – and believe it or not, it calms my nerves. The mood-lightening chat is a warm-up (as is the hot tea), and I'm unlocked now, ready to ask, listen, and see inside the mind of how one poet is inspired to craft a form I'm already finding less intimidating.

SLEET: When did you start writing poetry?

JIM: Funny you should ask that. I just finished a book that took me on a journey into exactly that question. I'm going to work backward now.

Okay, so when did I begin writing poetry? I just finished a draft of a book which will be coming out the next year or two called Seeking the Cave: A Poet's Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain. It's about a trip that I took to China in 2006 searching for the cave of a poet I've loved for 40 years – a poet named Cold Mountain – Han Shan, who lived in a cave in the Tien Tai Mountains. Only recently was that cave discovered for the outside world and I indeed was able to find the cave. But, the book turned out to be as much about my journey into poetry. When I sat down to write the book, it was initially going to be just poems, as I found 55 poems in my journals when I returned. Then I had the idea, “What if instead I do the book in the form of a haibun?” It's a Japanese form, in which the poet tell the prose story of what led to the poems, in addition to the poems. When I sat down to write that story it uncovered a third, unexpected layer, wondering: “Where did this stimulus for poetry come from?” A stimulus that took me, at age 62, hunting across the backcountry of China seeking the cave of a poet only because I loved his poems and wanted to show my gratitude?” Jane Hirshfield says “the only travel is inward.” Two details come to mind right now. One is in a poem placed early in the book, called, “The Boy Needs a Book in His Hands.” Here are the first four lines:

When the portrait painter sat me down at three,

She said, “That boy needs a book in his hands.”

She painted my eyes big, a lie,

But my hands did not lie.

 

The painter was a neighborhood woman, down the street. And there I still have that painting – holding a book. She saw something radiant in me even then…a love of books, long before I knew that I loved them.

So what do I remember of actually writing poetry? A couple of moments come to mind. One is a high school English class reading the classic poem by Robert Frost, “Out, Out.” It's a heartbreaking tale, but that isn't what struck me. It was something about the sound of Frost's opening lines – sound of sense woven together. I remember a moment of illumination — I must have been around 15 years old — wondering, “How did he do that?”

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard…

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

 

I know there's a 10-dollar word for that, onomatopoeia, but for me it was simply the multiple layers, language that could do two things at once – two effects – in a single phrase. The buzz saw “snarled and rattled.” That's of course, is the sound the saw makes. But it's also the sound and rhythm of the words mimicking the sound and rhythm of the buzz-saw action. I became entranced that language could do that, that it could work on more than one level at once. I've been entranced ever since.

One more detail I now recall. Back then, a friend gave me a copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It's a funky book and by the way, has now sold over a million copies. In later years, I got to know him. But back then it really was a revolutionary book. It's written in “hipster rhythm,” had a hipster rhythm to it – quite exhilarating. It's still around, still in print and I highly recommend it to anybody.

That had an effect on me too; that one could write in a different rhythm than the “stilted old rhythms” of what I've been hearing up to then. Not that I didn't love the rhythms of the old poems, you know the iambic. OR limericks, OR the bad jokes that all go in those forms. I love all forms, but those shoeboxes didn't have room for me back then, didn't seem to offer the opportunity to express what I was feeling. So from Frost I learned the sound of words was as important as what the meant, from Ferlinghetti the music in street speech. I began trying poems, experimenting with what language could do.

But certainly I never thought of myself as a poet, that that was an interest which could flower into a vocation. I had never met a working artist in my life. My father was an engineer. He had a family business. As the only boy, I was expected to go into the family business. I worked there every summer. I had two older sisters, one of whom would have been terrific at business, but of course no one considered a woman in those days, the fifties, and so they groomed me. I went to college expecting to become a civil engineer but in the end took more literature courses than engineering courses.

S: A revolt?

J: Well, I'd like to distinguish myself as pulling off a “revolt” but it really wasn't. It was a very slow evolution – sparked by that love for “a book I my hands.” I was slowly changing out of one suit of clothes, which I was born expected to wear, and into another, still forming that new identity. So now I'm 67, and just finished rewriting this book, for the hundredth time – Seeking the Cave, — and only in that writing did I finally recognize what happened to me at the beginning. These personal stories bubbled up. Like some of the Chinese poets, I said no to the family business. I spent a lot of time shaking off that old identity, but it wasn't easy. I mean, my parents were wonderful, very encouraging of any avenue. This was not that “they wanted me to do one right thing,” but if I didn't know what my “right thing” was, they wanted me to choose to be part of a 100-year old family business they loved. That made a great deal of sense. But I slowly took off that suit of clothes.

