Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles

Judith Strasser

In 1998, Judith Strasser accepted an invitation to serve as poet-in-residence at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. Here, in a rustic cabin without plumbing, she “hear[d] the poems [she] promised to write” in exchange for three weeks in “paradise”. Paradise included hauling her own water, drastically simplifying meal preparation, making the briefest possible dashes into the chilly lake for bathing, and trying to stay warm and dry on raw June days. As she “acquire[d] island eyes -/slowing down enough/to see…”, her own elemental circumstances formed a living bridge to earlier island dwellers. Indeed, Strasser seems to speak in two voices, her own and that of the islands. Like music with contrapuntal melodies, her poems interweave contemporary perceptions with “lake-rinsed memor[ies]” of Native Americans, fishermen, settlers, lighthouse keepers. One voice straightforwardly details her personal experience. The other tantalizes the reader with all-too-brief glimpses of shipwrecks, subsistence living, vanished communities, and distinctive local characters. “Fog drips…/Nothing will dry today./I have a change of clothes, a roof, a fireplace./But what of the voyageurs, rushing to rendezvous?/…How wet does a fisherman get/in November, racing the making ice to pull his herring nets?/This is the story. The sun disappears, Ojibwa children shiver,/a gale howls from the northeast.” So alive were these historic essences to Strasser that they haunted her solitary days: “Always: The sense that someone/is calling, although/there’s no telephone.” And through the evocative lines of Strasser’s poems, we hear them calling, too.

Judith Strasser recently retired as a senior producer and interviewer for To the Best of our Knowledge, a nationally-distributed public radio program. She is a free lance writer and an interviewer for Out Loud, the audio feature of the Poets & Writers website (www.pw.org), and conducts poetry writing workshops in Wisconsin and elsewhere for adults and children. Judith’s poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Witness and other literary magazines and anthologies; her book-length collection, How To Stay Alive, has been a finalist in several national book competitions. Judith has been awarded writing residencies at Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (New Mexico), Vermont Studio Center, The Ucross Foundation (Wyoming), and Norcroft (Minnesota), and was Artist-in-Residence at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in the summer of 1998. She has received awards for radio production and for poetry from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and recently published a chapbook, Poems for the Parks, under a grant from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission.

Judith has two grown sons, Jed Ela, a visual artist, and Nate Ela, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mozambique.

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Excerpt

County Road

The settlers are gone, cabins
rotted or burned. What remains:
the school house foundation,
moss-garden-capped concrete;
a Model T, sunk to its fenders,
kneeling under the trees.
A trail —

choked with balsam and alder,
roadbed rutted, muddy, sodden,
a permanent bog of memory
bordered by sentinel trees.

          Penny candy from the co-op;
Noreng’s berries, big as
hens’ eggs, too juicy to ship
anywhere; dances — pump organ,
squeezebox, fiddle, everyone
at the school; crossing the ice-
bridge for mail; Mrs. Hill’s
famous ham; the nor’easter
that took Harold Dahl.

Crawl over tree-trunks,
muck through jewel-weed,
tread bear scat in black berry brambles,
swim sedges over your head.
Lose the trace in the marsh. Turn back.
This is no wilderness. Still,
you’ve come to the end of the road.

                             Sand Island
                             Apostle Islands National Lakeshore