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Inventing Truth
August 6, 2010:
Last week I attended the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City, Iowa. I
don’t know why I haven’t done this before. It’s right up the road. This was the
24th summer for the festival, which gets raves reviews every year. Superb
published authors from all over the country teach 130 workshops across all
genres--everything from short story to memoir to poetry in individual workshops
of 12 students each. Workshop offerings have beguiling titles, like “Making
your characters come alive,” “Word yoga,” “Beyond writers’ block,” and “Inviting
the muse.” I chose “Memoir: Pieces for the whole.”
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James McKean |
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Photo by Jim
Stanley |
My
workshop instructor was James McKean, a graduate of the
famous U. of I. Writers Workshop, poet, and author of Tree
of Heaven (poetry from the U. of Iowa Press), Home Stand:
Growing Up in Sports (memoir from Michigan State U. Press),
and a new book of poetry Surrounded by Owls which (alas) has
not yet found a publisher. Jim’s outstanding physical
characteristic is his height. At 6’9” he was always the
tallest person in the room, no matter where us authors
gathered last week. At first glance he appears to be
three-quarters arms and legs. As an undergraduate, Jim
played basketball for the Washington State University
Cougars, starting at center from 1965 to 1968. During a game
with UCLA, he famously failed to keep Lew Alcinder from
scoring.
Sports poets are rare, and
Jim is a treasure. At the Elevenses (lectures every day at 11 a.m.) on the last
day of the festival, Jim read his poem, “Dance Contest,” which originally
appeared in Poetry Northwest. It so tickled my fancy I’m reprinting it here. Jim
prefaced his reading by telling us he never could dance well, and preferred not
to dance at all, tall and gangly and clumsy as he was from too-fast growth when
young. But he won a dance contest once, when he was 19, or thereabouts. He wrote
this poem about it.
DANCE
CONTEST
By James McKean
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Me? who
looked the other way,
sipping beer at the back
of Steemy's Bar and Grill on Thursday—
the dance contest night I'm afraid
I didn't read on the marquee.
She worked her way toward me, the beautiful
dancer I'd admired from a distance
in her brief costume beneath the air-brushed
blue light and strobe. Such
blemishlessness I stared at I admit
but why fish me out of the crowd
by the hand for that night's
contest, her new partner, her foil, her less
than equal, left foot after
left foot, a bumbler on weak knees,
the disillusioned half of couple
number three now on stage beside the band
and two-piece jungle gym
where she sat sweating on my lap,
waiting our turn? Unless to tell me
more than I wanted to know
in the dim half-light, to let me dance
whatever I wanted, to let a fool grow
wise in drum rolls and cymbals and hard bass.
I was that fool and for her I jumped
and twirled, legs kicked out
in a latter-day galliard, and for her mended
stockings and wig, her bruised knees
and loose-thread rhinestones, the rings
on her fingers, her husband's truck on I-80,
her two kids home with a sitter,
for her dancer's shoes worn at the heel,
for the sweat of her brow, I fell
to one hand, ran around it double time, circling
once, flipped, kicked, the splits
a mistake but recovered, twirled her in hand, a mix
of cakewalk, half-polka & cha-cha,
a newly invented half-baked
Thursday night fever, a layman's leaping
beyond the self for Nancy,
her name that night, for the spotlight and cheers,
for the ten bucks we won split two ways
and a pitcher of beer. She picked me
and I went to my knees for her,
for rain, for the harvest—three minutes' worth
remembered as love. |
Jim’s first book of poems,
Headlong, won the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award in Poetry, and his
second, Tree of Heaven, won an Iowa Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in
Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.
He now teaches creative writing for the Queens
University low-residency M.F.A. program in Charlotte, NC; the Tinker Mountain
Writers' Workshop at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA; and of course, for
Iowa's Summer Writing Festival. |
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