Another of my joys discovering ancient Chinese poetry is that 50 years is not a long time for self-discovery. So many of the fine poems are by older poets longing to escape the demands of city and family life for the pleasures of nature and poems. There's no such thing there as a long time.

One of the stories I love to tell is this. I'll recite a poem (Points to the bird feeder outside). See the birds out there?

The birds and their chatter overwhelm me with feeling.

At times like this, I lie down in my straw hut.

Cherries shine with crimson fire.

Willows trail slender boughs.

The morning sun pops through the jaws of blue peaks.

White clouds are washed in the green pond.

Who would have thought I'd ever leave the dusty world

and come bounding up the southern slope of Cold Mountain?

 

That poem is 1200 years old. And here we are today with the birds overwhelming us with feeling. That's one of the poems I fell in love with from the mid-1970's from a book, Cold Mountain: 100 poems by the T'ang poet Han-Shan.

S: I recognize that poem from your version.

J: Oh you do? I put it at the beginning of my last book and said, “This is my model right now.” By absorbing the rhythms of hundreds of poems like that one, I began to make poems in that form.

S: Oh, so cool.

J: Well, think about that. One of the discoveries late in my life, because I've written poems now since I was 15: Time doesn't matter. Time in a life doesn't matter. Time in history doesn't matter, because a poem speaks to me personally across 1200 years.

S: It's timeless.

J: It's timeless and also space less – if you can find good translators. One of the secondary purposes of Seeking the Cave is to honor the great Twentieth Century scholars and poets who carry ancient Chinese poetry to our hands: Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, Red Pine, David Hinton, and many more. Poetry transcends time and will easily transcend space if the right translators come along at the right time.

A side note. No great Twentieth Century translator translates ancient Chinese poems with end rhyme, whereas all the originals are end-rhymed, plus many more rhythmic and rhyme complexities. That abandonment of rhyme allowed tenth century Chinese poems to resonate with twentieth century American ears, as the nineteenth century rhymed efforts decidedly do not. It's like what Robert Bly did for Rumi – asking Coleman Barks to “free these birds from the cages” of stiff 19th century formalism.

So. From age 15 to 55, I wrote poems constantly but only published a few, and gave a few readings, as my life fell into to what Zorba the Greek calls the “full catastrophe of life”— four children — one of the joyous responsibilities of life. Oh God, I don't even want to think of all things I did do while I did not publish poems. I started a neighborhood newspaper and The Circle native newspaper, energy conservation and environmental groups, neighborhood sports leagues, Open Book – what was I thinking?!  — All the while I was trying to earn a living as a teacher, marketing communications consultant, journalist. I stole time to write poems, but they went into a drawer. When the children were young, I would write late at night. At first, we'd put the kids to bed at 8:00, then 9:00, and then 10:00. When we moved to this house, we put our two sons on the third floor and I'd wait up because I needed quiet. I needed the “buzz of the world” to calm down. Then I heard my 13-year old son walking his big feet above me, staying up later than I could, and I gave up. So around 40, I began to get up early in the morning. Turns out that is also what William Stafford did, and Ted Kooser. I wasn't following them at the time, but only seeking my own quiet. But I began to do what Stafford recommends. He would get up in the morning and write a poem every day. But he was very conscious of his process, as poetry was his vocation — I wasn't as conscious and just did it “because my pen won't stop,” as I say in one poem. If you look on my website, you'll see an essay about that almost unconscious, backwards process.

S: I read that essay – twice – because I was trying to discern the “quiet” aspect of it. Do you mean, literally “quiet?” Or was it inside your mind – quiet? It sounds like a combination of both, like you needed one with the other.

J: Yes, exactly. And there's a process. In this busy life I was living, one of the things that I've learned about myself – a strange recent observation – is that I'm “built to go forward.” I put on a lot of events, for example – particularly poetry events these days – and I've done so for years. Once I've put on an event, I'm not much good on the backend of say, writing thank you notes, and all that, because my psyche has already moved on the next event. That's part of my nature.

