Iowa City

University of Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories - designed by Frank Gehry
Staircase in the Old Capitol - University of Iowa

I've just returned from several days in Iowa City, where I was consulting with ACT (American College Testing) for the English portion of the college admission test. While in the Cedar Rapids Airport, I saw a wall-sized poster ad for Maharishi University of Management, which is located in Fairfield, Iowa. Its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, recently died. The poster was a reminder that the guru, who has lived in the Netherlands in recent years, was a entrepreneur as well as a spiritual guide. Back in 1971, Janne and I paid the student rate to undergo training in Transcendental Meditation, which was led by a TM disciple traveling through Auburn, Alabama, where we lived at the time. The trainer,actually wound up staying with us at the farm house for a night or two. He wore a neat sports jacket and tie and brought with him a bag of grapefruit. We meditated for several years, and I still think that I'd probably benefit from twice-daily meditation. My mantra--assigned to me during the training and supposedly a secret--surfaces in my consciousness from time to time, and I still chant it to myself when I need to relax.

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David Orr on poet Mathea Harvey
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A reading by Naomi Shihab Nye, who says "We are all born poets. Some of us just keep it up."
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"A writer is a person who would not have written what he wrote if he hadn’t started out to write it." William Stafford

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My essay, "Radiation," is finally available in Drunken Boat

Iowa City

Prairie Lights Books - Iowa City

For the past three days I've been in Iowa City where I had a chance to visit the best university art museum and one of the best bookstores (Prairie Lights) I know of. Temperatures Thursday and early Friday were bone-chilling. Thursday morning the reading was -9 on the bank clock on Dubuque Street. By midday Friday, the weather was more humane. Saturday was a gorgeous clear day--perfect for walking in the town and university. I spent time with Cile and David Goding on the northside on Brown Street, several blocks down from where Kurt Vonnegut used to occupy a rambling house on a hill.

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Iowa City

A cirrus sky

bleeds blue onto

half-plowed morning,

brings a promise

of corn to the prairie.

The river with frozen fringes

stutters north. Forgotten,

it tongues past

sturdy churches, pleads

with scalloped bridges.

An eagle spans a copse

of barren trees.

In Iowa City, I read Rebecca McClanahan's The Riddle Song, a series of essays about her family. Achingly honest, she writes as well as anyone about the complexities and mixed feelings of families. The collection opens with a piece called simply "Aunt." It concludes as follows, referring to her Aunt Bessie:

Now all these years later I hold her to me--a tribal instinct perhaps. Or perhaps I simply want to give back some of the words to the young woman in the diary. I sit in my study where shelves of books line the green walls. I finger the dictionaries and search for what lies beneath: aunt. From old French, ante, an offshoot, hall leading toward the main room. Latin root, amma: mother. Or amare: to love. As in amigo, as in amour. As in amateur, one who works for the bare love of it.

Rebecca McClanahan will visit our campus on Thursday for meetings with students and an evening reading. I look forward to seeing her again so that I can tell her how much I admire her poetry and nonfiction.