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No wobbles for Flaherty in Stilt Man
by Michael Worringer
Library Communications
Posted 2/6/2006
MADISON, Wis. -- In Stilt Man, the first Parallel Press poetry chapbook for 2006, Doug Flaherty's poems perform an unusual dual role. They not only tell stories but also the poems themselves often become part of the stories. What results is a collection in which both the construction and contents of Flaherty's writings leave lasting impressions.
Stilt Man offers some cleverly postmodern moments, as a few pieces offer the reader a behind-the-scenes look at Flaherty's thought process. In "Subsets" Flaherty writes about how he loves wordplay, using phrases like "I'm nobody's fool and you're a nobody too" and "Can the woe of woman manage the man age."
Along with discussions on creative writing, Flaherty deftly tackles emotionally powerful themes of birth, death, love and sex. In one piece, "After Father's Funeral," Flaherty realizes neither he nor his father knew each other very well. He writes of how his father "once stared, blinked into my poems, / failed to find his son hiding among the words."
Flaherty has published four full-length books, six chapbooks and has been represented in 10 anthologies and appeared in numerous magazines. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, and taught modern American literature and poetry writing for 35 years at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.Poetry chapbooks may be purchased in groups of six for $50, or $10 each. For more information, visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection from Stilt Man called "Getting Moody"
On most Mondays, coming off an eclectic
week-end, I turn esoteric. By mid-week, say
around two p.m. on Wednesday, the orientation
is clearly eccentric with tangy hues of modernity.
Who says fun with language dies after grade three?
Let that person go to the blackboard and write
I am a dumb schmuck four hundred times in
forty point italic New Times Roman. I mention
script, because poets should keep current on how
their work appears on the page, the web, the side of a bus--
prettier than hen scratches or pock marks left
on bar tops by over-wrought dice shakers. So much
depends on chickens and wheelbarrows and rain slicks.
So much depends on mental ambience when wording.
Getting moody is the prime occupation of the poet.
Sulk like a slinky descending a staircase. Whoop
like a whoopy cushion at the established order.
Be as ballsy as the steamy scenes in Deuteronomy.
Pare the nails, sit back like a chilled green bottle.
When the mood kicks in like one of the Pleiades stroking
your cheek with her blowsy wings, the words appear
like the cryptic messages floating up from the 8 ball
that says yes, maybe, no, sometimes, forget it. Sometimes,
but not as often as desired, the words froth-up like verbena
in the troubled interstices between synapses. I intuit that
it is a simulacrum with you, as well. But should you fail
to grasp the internal linkage, I report what a five year
old girl from Fond du Lac confessed to me last month:
When I grow up, I want to be hatched from an egg.