So this quietness I need in two ways, as a meditative stillness and pausing the “move forward” toward the next project, racing off to the next problem, the next election, the next thing to do. So sitting still forces me to physically slow down as well and — finally — be in the moment. My best time for this now is early morning. I get up in winter dark or at summer dawn. Often I read, and then a line, or feeling, will well up, and I'll take out my notebook and try to catch it. When I type it up, that “morning stuff” is often the seed of something much deeper. So I'll see if anything comes of it.

S: You do ever get that same inspiration from racket – ever – from noise?

J: For me it's always been quiet but I can't say “never.” Driving in a car trip alone often works for me – no radio, allows feelings and images, perhaps inspired by the landscape but not necessarily – to bubble up. But generally, I believe that what you needs is a place and time to unlock yourself. I think that applies to everybody. Now there are wonderful musicians – I see the singer/songwriters today as the great poets, the troubadours. We who write out of stillness may be poets of an “antique era.”

By the way, writing poems to be recited is important, versus the page poets. I honor performance poets, a wonderful skill, though perhaps less enduring. I write many poems wanting people to hear them, and I read them aloud to myself. But they mostly originate only when the chaos of the day is temporarily stilled so the spirit door is unlocked. And that can only happen by getting out of those crazy places, by letting it all settle down. That isn't a reflection on subject matter. You can write about traffic, like Transtromer does, or you can write about a rock concert. I used to put on rock concerts as environmental benefits – I can't stand the noise anymore. But I used to put them on. You can write about whatever inspiration internal or external, but the poem has to come from, or end in, another place. And I'll tell you where that place is. It's somewhere inside here. I'm gesturing to somewhere between the belly button and the skull, along the spine, the axis of heart and soul – they're located inside here. They're definitely not located in here (points to head). This is a huge distinction I've learned from Robert Bly. He's very helpful about that. You want these things to come out of place inside you that's mysterious, that you don't understand, and the writing process helps nurture, even clarify. Though it may be a clanging bell or a train whistle that send you there. I suppose an electric guitar could do it, but I'm not sure.

But the process has to lead you back down inside yourself. I'll give you four lines of a poem by William Blake:

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball

It will lead you in at Heaven's gate

Built in Jerusalem's wall

 

Robert Bly took those lines from William Stafford's fine book about writing, Writing the Australian Crawl. I've heard him (Bly) recite those lines many times. Now I recite them to you. That's how these gift linkages work.

The poetry process is to position yourself to crack you spirit once you start pushing your pencil, or pen, or keyboard, and watch, and listen, to learn where your fingers lead. The secret for me (and for Stafford) is that your hands connect straight to your heart, bypassing the head entirely.

I give poetry workshops in prisons, and I can tell you right now that I can get the entire room writing furiously and crying in 10 minutes. I first give them this process  – have them write down those four lines of Blake, as I explain, briefly – the metaphor. The end of golden string is the first impression that entangles your pencil. Whatever you see or hear or think, write it down, and then follow it! I often add a spark — “Describe your absent father's face.” Well, everybody's fucked up with their fathers so we get right to it, don't we? But the process is built from a pencil and a piece of paper and letting it lead you once you have the spark, the end of the golden string. Writing poetry – maybe all creative writing – seems to me fundamentally tactile. It comes through the fingertips, into the pencil, into the keyboard, bypassing the head completely, where we are churning it all over too much. The hands let the interior impressions come out, those images that come from dream life, out of our psyche and out of our heart and soul – that move us in the direction of Jerusalem's wall.

The tip of the golden string is an awareness that begins just by pushing the pencil until it starts moving on its own. It could be anything. Don't ever worry about what the stating point is because you're going to throw away those first lines anyway. But it starts the process and then takes you along for a wild ride. And the ride winds that golden string into a ball, which is down here in your chest, and then once you have the practice down, it can lead you back up to Heaven's gate, built in Jerusalem's wall. It takes you right to spirit.

Robert Bly argues you have to “go into the grief” first, down inside your heart, inside the darkness of the well inside you. That's a very hard road for me and hard for a lot of people. It's extremely hard for most men, certainly myself included! Who wants to let go, you know? But only then do the utterly amazing images and feelings come out. If the writing really goes well, you'll climb back out of that dark well into golden sunshine and you've created something sturdy, even magnificent. That's the process. That's vintage William Stafford, leavened by the understandings of Bly and leavened further by my affection for ancient Chinese poetry.

