Eat My Words is a great bookstore in Northeast Minneapolis—one of those it's hard to walking away from empty-handed. It was a privilege to read with rock-star poet Deborah Keenan, whose new book—her eleventh!--The Saint of Everything, is out now, and Chavonn Williams Shen, who didn't have a book out when I reached out to her to organize this reading, but in the interim landed a book contract. Congrats, Chavonn! Woo-hoo!

A great crowd showed up to listen and linger, including THP pressmate Kirk Wilson. I love talking with folks after readings, when they share morsels from their lives, as if the poetry continues to be made but communally, ephemerally.

I've got the sets down now—short, medium, medium-long, long, with variations for venues—such that it feels like I'm on the stump or am a band on tour writing up play lists in Sharpie to duct tape to the floor of the stage each night.  Despite that, not a reading goes by after which I don't berate myself a bit for forgetting something I wanted to say. I toured Ernest Hemingway's home once in Key West and remember the tour guide telling us that Hem would stop writing when the going was good, when he knew what came next and had more to say. A feeling like that is what I have when I remember that I forgot something. It makes me eager to go at again, to get to next time.

Images: The three that share the same design style are courtesy of Eat My Words staff. The "one of these things does not belong here" image is my creation, using the InDesign skills I honed working in alt-press and children's publishing, featuring a photo taken at dusk in my backyard on an unseasonably hot evening early in warm season.

Charles Rammelkamp has reviewed (click here) A Northern Spring in an online UK publication called The Lake. One of things he writes about is the time stamps in the text messages, in the four preludes, and how they convey a panic that is otherwise not present in the prose. I hadn't seen that until he said it, that juxtaposition. He says that "Three years later, [A NORTHERN SPRING] reads like a memoir, contemporary history, though the repercussions continue. Mauch’s picture of a fractured society nevertheless contains the seeds of healing."

One of the things I love about both blurbs and reviews is seeing my own work newly and more deeply—often more profoundly—by seeing it through the eyes of another. Charles has again done that for me, for which I thank him. I'm still working through the new vision. Still seeing with new eyes.

It is thrilling to be reviewed every time one is reviewed, and strangely—or maybe not strangely at all?—thrilling beyond thrilling to be reviewed in a UK publication. I realize this is the information age and the home place of an online publication really bears little insofar as its reach, insofar as who its readership and audience is. I nonetheless am content to sit for a few minutes in the self-created illusion of UK poets, writers, and readers checking into their favorite online poetry resource and entering the world of A Northern Spring. It is the daydream of the moment.

Having been baptized into Zoom during the COVID spring of 2020, all of my face-to-face, in-the-classroom course moved to the online platform, my connections with friends and family moving there, too, has made me a weary participant in the virtual. Would that I could see the masses raising hands and nodding in solidarity? I feel it.

My aversion, though, over time, has mellowed into acceptance of a new state of things, at least in some realms, one of them being the poetry reading. Properly orchestrated, virtual (using Zoom and other platforms) readings can be quite wonderful, bringing together voices and poetry it would be nearly impossible to bring together any other way. 

Such was the Trio House Press 2023 launch reading. David Groff, Lena Khalaf Tuffuha, Sunshine O'Donnell, Jennifer Manthey and I read for about five to eight minutes each from our new books, which was the perfect amount of time. It makes me want to do more of these readings in a similar format with other voices, other poets and writers.

It makes me wish, too, that there were a center to our contemporary literary universe a la Paris for, what, the first third or more of the twentieth century? Maybe a social media site is the best we can hope for. But that is a social media site I would be an expat in.

The reading went so well that I have been wishing we could get in a bus and go on tour across the country, five unique voices making poetry new for our times the best we know how. If ever there were a time in our country when such a tour could work, that time, alas, is not now. So I dream of it.

Here is a link to the reading, which I have likely oversold, like a film or restaurant review that gets you so excited to experience the real thing that the real thing falls inevitably falls short of expectations:

Trio House Press 2023 Book Release Reading

PHOTO: A bike shop in Paris, in Les Halles, from which we could procure transportation for an imagined moveable feast.

