Catch 8 in One Loop Autographed $128.00

 

Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat

All this Way for the Short Ride

Blue-Collar Light

Words Growing Wild - CD

Words Growing Wild - Cassette - For your truck !!

The Glorious Commotion of it all - CD

Rock'n Rowel - CD

Collision of Recklace Love - CD

 

Throw a Loop for These Gems

David Wilke and the Cowboy Celtic

features

"Black Upon Tan"

by Paul Zarzyski

 Megan Harlan, The New York Times Book Review
Rodeo life is the subject of All This Way For the Short Ride: Roughstock Sonnets, 1971-1996 . . . a lively collection of poems by Paul Zarzyski, a former bareback rider, illustrated by Barbara Van Cleve, a photographer who was recently inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. Though both Mr. Zarzyski and Ms. Van Cleve are from Montana, their very different styles work to capture a chorus of contradictory moods: her luminous black-and-white images seem etched from some archetypal landscape, while his verses bristle with audacity and whimsy. Mr. Zarzyski alternates between bluster and lyricism. For the former, he uses lovingly metered stanzas and punch-drunk, self-mythologizing bravura, which heightens both the flair and the corniness of rodeo lingo. ("Running on Bute, LeDous songs and caffeine / You rollicking, rosined-up, spurring machine.") But he proves equally adept at meditative free verse, as in the title poem, in which he compares a cowboy killed by a throw from a bronc to "a bride's bouquet / pitched blind." Ms. Van Cleve's facing photo reveals the impossibly calm center within such a moment, as the leaping horse hovers delicately above the ground and the rider, despite his flailing body, leans back with a peaceful expression. Together, these artists offer a rare slice of what Mr. Zarzyski calls the "real West, the sunset into which -- / imagine why, if you will -- the cowboy rides off."

The New York Times Book Review, Megan Harlan
Rodeo life is the subject of All This Way for the Short Ride . . . a lively collection of poems by Paul Zarzyski, a former bareback rider, illustrated by Barbara Van Cleve, a photographer who was recently inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

 A New West Book Review
Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat

By Allen M. Jones, 8-03-05
 
 Despite the proliferation of cowboy poems and poetry gatherings, New Mexico to Montana ­ the thousands of paeans written to spring branding and calf pulling, the odes to beloved ponies, to haying and feeding and shoeing ­ there aren't more than a few genuine, sure-fire cowboy poets out there. Cowboy rhymers and lyricists, sure; cowboy limerick writers, joke tellers, you bet. But poets? Count em on a couple of hands.

A quick definition: First and last, poetry is about language. It's about using words the way spelunkers use flashlights. It's a stretching of syllables, a stacking of sentences, a carving out of verses into stained-glass patterns until you find art. Cowboy poetry, it's always seemed to me, too often hides behind pure narrative. Stories with lines that don't go all the way to the margin; jokes told in a provincial argot and a fixed set of referents, a set of simple rhyme schemes. It's entertainment, and most of it's been done before. When a real poet, a true original, rises up out of the dust of this herd, he's justifiably celebrated. Think of Wallace McRae and how he occasionally steps on the third rail of genius. (The fact that Wally wasn't named Montana's first poet laureate is a crime of the sort that should have already sent somebody or other to Deer Lodge.) There's Linda Hasselstrom, she's pretty good, and Waddie Mitchell who, when he stops clowning around for five minutes, can cut quick to the heart of things. Then of course there's Paul Zarzyski.

It's been my considered opinion for some years (I used to regularly publish his work in my own little magazine) that Zarzyski ­ who happens to wear a cowboy hat, who's a perennial favorite at Elko, who's ridden rough stock and fed out flakes of hay ­ is one of the top notch working poets in the country. Poet, period. No antecedents, no qualifiers. Recipient of the 2005 Montana Governor's Arts Award for Literature (putting him in the company of Ivan Doig, James Welch, Thomas McGuane...), his ninth and most recent book, the Spur Award winning Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat, stands comfortably shoulder to shoulder with the three other significant volumes produced out of Montana, Richard Hugo's Selected Poems, McRae's Cowboy Curmudgeon and Welch's Riding the Earthboy 40. It's a top notch book from one of the West's most accomplished poets.

A student of Hugo's, Zarzyski has inherited a healthy dollop of the big man's blue collar pragmatism, his beer and bratwurst approach to the page. He's a writer who insists on readability. In the world that Zarzyski inhabits, an opaque, obscure poem is no poem at all. In the second little gem of Wolf Tracks, a poem called "The Meaning of Intimacy," he describes holding his cheek to the muzzle of a colt as he feeds him hay. "My heart beats brisk / time to the rhythm of grinding teeth / crunching tiny pipettes of perfume ­ sweet / breath and music piped through the pink / nostrils into February air, so still..." A mundane experience filtered through a love of words, squeezed dry and given it back to us in such a way that see both the accuracy and the freshness of the vision. Tiny pipettes of perfume, breath and music piped through pink nostrils. That's by god the way it is, and next time you smell hay, you're going to smell it fresh in a new context. Seems like most ranchers would do well to carve these words into the stoops of their horse barns.