S: Now you teach poetry in the summer right?

J: Yes.

S: Is this a sampling of a lesson?

J: Actually no, I don't teach writing skills except that quick exercise in prisons. I know writing is a therapeutic process. I feel I don't have much to offer artistically and so don't feel particularly competent to teach poetry writing. Remember, I had to feel my own way for fifty years! The summer classes I teach in poetry are all content. “Lessons,' they call them, although some attendees have said this class or that one changed their lives. Secular sermons, I call them.

For eight weeks throughout the summer, one hour each week, I get teach a poet I love. Again, I call them “secular sermons.” I attend church whenever I can, and am moved by many of the ancient stories from spiritual traditions, not just Christian, and the sermons that use those stories to make a point about our interior lives. I've been most moved by many of the Native American stories originating on this continent, and taught American Indian Literature for twenty years. They have absolutely changed my life. And I've been impressed by the compassion for all beings in Buddhism. So what I get to do in the poetry class is deliver a sermon, using the world's great literary texts as signposts. I'll talk about Cold Mountain retired alone in cave after his wife and family disappeared, and recite his poems, or a depressed Gerard Manley Hopkins, and recite “God's Grandeur” and “Inversnaid.” Because poetry comes – great poetry – so often comes from the same place as the personal journey if all of us, and spiritual traditions. It offers a guide for exploration, don't you think?

S: I'd have to agree.

J:  I architect each hour. Tell who the poet is — background, writing style and objectives. Then we read together the poet's best poems, organized to tell a story, to the walk through the poet's life and the life of the listeners too. I build an arc for each class to have them walk out illuminated by these beautiful texts.

S: So the students know that they're not going to “learn how to write a poem.”

J: Right. There are poets who are very good at teaching writer's workshops, but it doesn't interest me if it isn't about helping ordinary people see into their lives. I want to help you go RIGHT to your heart and soul and guts and grief and joy inside you and figure out how to get a hold of it. That's what I care about. So you can understand yourself better. And the great poets help us do that.

I will say this too. I don't only write Chinese style poems – these eight line poems. But I found, as you'll see in the book, A Cartload of Scrolls, it's a form that mirrors this process in eight line containers.

S: I saw that it in the introduction. You explained how you're trying to write.

J: Yes, I note the structure of the Chinese poem, and that it seems to suit me personally, perhaps from my many years as a journalist and editorial writer – I love compression. Eight lines seem adequate to me to say all I can say on a subject. Forms can be very helpful to writers and I recommend people try them, and this form was a very helpful discovery to me. I worked many years as a journalist, particularly as an editorial writer for the Star Tribune. There's a structure to that particular kind of writing very similar to these Chinese poems. The difference is that my stories and editorials dealt with external reality. After a day at the Star Tribune my head would be burning hot, my brain was working so hard. When I finish writing a poem, my hands are hot. My fingers are hot! But I'm calm inside. It's like watching a pot boil, versus lighting the fire after chopping the wood beneath it. Magic bubbles right in front of you.

This ancient Chinese form – the shih – allows you to lay out an argument, which is what an editorial also does, carefully selecting only the necessary and compelling facts that turn an argument. What an editorial doesn't allow is that marvelous “leap” into the emotional or psychological at the end, which Robert Bly talks about in Leaping Poetry, one of the great essays about poetry. If you asked me what books I would recommend on the craft of poetry, I would say, Writing the Australian Crawl, by William Stafford and Leaping Poetry, by Robert Bly. And Poetry Home Repair Manual, by Ted Kooser. Bly says that a poem should hold some “leap” into the unconscious. It has to reach into the other realm. That leap is a surprise to the writer and to the reader. The structure of the classical Chinese poem has this leap built into it – a surprising turn at the end, called zhuán, “to make a turn.” “Whoever thought I would leave the dusty world/and come bounding up the southern slope of Cold Mountain?”

Journalism did not allow me to do that, nor should it. I was just talking to my former colleague, Lori Sturtevant, and we agreed there's an impervious wall in journalism between fact and emotion. One of the reasons I left was I wanted, I needed, to connect emotion to my writing. I wanted readers to feel something. And you cannot do that in journalism. A journalist's job is to locate the external, verifiable facts and lay them out clearly and effectively, and in the case of an editorial writer, to array them in a way that convinces somebody of an argument. But it's not an emotional argument, but an intellectual, external fact-based argument. Poetry is an argument based on internal facts. My Chinese-style poems could be thought of as emotionally based arguments.