Poet, essayist, and critic Kristina Marie Darling asked me some great questions about A Northern Spring. The full conversation is available at Tupelo Quarterly (click the link), along with an excerpt from the book. Here's an excerpt from our conversation:

KMD:  I’m intrigued by the many types of silence at play in A Northern Spring, which range from white space, rupture, and elision to purposefully elided narrative context.  Can you speak to the power of silence in poetry and the importance of what is left unsaid?  

MM: Gary Snyder said something in an interview, probably before I was born—certainly before I was old enough to pick up a date in car—about having to spend as many years un-educating yourself as you spent educating yourself. That struck me when I first read it and has stayed with me as a guiding foundational principle. What’s the authentic me? What parts of me are parts molded by other people and ideas? Can I genuinely separate the former from the latter? Or can I just pretend to? And if all I’m doing is pretending isn’t that as good as the rest? 

Maybe asking those questions is its own sort of self-ruse, but questions of that ilk—planted in me by what Snyder said—are part of my creative process. The more I work as a poet and writer, the further away I get from my own formal education, and the more I trust in the instincts of what feels like a buried genuineness, and while that may be a construct, it’s a construct that affects the process and changes the product. 

My native dialect isn’t the Standard Written English I teach. My native dialect is Midwestern small-town hick. An undergraduate English professor of mine told me, when I said I thought I’d like to be a writer, that I would never be a writer because of the way that I talked and how that talking permeated my writing. The proficiency I have with SWE has come with a lot of effort over the years, and when I teach it now I always teach it with a caveat near the end of class, using excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage,” emphasizing that SWE is but one dialect and likely not the one my students were first proficient in—or will ever be most proficient in—making them just like me. I encourage my students to subvert SWE for purposes of greater justice, etcetera, but counsel them, as do the DFW excerpts I share, that they need to learn it well before they can subvert it, and may well need to employ it in the act of subverting it. 

A lot of what you’re referring to comes, I think, from those two principles commingling—me trying to un-educate myself, and me using SWE in the process of trying to subvert it. Throw in, too, my increasing ability, word by word by word over years, to trust the reader. To trust the reader to get it. To trust the reader such that I do not have to over-explain—don’t have to over-anything, but can just do what feels like needs to be done and no more.

I love how the meanings of the word “elision” make the word itself its own yin and yang. It’s alive—is a kind of power—which is also how I see and feel the white space on a page. Placement matters. Look at the walls of any well-decorated or well-orchestrated or accidentally perfect space. What we call “silence” or in the case of spaces “a neutral palette” (or whatever—fill in the blank) is not really silent or neutral (or whatever) at all. If poems emerge at the boundary between the yet-to-said and the saying of—which is the poem—then the white space is alive with all that is yet unsaid, all that is yet unsayable, an aether vast beyond anything we’ll ever get said. The silences are the hope of a kind of eternal, and so are entirely unknowable—which we want them to be because we need that—making them as safe as they are scary.

PHOTO: The book in which I read what Gary Snyder said, one of forty books on my reading list for my MFA comprehensive exams, the questions of which could address the content of any of the forty. In was an all-day essay exam—you got a break for lunch—from the old days of rigor.

This coming Sunday, Trio House Press is hosting an online reading to launch this season's five new books. I'll be reading from A Northern Spring along with pressmates Sunshine O'Donnell (who'll be reading from States of Arousal), David Groff (who'll reading from Live in Suspense), Lena Tuffaha (who'll be reading from Kaan and Her Sisters), and Jennifer Manthey (who'll be reading from The Fight). We're allotted five to eight minutes, after which there will be a Q&A with questions taken from the YouTube audience. I'm going to try to sculpt a new set—a briefer version of the set I finally got to work at Poor House Studios reading. Fingers crossed.

The reading will start at 1 p.m. CT and go for an hour on both Facebook and YouTube (click either for the links). It will be recorded and available on Trio House Press's YouTube channel, so you can watch it after the fact, not live.

PHOTO: Social media promotional image for THP's 2023 season group book launch.

Art-A-Whirl is a BIG arts and music festival that takes place in art studios, bars, breweries, parking lots, and other venues across Northeast Minneapolis on the third weekend of May. It hails itself as "the largest open studio tour in the country." It's a traffic-clogger.

