The title and cover art of Jim Reese’s fine volume of poetry, ghost on 3rd, evokes thoughts of the film Field of Dreams. Unlike the film, Reese’s life spans two states not of being but of geography (and more than two of being), neither of them the film’s alleged “heaven” of Iowa. Rather, Reese lives in northern Nebraska and works mainly in southern South Dakota. Both of his primary locales sit near Powell’s one hundredth meridian, better than most determinants for where the American West begins. Nonetheless, if anything, Reese’s world is at once more haunted and more full of life than the classic baseball film.

Still young enough to be blessed and cursed with the label “emerging poet,” Reese has previously published two chapbooks and another complete volume of poetry, These Trespasses (Backwaters Press, 2005). The 50 poems in this current volume are accessible without lacking depth and colloquially literary–and thus in the American grain. They also spread sufficient humor to prove truly serious, moored to rather than mired in their senses of place. Reese touches life throughout: at times caressingly in family poems about his grandfather, parents, two daughters; at times nostalgically (though never maudlinly) in poems about his past; at times probingly, as in three poems about serving as a guest-teacher in San Quentin. The poems are full of grit and goodness, guns and grace, gin–and tonic.

Their author certainly possesses both a poet’s eye and sense of the order in disorder, the disorder in order. The volume’s opening poem, “This Havelock,” about the Nebraska town fused with Lincoln, is a paragraph/prose poem consisting of a leavetaking. It riffs on James Welch’s “Harlem, Montana” throughout, but especially near its end: “I have to leave you, Havelock. . . .” Though Reese includes two other poems in the same basic style—both reaching into a past more distant and spaced to set off new sections of the book—“Havelock” in particular works as transition from the world of deceptively poetic prose (or prosaic poetry) into the more conventionally structured 49 following poems.

The most impressive poems within the collection are “Ghost on 3rd” (the “G” capitalized unlike in the book title) and three San Quentin poems, “Waking to San Quentin,” “Jesus Christ Pose,” and “I was at San Quentin and All I Got was This Lousy T-shirt.” Heart-wrenchingly about loss through a disease of deterioration, the title poem proves, to resort to necessary cliché, sublime–especially the following lines: “The last time we fished / I had to ask for help / to lift you from the boat onto the dock. . . . / Sleep, Grandpa, sleep. / You are the ghost on third / and I’m sending you / home.” The trio of San Quentin poems, grouped together to great effect immediately after several family and domestic poems, strike true mystic chords of that dissonant Other-underworld known to those who have taught in prisons. Neither sentimental nor judgmental, these poems provide well-selected, all-too-real prison imagery, along with human connection and humor courtesy of those inhabiting America’s single largest industrial complex as two million-plus guests of the world-wide leader in incarceration.

Reese appears worthy inheritor of the mantle primarily worn for many years by the recently deceased William Kloefkorn, among those whom Reese dedicated the book to, and Ted Kooser: best in Nebraska, among the best in the West, among the best in the nation—his poetry is that good, that promising. Jim Reese has heeded mysterious whispers from Nebraska’s cornfields and built this book. We should come.

Final winners of this year’s prize will be announced by April 2012.

Here’s the poem:

“The Blues in Jeans”
by Jim Reese

When I found the sewing needle
in the crotch of my newly hemmed jeans,
I was troubled.
Not for the nut sack that had gone
unharmed but for my overall well-being.
My mother-in-law who had done the sewing
perhaps forgetful, perhaps not.
An instinctive shriveling
in the un-hemmed crotch
rendering my jeans somewhat roomier
than I had remembered.

Two poets, not alike in style, read their works to a small but rapt audience at Cal Poly Tuesday. Nebraska poet Jim Reese and Cal Poly alumnus, poet and singer Ephraim Sommers were special guests for the Summer Literary Reading Series, directed by Cal Poly English professor Kevin Clark.

During his performance, Sommers played his acoustic guitar, recorded the music live and then looped it back as he sang or recited his poetry, which rested on his music stand.

Sommers is a San Luis Obispo County native who grew up in Atascadero and attended Cal Poly to study English and political science because he wanted to stay in the area with his funk rock band Siko. He said Cal Poly was very helpful by inviting his band to play during UU hour and giving him a job as a gardener. He ended up in San Diego to earn a master’s degree in creative writing and studied under the poet Ilya Kaminsky. He is also the managing editor of Flashpoint, an online music and literature journal.

Sommer’s new album, “Stones and Smoke,” is a collection of his solo work over the years. He said while he was in Siko, he didn’t have a chance to breathe and make his own music.

“It’s a lot of songs that are a lot more mellow, they are based around the acoustic, they’re based more around the vocals, as opposed to the instrumentation, which would be more of the Siko thing.”

He said he was very happy to be back in area, was loving the San Luis Obispo vibe and was flattered and surprised to be invited to the series.

Sommers said his poetry has evolved from narratives to lyrical, hopefully developing stronger images as he tries to mash music and poetry.

“I’m trying to mold music and poetry into one medium at one time,” he said.