S: When you say, “emotionally-based arguments,” are you asking the reader to take a certain something from it that you're “arguing,” in a sense?

J:  That's an interesting question. I guess not – and you're right calling me on the word argument.

S: Also, do you want them to take what they see in it?

J: No – some people would say that – but no. But that doesn't mean it's an argument either. What I guess I'm looking to do is write something beautiful yet explosive, but not in the political way, but in a surprising way, and a way that touched the emotions. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” If I feel something, and if I capture it, the reader should feel it too. But I guess I'm not making an argument that they must feel it.

S: At least convince the reader to see how you feel?

J: Maybe, but it may take a long time. Let me answer you with the analogy from my teacher as I call him – Cold Mountain, who lived in a cave 1200 years ago. He is said to have written perhaps 303 poems on rocks and trees that were later collected into a book during the T'ang Dynasty, sixth to ninth century. He still is not much read in China, a thoroughly Confucian society of organized relationships, but the Japanese liked him better. Zen monks translated and studied him, this poet-eccentric, and now some Americans like me find ourselves responding to him. I read him because I find material that means a great deal to me – something beautiful and alive and touching for me. Yet he wrote poems only because he loved writing them. He wrote them because they were fun. He wrote them because they were interesting. He carved them on trees and he painted them on the walls of village homes and temple walls. He was expressing himself. And that joy of expression is what comes across through time, so if some reader feels something from my expression a 1000 years from now, I'll be quite happy. That would be a great joy for me and perhaps for that gnarled tree that I will have become.

S: I was thinking about that joy – for me it's music – and connecting with it, regardless of how old it is.

J:  I agree. I think poetry should be seen as analogous to pure music. Seven of the nine muses of ancient Greece were poetry and music. But also sculpture or painting. You see a painting and what is it? Certainly not an editorial. It's not trying to convince you of an argument. It affects you because of the color, intensity, the beauty – which may be grotesque. There are all kinds of emotional possibilities.

Or a poem is like a sculpture. When I was an editorial writer, I wrote like a sculptor. I'd start by throwing everything I knew about a subject at the screen, as fast as I could, everything that could build the argument. So now I had a screen pile of information and some linkages, but a mess. I'd do that in my first hour and now it's ten in the morning, and the final editorial is due at three in the afternoon, to be edited and published the next day. I'd spend the next 4 or 5 hours carving and shaping. It was like a potter pulling up a pile of clay, this formless pile, and then shaping it, mostly carving away. Often something was missing as well, an armature of fact. Then I'd research what was missing by interviewing people, reading studies, or sending the librarian searching around the world, doing everything I could to build the editorial into a polished and beautiful structure, in that case, a compelling argument. Well, for poems my process is similar, but the inspiration is different, a feeling, or interesting sounds. Musical speech sounds, that's where the music comes in. And I'll feel them in my body. You know that feeling?

S: I just did a few days ago and I had to get a piece of paper and write it down!

J: Exactly. I carry a notebook in my pocket and write down every magical feeling or musical line that comes to me. Often I'll be driving the car because for me that tends to be a time of relatively unlocked space, you know, radio off, when your mind is not engaging with the world or somebody else. So get unlocked and then when a line comes up you catch it, and hang on and see where it goes. That will end up as a scrawl in the notebook and I'll come back to it later. And even if I can barely read my own chicken scratching, that feeling comes back. That's what (William) Wordsworth said poetry is, “emotion recollected in tranquility.” So what happened is that one captures the emotion in a line or two – and then when you get to a “tranquil” place those lines may or may not be any good but the feeling comes back to you and as you continue, all kinds other connections occur. You're feeling, “Whoa,” but you follow along and often what arrives at the end is something completely other than how it began. What arrives at the end is probably what's important. In a rare case, it could be what's at the beginning. Those lines I cited to you before, from little poem, “This Boy Needs a Book in his Hands.” That phrase came to me and I took it. Was it something about the B's? And the equivalent weight of the sounds, “boy, book, hands?” The content is really a little narrative to start, until we get to, “my hands did not lie.” Then the horse of the poem rides away, me hanging on.

THAT BOY NEEDS A BOOK IN HIS HANDS

When the portrait painter took up her brush to capture me at three,

she told my mother: “That boy needs a book in his hands.”

