"Undated Snapshot": Selected poems, 1981-1991. (Original writing);.

• Main Author: Gastiger, Joseph Micheal.
• Other Authors: Director: Lucien Stryk.
• Language: unknown
• Published: Northern Illinois University. 1992
• Subjects: Fine Arts; Literature; American; inuit; Killer Whale; Killer whale
• Online Access: http://commons.lib.niu.edu/handle/10843/9880; http://hdl.handle.net/10843/9880

Sorry, the full text of this article is not available in Huskie Commons. Please click on the alternative location to access it. 79 p. These forty-six poems form a sequence that moves along currents of daydream and memory, desire and anxiety: those streams of consciousness that run beneath the surface of daily experience and give our lives weight, depth, and continuity. Our impressions of any immediate moment and of whatever brought us here, our responses to the news on the radio and to the next day ahead, are subsumed within some larger personal story we have been telling ourselves since words first became available to us. This book tries to capture a portion of the story I am telling myself and keep telling those I care for most--by the way that I make supper or rake the leaves, and by the ways I hear or fail to hear what they ask. While not, in any strict sense, chronological, these poems cover a decade, and they move from tentative, partial recollections of growing up no less painfully than anyone does to work that celebrates the intensities of sexual love, the risks and responsibilities of fatherhood, and the part one must play in a greater community. One hardly escapes from the recriminations of one's first family before one becomes the architect of another. In the course of these poems, though, their speaker becomes a less wounded figure, and--I hope--a more comical, more generous, man.These poems employ a variety of stanzaic and syllabic patterns as they travel a distance of ten years. In this regard, along with many others, I have trusted some notion of lyrical structure or organic form; I believe that the psychological pressure that activates and motivates each poem can direct its shape, its line breaks, and its rhythm. The Inuit carver, working in soapstone, claims that he is not creating a seal, or a killer whale, or a man adrift in a skin canoe. Rather, he says, he is freeing a spirit already living in his material, chipping away all that is not hunter or seal. In matters of craft, I defer to a similar instinct.