A sampling of the titles in Wolf Tracks shows a sense of verbal playfulness that's rare (indeed, almost nonexistent) in the professional poetry community. Maybe it's an inheritance from the cowboy poetry circuit. There's "Putting the Rodeo Try into Cowboy Poetry" and there's "Antipasto!" ("The tongue loves Antipasto! The linguini way / each button-mushroom syllable ­ gold / nubbin plucked from hardwood stump ­ lingers / toward the uvula..."); there's "Bizarzyski ­ Mad Bard and Carpenter Savant of Manchester, Montana ­ Feeds the Finicky Birds." and. "How the Beluga Spoons." This is joy at the marble-in-mouth tastebud-tang and roll of a good string of syllables. Nothing more nor less. In this regard, one of his most enjoyable poems (although not his best), is simply called "Potatoes." Presumably conceived as a performance piece (the audience is referred to as "you folks"), you can easily picture him ambling back and forth across the stage with a microphone, rolling through a laundry list of beloved sounds: "You got your Yukon / Golds, your Fingerlings and Yellow Finns, your Chieftains, / your Chippewas, Kennebecs, Burbank Russets, Early Gems, your Colorado Longs and Pontiac Reds..." A few lines later, six vodkas into an airline flight, he describes how he was "scalloped, twice-baked, platskied, jo jo'd, / au gratined, shoestringed, mashed, colcannoned, vichyssoised, / hashbrowned and having green potato skin / hallucinogen flashbacks..."

His self-effacement and lighthearted bon mots serve, through contrast, to put an extra emotional whoomph behind his more poignant poems. Zarzyski's a kind man, a conscientious guy, a ruminator who considers his impact on the world and on the people around him, and this kindness comes through in his work. In "Imperfect Strangers," he regrets a chance encounter with a drunk on the guy's birthday, not buying a beer for his "one big night alone." In "The Hand," an invective against racism, he recreates an encounter between a white aristocrat and an elderly black man. In "Carnivore," he considers a freezer shelf of venison: "how we kill to eat, and eat / to kill again, and how we love, / between the seasons we set aside for killing, / to see the living / go on living? We owe our prey some grace, / some contemplation of their lives / here with us." And in one of the book's last poems, "For One Micro-Chronon of Time," a brilliant consideration of 9/11, he writes, with a tender soupcon of heartbreaking hope:

...Notice ­ this time,
your eyes closed, your heartbeat
stilled ­ how those there witnessing
the one-by-one acceleration of the towers' top floors
buckling, all threw their arms up
in New York unison. Against the looming black
weight, imagine, feel, how they strained
to lock into place with their power-
lifting lumbar ­ with their knees,
shoulders, elbows, fingers, toes,
sinew and soul ­ the tonnage
they knew they could hold aloft..."

Within the insulated, academic world of poetry readers, writers, and reviewers (three hats consistently worn by the same half-dozen, tenured folks), it's endlessly lamented that the discipline has become irrelevant, that it's not reaching the larger public, that it's lost its standing as an art form. One has only to read through a few dozen of the pieces published in, say, The New Yorker, to understand why. There's a safe and bland sameness in this work that very nearly begs the average, educated reader to turn the page. Where's our Ogden Nash? Where's our Stephen Vincent Benet? Where's a backfiring jalopy and short-fused firecracker? Mostly gone, hounded out past the hedges by workshops and a circle jerk of critics lauding each other's mediocre work. In this context, Paul Zarzyski and his Wolf Tracks are lifesavers, a pair of water wings thrown out to a drowning discipline.

For More Fine articles http://www.newwest.net

A New West Interview
Paul Zarzyski: "Poetry is the bloodiest of the arts."

By Allen M. Jones, 8-25-05
 
 New West: In the introduction to one of your chapbooks, Blue Collar Light, you describe how, despite a household largely empty of books, you became enamored with words, how your "childhood ear latched onto and savored the colloquialisms and jargon" of your hometown and family. The way you describe it, it seems a natural transition. But so few other people manage to make a similar segue, from working class limericks to real poetry. What else shaped you in your development as a poet? What brought you to where you are now?