She made my eyes big, a lie. But my hands did not lie.

The radar of my palms flies me through insect nights.

Fingertips reveal cold syllables carved on rocks and trees.

I have heard the dull thud of fists greeting skulls.

My open hand rebels, curved like an ear, a tortoise shell,

a woman's body, a child's head of hair, the earth itself.

 

Initially that horse went the wrong direction. I had a different quatrain ending I didn't like at all. I kept that draft around, because I think I liked the “lie,” felt that was hooked on to something. So when I was writing the latest draft of Seeking the Cave, I remembered those first four lines, because I knew they were true, “She painted my eyes big. A lie. But my hands didn't lie.” But the rest of the poem wasn't true. Then an interesting thing happened. I was looking at this poem and I suddenly cut away the failed four lines and found myself immediately back the saddle heading a deeper into the forest, but different direction. It was really about the hands, I learned now. Recollected in tranquility, off the poem went. So I revise this same way. From the captured original feeling, you get back to your desk and that feeling pours back in and you ride it again. That's what Wordsworth was saying. And that's been my experience. If you can capture that original feeling, it will come back and inspire you to follow it along, again and again, until the best road is discovered.

S: Do you practice any other art forms, like sculpting or painting?

J: No, the only art I practice is writing, but in several different forms. You'll see in the new book prose with poems. But here I am, 67 years old, my life resolving itself into, I hope, “greater simplicity.”

I have four children and six grandchildren. Parenthood is the world's oldest profession, and I'm in it to the end and their lives are as complicated as yours and mine, so that responsibility never ends. That's about a third of my time these days.

A second “third” is that I still write as a journalist, as I gained valuable expertise in education and environmental policy learned at the newspaper, and before, so I still write in those areas, particularly on climate change. I am also active in politics, although my wife does much more.

The final “third” has been the great gift of these last ten years or so. I've had the time to work on publication since 1998, when I left the Star Tribune. I published my first book, personal essays, in 2000 and I've had a small collection of poems come out nearly every year since. This is a great joy for me to be able to do this.

Anyway, I think I might have gotten off the topic. What was the question again?

S: Other forms of art?

J: No, only writing, which I love in all its forms. Over the years I've written plays, screenplays, corporate annual reports, business advertisements, video scripts, and lots and lots of journalism, and now poetry and some prose going forward. I find the essential challenge the same: To awaken something in the reader. Something awake in the writer, some awakening in the reader.

Finally, I teach, which I also think of as an art form.

S: So considering it an art, how do you plan a lesson?

J: It begins the way Kooser begins a poem: by identifying tat part of the audience I want to reach. They are not writers or poets, but citizens in the world. As I said, I'm quite serious about viewing poetry classes as “secular sermons” even though “secular” and “sermon” may sound antiseptic. I want to create a spiritual experience for the people that show up for an hour every Wednesday on Mackinac Island. How do I do that? As I said, the hour has an arc, a beginning a middle and an end. And at the end, I want people to be touched, as I am. Want people to be opened, I want them to feel illuminated. And I think some are. But that's not me. It's because I'm using the best poems of William Blake or Yeats or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Cold Mountain or Basho or Rumi or Linda Pastan, or God knows Emily Dickinson and Whitman. But what makes it fun is that we start with biographical/historical and craft information, then move deeper and deeper and deeper with the poems, and learn together where these poems took the poet. And where they take the reader. It's the process from Blake we talked about earlier. The details start “winding” into something bigger, and suddenly at the end of the hour, we're at heaven's gate! Maybe! Anyway, the arc is a conscious one on my part because I believe in these phenomenal texts from the great poets. I don't know if that's a lesson plan, per se, but that's what I do.

S: Back to “other arts,” I'd love to be a songwriter but I don't know the music part of it all. I just don't know the instrument parts.

J: My son has the same problem. He is a gifted poet but wants to be a songwriter, but also doesn't know music well either, though he as a wonderful ear for forms, including country songs. Well, I suspect you have to learn the music if you want to do that, although there's lots of programs now to help you I imagine. But your instinct is right. Poetry for me begins as an act of love. But in that particular act of love, I know the audience will be small for me. This is not a problem. That's the way I found Cold Mountain, who clearly expected no wide audience, yet I found him 1200 years later. Maybe someone will find a poem of mine 1200 years from now that connects to their heart. But today, most of the major poets are troubadours, the singer-songwriters who may very well reach a wide audience in their own time. Some may have some wider cultural influence, like Springsteen, like Lucinda Williams, daughter of a poet by the way.