Clark had Sommers as a student in his English classes. He said Sommers was a very quiet but very intense student, who primarily wrote persona poems — a poem that is written in the voice of somebody else.

“He wrote poems about people who were on the verge of madness and sometimes went over the line,” Clark said.

Clark said that Sommers’ poems as “ferocious” and “wonderful.” Clark has a theory that Sommers’ musical background with rock ’n’ roll correlates with his ability to explore the human psyche.

“Now he tells me he’s writing more lyric poetry, which is poetry that renders interior emotions without as much narrative as much story structure as he used to have,” Clark said.

Clark described the second poet, Reese, as a very different character from Sommers. He said Reese is a “Plains poet,” which refers to the Great Plains area between the Rockies and the Mississippi River. Clark said traditional Plains poets write pastoral nature poems describing the richness and earthiness of the plains.

While Reese has these elements in some of his poems, Clark said, Reese also talks about some of the modern difficulties on the plains, such as the drug problems and prison life, but still infuses his writing with humor.

“(It’s) Midwestern humor in which people make dumb mistakes but there’s just a little more of an edge to it than that,” Clark said.

Reese is an associate professor of English at Mount Marty College in Yankton, S.D., a published author and poet as well as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal PADDLEFISH. His recent book, “ghost on 3rd,” was nominated by his publisher New York Quarterly Books for the Pulitzer Prize in Letters.

“Your grandma could nominate you for the Pulitizer Prize,” Reese said. “But if your press nominates you, they can only nominate two people, and that’s when it means something.”

He is also an artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Art’s interagency initiative with the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he teaches inmates creative writing.

“There’s five of us in the nation, so we are trying to do the best we can,” Reese said. “We’re introducing creative writing and how it can be therapeutic and healing and also educational.”

He teaches inmates how to think outside the box and be more observant, and how it can help them think of themselves as more than just someone stuck in prison, he said.

“They have some very important things to tell everyone because they made some mistakes,” Reese said. “But in my class, I hope they come to terms with them and share that in the public,” Reese said.

Most of the prisoners he teaches, he said, are there for drug-related and white-collar crimes. He also goes to prisons such as San Quentin and Folsom. Reese said the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton he teaches at on a regular basis was the only federal prison that doesn’t have a barbed wire fence.

“I believe deeply in what I’m doing, and I believe deeply in education,” Reese said. “And that’s the only thing that’s going to save this country and the only thing that’s going to save the war on drugs, which is not saving anybody.”

Reese’s performance style was, unsurprisingly, very different from Sommers’. He had no guitar and the only singing he did was a few lines of Prince’s “Red Corvette” while reading his story about the first time he learned about sex. He spoke softly with his Nebraskan accent but kept the audience listening close for his jokes. He made the audience laugh with his wit and insight, even when the subject matter was serious.

“If you can grasp that humor and really strangle the seriousness, and make people laugh, that’s pretty cool,” Reese said.

One of the attendees was English department chair Kathryn Rummell. She had Sommers in class and felt a connection to Reese’s Midwestern poetry, because she is from Kentucky.

“I loved the song at the end and I loved (Sommers’) cute little smile as he was singing,” she said. “And I thought Jim was hilarious, I thought he was absolutely fantastic.”

Jim Reese gave a terrific reading at SMSU tonight–beautiful, powerful poems, equal parts humor–about lingerie catalogs–and gut-punching pathos–about his work teaching prisoners writing. He read poems from his new book, ghost on 3rd (click on book title to read the review in the American Poetry Journal), brand new unpublished poems, and a rollicking new piece of non-fiction about budding teenage sexuality in all its steamy, innocent indoor-roller-rink glory.

Jim is the founder and editor of Paddlefish, a publication of Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota.

Here’s a poem from the most recent issue of Paddlefish by Leo Dangel, beloved professor emeritus of SMSU. Leo always filled the house when he gave readings on campus–with faculty, students, staff, and people from the surrounding communities. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser wrote of Dangel’s book of collected poems, Home from the Field,
“These poems are warm and generous and perfectly formed to the mouths of the people who speak them.”

Independent Harvester

If our oats crop was ripe on the 4th of July,
there was no liberty for us. My father pulled
the grain binder out from its place under
a cottonwood tree, the sickle sharpened and fierce.

Our uniform was faded cotton and straw hats.
My mother drove the rusty tractor, and my father
operated the binder, the sickle rattling back
and forth, sounding like a machine gun,
mowing down the standing grain in its path.
My sisters and I set the bundles into shocks
that covered the field in rows of monuments.

No one thought of Washington or flags.
I remember how the water, kept cool
in a Mason jar under a shock, tasted,
how the stubble felt when it bent and broke
under my soles. The hemp twine that tied
our harvest together had a certain smell.

We saw the late sun slanting on the field.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.yankton.net/articles/2010/02/13/river_city/doc4b74daec5c1ad363298767.txt

See it here: http://www.southdakotamagazine.com/editors_notebook.php?p=3088