New West Poetry Book Review

A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing
By Jane Augustine
Marsh Hawk Press,118 pages, $15

It's hard to think of poetry and mountain climbing in the American West without thinking of the Beat poet and the mountain-climbing hero of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder. All of us who see mountain climbing as a bit more spiritual than the average weekend recreation owe a little something to Snyder and the Beat generation’s vision. In a certain sense, poet Jane Augustine also owes a lot to Snyder: like him, she is an enthusiastic mountain climber, a devoted student of Buddhism, an erudite reader of world literature, and a poet who, despite traveling the world, has maintained her roots in the West where she was born. In her poetry, likewise, she shares Snyder's penchant for the short free-verse lyric.

Augustine's latest book of poetry, A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing, however, is not one of the awkward homages to the Beats that are still being published. As its playful title suggests, it is an assertive testament of one woman's life in the West that should be read as both a tribute to, and a gentle poke at, the spirit of Snyder and the (often exclusively male) literary counterculture that claimed the landscapes of the mountain West for their own. In these lyrics, which manage to embody both the elegiac and the celebratory, the confessional and the mystical, Augustine confronts traditional myths of Western life by defying our expectations about what poetry that celebrates the West should be. [more]

NO CANCELED ORDERS

My special Wild Bill column on Monday covered the statements and campaign contributions made Dan Cooper, president and co-founder of Cooper Firearms in support of President-elect Barack Obama. As his statements caused a firestorm of criticism from his customers on gun websites and blogs, Cooper resigned from the company and said he was worried about the future of his company because two of his biggest retail accounts, Cabela's and Sportsman's Warehouse, had canceled their orders.

Which turned out to not be true. [more]

Obama-Mania Hits Boulder

Ohio was the turning point. When Barack Obama won the crucial Midwest state last night it popped the release valve on eight years of pent-up outrage, frustration, and shame for millions of Democrats and independents across the U.S.

Up to that point the several hundred Obama supporters gathered at the Boulder Theater had reacted with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety as early returns were reported by MSNBC and CNN on the big screen. [more]

Western Book Roundup

Last week the 2008 Whiting Writers Award for emerging writers was announced, and among the ten winners of $50,000 each were a couple of Western writers, Oregon native fiction writer Benjamin Percy (whom we featured here), and fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, who currently lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona. (There were also two California-based honorees, fiction writer Lysley Tenorio and poet Douglas Kearney.)

Oregon's Barry Lopez presented the awards, and Galleycat shared this video interview with him, shot at the event. Lopez said of the honorees, "The world's problems are not theirs to solve—they're the ones who will provide us the structure in which to think about how to address these things."

Also in the Roundup: The Center of the American West features immigration as the topic of this year's "Words to Stir the Soul," and the Wasatch Journal extends its story contest deadline. [more]

President-Elect Obama

It took a while, but Democrats in Colorado got almost everything they wanted in today's election results.

For more than an hour after the polls closed around the state neither the national nor local news organizations had called the presidential race in Colorado. Finally, at about 8:30 – moments before CNN called the national race – and with 32% of the precincts reporting, The Denver Post reported, "Colorado, a traditionally red state, swung blue tonight as voters chose Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for president and Congressman Mark Udall for the state's open Senate seat."
[more]

Here in Montana, and across the Rocky Mountain West, the election of Barack Obama represents the startling culmination of social, cultural and political changes that have been underway in this region for many years. You've heard a lot of this by now: the Mountain West, increasingly populated by amenity-seeking coastal migrants and Latino immigrants, and with an independent-minded electorate that's resistant to Republican over-reaching on social issues, is no longer solid red, but rather "in play." And if the breadth of Obama's victory ultimately rendered the electoral votes of Colorado and New Mexico and Montana and Nevada superfluous, the deeper significance of the changes remain.

It certainly didn't play out the way any pundit might have predicted a couple of years ago. Obama, for starters, is hardly the "Western" candidate that many Western Democrats imagined would be the standard-bearer for the inevitable breakthrough. "You guys have a nice deal around here," Obama said in Missoula last spring, with all the wonder of a first-time tourist. He joked about going fly fishing (a river runs through it, after all!), but it's hard to picture him in waders.
[more]

FIRST AND ONLY ON NEWWEST.NET

Anybody who has been following the cyber-firestorm over pro-Obama statements and campaign contributions made by Dan Cooper, president and co-founder of Cooper Firearms of Stevensville, Montana, knows that as part of the collateral damage, life has gotten hectic at Sportsman's Warehouse.

After the story broke on October 28 in USA TODAY and became the subject of my column on NewWest.Net five days later, gun owners angry with Cooper besieged Sportsman's Warehouse's 66 superstores and corporate headquarters with threats of a boycott if the company didn't stop selling Cooper's products. Then, gun owners angry with gun rights activists calling for the boycott went into those same stores threatening their own boycott if America's Premier Outfitter didn't continue selling Cooper products.

You got to feel for Sportsman's Warehouse, obviously caught in the middle of a controversy they didn't create, so I called CEO Stuart Utgaard. He was anxious to clear it up for us. [more]

Election Day

Equipped with a camp chair, a book, and a box of glazed doughnuts (Vote the Fried Dough Party!), I arrived at my polling place at 7:20 a.m. today prepared for a long wait. There was no one there. Nobody. [more]

Coal-Bama

This morning, on E-Day Minus 1, I got two emails from coal industry associations claiming that Barack Obama wants to "bankrupt" the coal industry. They're equally bogus.

If you actually look at what he's saying, it's No. 1, we should create a cap-and-trade system that will use market forces to make future conventional coal-fired plants non-viable, and No. 2, we should pursue clean coal plants to the degree that the technology develops to enable them. [more]

New West Author Interview

Erin Hogan's first book, The Spiral Jetta, is an entertaining account of the road trip she took through the American West in her Volkswagon Jetta, seeking the greatest hits of land art, including Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in Utah and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently answered some questions via email about why these artists were drawn to the West to create their works, how her perceptions changed over the course of the journey, and the fate of her Jetta.

New West: What first gave you the idea to embark on a land art road trip through the West? Did you plan to write a book about it from the beginning?

Erin Hogan: I had actually wanted to take a trip like this for a while. I mentioned it to an editor friend of mine who said, “Absolutely! You should do this, and then you should write a book about it!” I wasn’t sure I could make a book out of it, but I did think I could write an article or two about the experience. So while I was on the trip I took a lot of notes and pictures and recorded people at these various sites. When I sat down later to start writing, well, I guess I had more to say than I thought I would, and it just grew into the book. [more]