S: And do you have any other favorite singer songwriters?

J: Now having said that, that's an intellectual understanding on my part –I hardly know most songwriters, but I'll get to that in a minute. I am teaching a course now in poetry at the lifelong learning institute, and I said that the poetry at the beginning of the century was T.S. Elliot, our first poetry rock star. You know, when T.S. Elliot came to Minnesota, 15,000 people came to see him.

S: Wow, really?

J: 15,000 people filled “The Barn” (at the University of Minnesota), the basketball arena, in 1956.

S: Wow, now that's a ballgame!

J:  Yes. I brought Mary Oliver to Minnesota in 2005 or 2006, by far the most popular poet today, and she hadn't been on the road in years because of her partner's illness. I had 1400 people in that audience, and probably could have had twice that amount if I had the seats. But that shows you the change in the scale – say 3000 to 15,000. Eliot was the last poetry rock star. Woody Guthrie had no large audience in his day, but there was that spark that flew from him to Bob Dylan. Dylan then met the Beatles in 1964, passed a joint, and John Lennon electrified his mind and Dylan his guitar, and singer/songwriters stormed the culture gates and now that's the way most poets want to express themselves. I completely respect that. Dylan is pure genius, one of the 4 to 5 that come along in a century. So was Lennon.

There are a lot of other good ones. I don't pretend in any way to be “up to speed” because I rarely listen to music, spending as much time in quietude as possible. When I'm in the car, I listen to books or lectures, and best of all to nothing at all… stillness…and see where that takes me. Because my life has been busy for so long I revel in whatever moments of stillness I can find. At 67, I still write some articles; I still do politics and family events. But my great love is to just sit and read books. hold a book in my hands” of all kinds and let my pen wander toward that golden string, which may or may not become a poem.

S: In the same vein as “favorites,” do you have a recommendation for local writers?

J: Oh well, absolutely. I do read novels and review books for the Star Tribune. I have three writers – probably only three living writers – that I've read all their work. One is Louise Erdrich and I recommend everything she's written highly, but I'll give you the top for me.

Her very first book, Love Medicine, second an absolute astonishment called The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. She has a poet's ear for prose, and wicked storyteller's heart. In fact, some of her stuff makes your hair stand on end. Then add her last book, which was very risky for her – a front-page review of the New York Times, where the reviewer said what I said to myself when I read it later, How does she dare do this?” A book called Shadow Tag. She's one of the major writers in America, and by the way, a fine poet. Her first writing was poetry. Then she decided she really needed to be a writer who could earn a living. So she began to research magazines that paid, like Redbook. But I put her on stage as a poet once for her a sensational book of poems, but she almost never does readings.

The second writer I've read all of is Jim Harrison and he's a complicated case. I reviewed his last two books unfavorably but what people should read are his novellas. He's the reigning genius of that form. Three or four collections have three novellas each. They're superb. And also – I hadn't thought about this until this second – he's a pretty remarkable poet. A Buddhist inspired poet from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. A local wonder! Those are two that I recommend highly.

There are many from in the world of poetry. Robert Bly of course, who has influenced me greatly, his own work in poetry and prose, his essay Leaping Poetry, his affecting translations. His best friend just won the Nobel Prize, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. In fact, and this is not to disparage Tranströmer, but a Nobel should also go to Bly. A major reason Tranströmer is famous is that Robert befriended him and translated him and brought him to the United States in 1972, and their correspondence is a best seller in Sweden. Bly has translated 23 poets from around the world. His influence is unparalleled. He deserves some great award, and he lives right here in Minneapolis.

S: Local guy?

J: He changed the poetry world from Madison, Minnesota. I just helped publish a book about him, Robert Bly In this World. Lately I recommend the Wen Fu: The Art of Writing, by Lu Chi, translated marvelously from the Chinese by Sam Hamill, beautifully printed by Milkweed Editions. I've given away many copies.

S: Staying on books, there's a book you wrote titled Urban Coyote that I'm interested in because it's about Minneapolis.

J: Yes.

S: I want to ask you about the name, particularly the coyote part, since it's the “trickster,” and I see these references appear in your website too, coyotepoet.com.

