national poetry month

Poet Laureate Embraces Montana’s Poetry Legacy

By Dana Green, 4-07-06

Montana’s link to the poetry world has not been idle.

Sandra Alcosser, who lives part of the year in Florence, Mont., just returned late last night from a poetry reading in Bozeman. Then she will board a plane to New York, where she will be part of a discussion on medieval bestiaries, animal stories that linked the spiritual and natural worlds.

She has spent the past week in a media whirlwind, talking to local newspapers and radio about her work. And next week, she will be in Missoula to receive the H.G. Merriam award at the University of Montana.

Yes, she’s been a tad busy. But there is an explanation.

“It’s National Poetry Month,” she said with a laugh.

Alcosser’s schedule, however, doesn’t seem to slow down much any part of the year. Along with teaching students at San Diego State University and holding poetry workshops across the country, she has added her duties as state poet laureate to her plate.

But Alcosser’s excitement about the new position is evident in her voice, as she talks about how it has increased poetry’s visibility across Montana.

She has been asked to read her work at wildlife refuges, museum openings and local festivals – a testimony to the excitement generated by the appointment, and the realization that poetry and other disciplines can go hand in hand, in Alcosser’s view.

“Montana poets have not had a tremendous of support in (the past),” she said. “This laureateship has opened up new enthusiasm across genres … (and) among poets. And poetry and nature – they have an (innate) connection.”

Alcosser hopes to spend the next year, along with others, working to uncover Montana’s unknown poets.

“Where are the voices from the canon of Montana poetry … that’s the essence of my work – to find those voices and pull them forward,” she said.

Alcosser is currently working with MSU-Billings English professor and poet Tami Haaland to create a book that will tell Montana’s history through a collection of poems.

As they researched the book, Haaland discovered that Robert Frost’s daughter, also a poet, lived and worked in Billings. Frost visited her periodically, until she tragically died in childbirth with Frost at her side.

The book continues to grow, as they discover other unheralded poets and writers, according to Alcosser.

Ultimately, these Montana poets' lives and work will be housed at MSU-Billings, where Haaland is compiling the Montana Poetry Project, Alcosser said.

Alcosser has published seven books of her own poetry, and she hopes to spend next year completing her eighth – and book that will focus on themes of exploration, inspired by a 1992 trip on the Missouri River.

“People move across territory and settle it to make it invulnerable,” Alcosser said. “It’s about the exhilaration of discovery … and the ultimate exhaustion that takes place, after resources and people are (used).”

For Alcosser, Montana is only just starting to explore its own poetic and literary past. She credits groups like the Montana Arts Council and the Committee for the Humanities, as well as events such as the Festival of the Book, for bringing Montana’s literary community together.

“It’s an incredible gathering place,” Alcosser said. “And right now, there’s a tremendous energy … and a lot of amazing work and projects being done across the state. Poetry was always there, but it has come back to life as a community in Montana.”

Alcosser will receive the award at the annual UM Library Banquet Wednesday, April 12, at the University of Montana.

Also on April 12, D’Arcy McNickle, a Montana American Indian novelist and anthropologist, will be given a posthumous H.G. Merriam Award.

The H.G. Merriam Award honors the memory of Harold Guy Merriam (1883-1980), the English professor who started UM’s creative writing program. The awards have been presented since 1982 by the Friends of the Mansfield Library, a group that works to promote the library and enhance its holdings.

Michael's Wine

by Sandra Alcosser

Winter again and we want
the same nocturnal rocking,
watching cedar spit
and sketch its leafy flames,
our rooms steamy with garlic
and greasy harvest stew.
Outside frosted windows--
claw marks on yellow pine,


Venus wobbling in the sky,
the whole valley a glare of ice.
We gather in the kitchen
to make jam from damsons
and blue Italian prunes,
last fruit of the orchard,
sweetest after frost, frothy bushels
steeping in flecked enamel pots.


Michael, our neighbor,
decants black cherry wine,
fruit he ground two years ago,
bound with sugar, then racked
and racked again. It's young and dry.
We toast ourselves, our safety,
time the brandied savory
of late November.


I killed a man this day last year,
says Michael, while you were away.
Coming home from town alone,
you know the place in Lolo where the road
curves, where the herd of horses got loose
New Year's Eve, skidded around
white-eyed, cars sliding into them?
Didn't see the man until my windshield broke.


Could have been any one of us.
Twenty-nine years old, half-drunk,
half-frozen. Red and black hunting jacket.
Lucky I was sober. We stand there
plum-stained as Michael's face
fractures into tics and lines.
He strokes his wine red beard.
Michael with no family,
gentle farmer's hands, tilts the bottle,
pours a round, as if to toast.

It was so cold, he says,
that when it was over,
he swirls the distilled cherries
under a green lamp, there was less
blood on the pavement than you see
this moment in my glass.


From Except By Nature published by Graywolf Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Sandra Alcosser.

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