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Jane Hoogestraat
- University of Arkansas Press
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Jane Hoogestraat Jane Hoogestraat was born in South Dakota, earned her BA from Baylor and her PhD from the University of Chicago, and arrived in the Missouri Ozarks in the fall of 1989. Since that time, she has taught at Missouri State in Springfield, specializing in 20th century poetry, literary theory, and creative writing—poetry. Her first chapbook, Winnowing Out Our Souls (2007), was published by Foothills Press; her second chapbook, Harvesting All Night (2009), won the Finishing Line Press Open Competition. She has also published in such journals as Elder Mountain, Fourth River, Image, Midwestern Gothic, Potomac Review, and Southern Review. qQ Listening to Fauré This morning the darkest green, the coldest spring fell away before a sunlit clearing where a cardinal and a jay teased a squirrel. Later an overcast sky held until we were inside, purple irises withstood the storm. When in the night you turn to cross another year, think of this music, how it will not cease returning the same lines, richer year by year like those late green thunderstorms we’ve watched nights from the living room. We keep our candles lit long after midnight, after the sirens, in the region of what little peace there is. 119 By June when the first fireflies are out, a neighbor will light four corner candles for guests to play croquet far into night. Others will watch from a porch swing. Another visiting poet has written to say you live in very paradise there, where the evening light falls less eerily than the fireflies after they have flared, too suddenly green, gone. Enough evenings like that, we won’t curse the cold spring storms that leave this town too green, or think instead of all that we were spared. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones Play the Ozarks Yes, the banjo can hit the ironic, scale the world’s notes, which we would have known had we tried earlier to learn the real music of the place where we live, tried a little. Can a banjo, also, carry the craggy resources of a place, a violent area, where outside the garrison town, there was no law, a bitter place that simmers in its stories, needs its banjo, fiddle, if you will, to call the riffs, the dances, to name the stories . . . to lighten and to lift, to keep the score, to remember what it cannot heal? 120 Jane Hoogestraat ...