J: Well, I was heavily influenced in my twenties and thirties by Native coyote lore – tremendously influenced. There's a book by Barry Lopez which is a compendium of Native trickster's tales. What he did – and I think this is clever – he called them all “coyote stories, whereas in the Pacific Northwest the trickster is raven, the southeast rabbit – hare, and so on. In this part of the world, the trickster is “Naniboujou” or Manabozho.” Louise (Erdrich) often has trickster characters in her books and sometimes plays with that name. In the Lakota world, Iktomi the spider is the trickster. And there are marvelous trickster tales elsewhere, like old Kiowa tales. I read all these and they took me over, and Coyote, from California tales, seems to give fine overall feel of the character.

Like most of us, I grew up in classic Christian culture in a classic Christian home. We weren't heavily religious but were all imbued with the mythology and the lore of old Middle Eastern and European stories, so it was a complete revelation to me read the Native stories and realize Trickster was supremely important in the world right under my feet. They placed him close to the center of creation – a delightful centrality for foolishness and accident completely absent from Christianity – surprise, accident, and humor. What an improved understanding of the world as it really is! I just loved it. I wrote a play for the Children's Theater called Coyote Makes This World.

S: (Coyotes) showing up everywhere now.

J: I just love that. The coyote, the consummately adaptable survivor, is winning. At the end of the day, the trickster Coyote will win as well, as we are learning from global warming. The “urban coyote” is because most live in cities now, and the image I had in mind as a writer was that I'd wander and sniff the back alleys like a coyote finding lost, forgotten, neglected stories lying around behind the scenes. And that's how it turned out. I wrote the column for 15 years, and selected some of them for that book. So yes, it is about place, a neighborhood really, in Minneapolis, but the view of the world is very much influenced by coyote sensibility.

As I've moved lately toward Chinese poems, I think that attraction reflects winning the battle inside me between my Confucian life – the life of community and family and political responsibilities – and the Daoist life, a life of solitary contemplation in nature. I'm moving along that spectrum.

S: So a transition in your life, which is reflected in your work?

J: Very much so. I was younger when the trickster had me in his grasp, and family and community claimed most of my time.

S: Is there anything you're working on right now, since you're always “moving forward?”

J: After editing Seeking the Cave, my next poetry project is titled A Marriage Book. I've been married 45 years. Through all that time, I've written hundreds of poems, those ones that went into the drawer. I find that writing poems gets certain truths told. When you're in the busy world, you're doing your best to get through the day. You put on masks. You tell stories that aren't true – or which are partially true – doing your best to survive in that time warp. Survival rightly requires endless compromises. And what happens is you find yourself at home late one night and you find your fingers writing another story entirely, and you look down at that poem in the morning and it expresses something that was unsaid but true, that you didn't even tell yourself. You didn't have time to tell yourself. You couldn't have understood it. So I have 45 years of those poems to deal with. Finally it is time put them together, love poems really. One of my heroes in life and poetry is Gary Snyder. His epic work of 40 years or more was finally published as Mountains and Rivers Without End. Gary's effort was to capture his feeling and understanding of natural world. My effort of 45 years has been to capture my feelings for this very complicated nexus called family love. Very few of these poems have been published except in chapbooks that readers have responded to. I mostly gave them away. Now I feel I should do more with them. Gary climbed mountains. Marriage is the mountain I've been climbing most of my life. The view from along the way is my next big project. Plus, for relief, an anthology of poems about bees.

S: They sound great.

J: Loving bees is easy. Loving humans is hard. I once sent a selection of marriage poems to a publisher and he hemmed and hawed. It had love poems to children and grandchildren, plus love poems to my wife, some of them erotic, and he said, “I don't feel comfortable putting these together.”

I said they belong together, because that's the honest story. You know? It's all the same package – sex, children (surprise!), pain, confusion, success, breakdowns of children, college problems for children, marriages of children, grandchildren flying in, where did they come from, yet they are yours too. All that.

My Han-shan poems are about my search for an interior life. Seeking the Cave is what I discover there, in fact and in my psyche. A Marriage Book will be about that mountain called family — the climb, the crevasses, the clouds, the mountaintop. That's poetry from that part of my life.

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Please see our poetry section for two of Jim Lenfestey's poems. He was kind enough to share with Sleet a piece from his forthcoming book Seeking the Cave: A Poet's Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain. For more information and further reading, please visit Jim's site www.coyotepoet.com.