I have attended many times as a fan of the art, the music, the food, the mass gathering and people-watching, including one year when dark clouds and winds during a tornado watch had us scouting the closest shelters, wondering if the bar whose parking lot we were in had a basement we all could squeeze into—which would have made it the second time I had to seek refuge from a tornado in a bar's basement—but we were lucky: no funnel dropped.

This year I was asked to read for the marathon HOWL reading at Bella Luna Studios at the Wolf House. The Wolf House is literally a house made top to bottom, front to back, into/of various mediums of visual and tactile art. It's also an Airbnb, so you can stay there. Bella Luna Studios is curation project of writer Annette Schiebout, who invited me to read.

The nature of a marathon reading is that you don't have much time at the mic. Trying to say all I hope to say about A Northern Spring was off the table. Also, the day before the reading, I was the basement running on the treadmill and listening to the Science Friday on NPR, a segment of which focused on crow roosts. The title of the segment, "What To Do When 500-1,000 Crows Roost In Your Neighborhood" pretty much explains the focus. I'm something of a bird aficionado—have been since I was a kid and learned to identify all of the waterfowl that would come through along the Mississippi Flyway—and have a fondness for crows, who a palm reader long ago said was one of my spirit animals (I wrote a poetry collection called Bird~Brain). I also have experience with a crow roost of this size from my time as a student in Mankato, Minn. Listening to the segment, I thought of a particular poem I wrote one summer about that downtown Mankato crow roost. It's called "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass" and appears in a book of mine—my previous poetry collection—called We're the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. Science Friday host Ira Flatow asked listeners to send in stories about crows and roosts. I sent my poem, dreaming that it would be posted on the SciFri website, which to date hasn't happened (I keep checking).

So for my five to seven minute set, I decided I'd read "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass" and tell the SciFri story and of my hopes. I read a couple poems from A Northern Spring and mixed in a one or so minute spiel on its gist and arc. Then I had to split and get to St. Paul for a mixer with other new, newish, or soon-to-become citizens of Luxembourg who live in Twin Cities, of which I am one, via ancestry. You have to travel to Luxembourg City to declare your citizenship, presenting a lineage of documents—marriage, birth, and death certificates—that step by step trace you back to an ancestor in Luxembourg, which for me was a great, great grandfather. I received my official declaration of citizenship last December and am traveling back this summer to get my Luxembourg passport. When my publisher needed a FAST FACT for a social media post, this was it.

PHOTOS: Left, me with my arms up as I tell the story of the Mankato crow roost and get ready to read "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass," shoeless, as you have to be to walk on the art that graces so many of the floors of the Wolf House; right, social media promotional material for the Art-A-Whirl reading at Bella Luna Studios at the Wolf House.

Trio House Press, publisher of A Northern Spring, recently located to Minneapolis under the leadership of new Executive Director, Kris Bigalk. This is my third book out on Trio House, and the press has felt like a family—like the perfect situation you hope you find with a publishing house. Kris organized a "THP in Minneapolis" reading/conversation at the Casket Arts building. As the name more than implies, it was originally a casket factory but has since been converted into a space for artists and arts-based businesses that now comprise the "Casket Arts Community." It's a gorgeous old building, wonderfully kept up. 

I read with new pressmate Jen Manthey, whose poetry collection The Fight shares a pub date with my book on July 1. After Jen and I read a bit from our new books, we sat down in comfy chairs in the beautiful third-floor atrium and engaged in a great conversation moderated by poet Halee Kirkwood. This is the kind of forum that I'm finding is most suited to me being able to cover the ground I want to cover when presented A Northern Spring to a live audience. It allows me to cover a few basics up front and then to slip in further contextual information in as I respond to questions and engage with fellow writers and moderators. It feels like I can do so unhurried.

Northeast (commonly called "Nordeast" here) is a great part of Minneapolis. It's packed with small shops, restaurants, bars, local breweries, tax preparers, and more (and yes, I know I sound like an ad now), all part of a thriving arts and music scene. Down the road from Casket Arts is the local Indeed Brewing Company and Taproom. They make a great pilsner, which you can get regular-test or NA. 

PHOTOS: Upper left, me reading from printed pages; upper right, seated from left to right and engaged in lively conversation are Halee Kirkwood, Jennifer Manthey, and me.