Paul Zarzyski: Not "limericks," but lingo--musical language. Yes, "real poetry," metered-out in individual words or phrases, or, when luckiest, in complete lines or even passages. I didn't identify it as poetry back then, but I knew it was unique, creative. I understood that the best-told stories were rendered with a lilt, with rhythm, with a symphonic language that made the listeners' tympanums dance. Phrasing. Breathstop. Locution. Locomotion. Propulsion. Explosion and implosion (the latter, defined phonetically as "the nasal release of a stop consonant in which the vowel of the final syllable is greatly reduced--eaten, sudden, mitten, etc.) I'm not talking haiku here, but rather lengthy, sometimes garrulous, narratives complete with crescendo, punch line crescendo. More spontaneity than containment. More freedom than fettering. Take that extra tuck and let the lingo buck. "Words Growing WILD," by god. I grew up in a physical, visceral world where putting words together musically effected purt-near as much truth-'n'-beauty as putting jabs, hooks, crosses, and uppercuts together pugilistically. Pugilistic puissance. What brought me to where I am now? Roadwork in the boneyard. Long sparring sessions, sometimes 15-20 rounds per writing shift, oftentimes with myself--not mere shadow boxing, but unpulled punches right on the ol' proverbial button, hard shots to the heart. In other words, I trained--and still train--with all the pluck and pump and gusto I can muster. It's all about work ethic, about digging deep down within, about testing the edges. You were hoping for a literary and/or intellectual response? You're talking to the wrong poet. Go find a writer who touts "inspiration" as his mantra, his wellspring. I subscribe to the dictum of Turkish Poet, Nazim Hikmet: "Poetry is the bloodiest of arts--one must offer his heart to others and feed on it himself."

NW: Cowboy poetry, in its emphasis on readings, on performance art, seems to harken back to an earlier time. Maybe it goes all the way back to the Greeks. Back to the day when poetry wasn't isolated to the academy but was a populist, often ribald, artful entertainment. It seems to me that your work appeals to this same sensibility. Who is your ideal reader? When you finish a poem, send it out into the publication aether, what are your ambitions for it?

PZ: Maybe I should feel embarrassed--finally exposed as a fraud forever--but never, not once, have I pondered my "ideal reader." Certainly not in the midst of writing a piece--wouldn't that be akin to an act of creative homicide-suicide? On second thought, I guess I have, in fact, considered "ideal audience" AFTER I've finished a poem and before taking it from the page to the stage. Yes, of course, I'm always attempting--and often failing I should add--to predict an audience's affinity for specific subject matters and, to a lesser degree, sensibilities. I like your phrase "artful entertainment," though I'm not sure you need to italicize artful. One of the sections in WOLF TRACKS offers a trio of epigraphs that reflect this concept, one by Picasso that hits it I think, dead center: "I'm just a public entertainer who has understood his time." You asked, however, who my "ideal reader" is. Which might differ from who my ideal listener is? You got your Page Poems and you got your Stage Poems and, preferably, hopefully, you got your poems that are effective equally from either venue. We could talk for hours about this notion, but let's address instead your "publication aether" inquiry: I'M my "ideal reader" and the only aether I aspire to dazzle these days is the aether that surrounds and rises for billions and billions of light years straight above my 12 by 12 writing niche. I'm 54 12 years old, been spurring' words wild across the open range of the blank page and calling it "Poetry" since the early 70s, and feel I've evolved--for better or worse--to a place where validation from the outside world becomes less and less significant, while self-validation becomes more and more difficult or perhaps even impossible. All my ambitions these days are consumed by The Process. I talked to my painter friend, Ted Waddell, recently and when I asked him how his work was going, he replied, "I'm just trying to figure out the color green." BINGO! Finally, the less I'm able to define audience for a poem I've decided to deem "finished" or "abandoned" or whatever, the more hope I probably have that the poem will find its OWN indefinable audience, if that makes any sense?

NW: In various epigrams and dedications, even in the lines of your poetry, you mention, variously, Wally McRae and Richard Hugo, James Dickey and Billy Collins. But the arena you've carved out for yourself seems to me entirely your own. Who else has been an influence on your work, and in what way? How would you describe your own work to an interested but unfamiliar reader?

PZ: The second of this double-pronged question is easy to field: I try hard to avoid trying to describe my work to "interested but unfamiliar readers," because I fear I'd fail so miserably, they'd NEVER buy a book or CD. "What do you write about?" is the question most often posed, to which I have a stock response--"living and dying on Planet Earth." Sometimes, especially if I'm in that altered state of euphoria after, say, my fourth or fifth Guinness, or my third shot of grappa or Cabo Wabo tequila, or my very first sip of a dirty martini, I'll elaborate a tad hangin' and rattlin', rockin' and rowelin', sinnin' and grinnin', fishin' and wishin', ebbin' and flowin', yearnin' and burnin' and learnin' on Planet Earth and, occasionally, on Planet UniPoet, from whence I was beamed down. You ask a silly question, you get a sillier answer, right? Your inquiry about my "influences," my gurus, however, is not one bit silly. Yes, first and foremost, Hugo. His heavy duty focus on Music and its magical or mysterious capacity to dictate or, my word, invent the Message fit me like a custom-fitted Nudie-The-Rodeo-Tailor rhinestone-studded-'n'-embroidered bucking-broncho-twister-in-the-saguaros suit jacket. Not instantly, mind you. I was green as a gunsel could be--friggin' verdant! Still clinging to the possessive--my poem. It took a few years before I began to fully comprehend the power of Dick Hugo's dictums: "Just concentrate on having fun with the sounds of words and don't worry about what it is you think you have to say; in every poem there's a constant battle going on between the music and the message--in the very best poems, neither ever wins; poems are like people--if you listen to then carefully and long enough, they'll eventually tell you what it is they have to say." And, prior to Hugo, there was a myriad of poets who my first mentor, David Steingass, introduced me to--Paul Zimmer, David Etter, John Woods, Gary Gildner, John Haines (who I later studied with at the University of Montana), Phil Levine, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Ellen Bryant Voight Carver, Snyder, Gallagher, Kinell, Stafford, Harrison, Hall, Wendell Berry--his "Farming: A Hand-Book," one of the first collections Steingass urged me to devour--and how can I wait this long to list James Wright and Dylan Thomas, Madeline DeFrees and on and on and on, every individual one's work, as well as the amalgamation of all of this incredible poetry, so critical to my ear's fine-tuning, to my heart's honing. I'll never, EVER, forget my first Bukowski encounters of the umpteenth kind. Never, EVER, forget Dickey's "Poems 1957-1967," with its "Cherrylog Road," the closure of which, to this day, 30+ years after my initial reading, still screams the beauty-'n'-truth of MY black leather jacketed youth:

And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard

Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

Shit-oh-dear, did I ever have great teachers, all of whom were alchemists--capable of turning commonplace experience and/or observation into literary gold. My first chapbook it titled CALL ME LUCKY--that says it all.

NW: Too often a poet's standing among his or her peers is determined not by the work itself but by the university chair they hold, the endowments they secure. In this regard, although you have an MFA from the University of Montana, although you were a protégé of the great Richard Hugo's, your decision to work outside this system has given you a harder row to hoe. How would your work be different if it were coming out of the university system?

PZ: Good question. Unfortunately, its impossible for me to honestly answer because I've been working outside the university system for purt-near two decades, aside from an occasional 3-4 day residency here and there, and I have not had the time, nor the inclination, to keep abreast of the work that IS being written by those well-ensconced, so to speak, in the academy. To boot, comparisons are, in my opinion, absurd. You tell me-- is "publish or perish" still the mandate? If so, I'd likely have crashed, burned, and turned to cinder long ago. Again, my personal validation has so little to do with publication, and its synonymousness, in most minds, with success, with career, with establishing a name in the upper towers of literary hierarchy. I love what a critic-friend of Sam Shepherd said in a documentary interview: "Sam was always willing to fail and fail interesting and if you're willing to fail interestingly, you'll succeed." So, with that in mind, here's a wild, shoot-from-the-hip-'n'-holler-shit attempt at answering your question: Maybe--just maybe--the pressure to achieve notoriety via prestigious publication, and/or via winning awards and/or receiving accolades from the critic powers that be, would have curbed my willingness to risk failure? WHICH, now that I consider the prospect indepth, would likely eighty-six 90% of the work in my repertoire, my remuda, including "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer," "The Whale In My Wallet," "Benny Reynolds' Bareback Riggin'," "The Bucking Horse Moon," "Turkey Buzzards Circling Nirvana," I best quit before I swirl into doldrums so deep, not even the XXX industrial-size 55-gallon drum of concentrated Prozac with pop-up straw can block-'n'-tackle me back up.

NW: No matter your discipline of art, seems like it's natural to lament a bygone, halcyon age. Short story writers still talk about the passing of the Saturday Evening Post. Novelists describe (awestruck at the idea), the riots of people shouting for the next installment of a Dickens serial. To end on an optimistic note, what is there about the current age in poetry that's going to be remembered fondly? That might even be romanticized by a succeeding generation?

PZ: So you want me to take a stab at "what lasts?"? Our mutual friend, Ralph Beer--one of the most talented prose writers to ever call Montana home, I know you'll agree--dared me to field at least one of your questions with a single word. What lasts? Wykxxxski! That's what. (Hope I got Ralph's spelling right.) And, speaking of that amber elixir, served in the thick crystal ball-esque glasses into which I've peered well into the a.m. on numerous youthful out-of-the-body-sojourns, not one of which, ever, transported me into the future (no forward gear, only reverse, in a whiskey glass), I can't even venture a guess as to what succeeding generations will celebrate from today's poetry. Yes, these are vibrant times for the jagged-on-the-right art form, in that more is being written as well as read and listened to, than ever before, Quantity, however, is not directly proportional to quality. Or is it? WYKXXXSKI!

By Allen M. Jones, 8-25-05

For More Fine articles http://www.newwest.net