As I’ve mentioned previously in this space, I came into writing poetry more or less under protest.
My mother reminded me recently that she had encouraged me to try and write poetry as a young kid, but I had never taken to it. I always pictured myself as a fiction writer rather than a poet. My evolution into considering myself a poet took place over an extended a period of time and I was well into adulthood when it started in earnest.
At the risk of repeating previous stories, the process towards writing poetry began during the late aughts. It was then I moved back to my hometown of Muscatine, Iowa, and rejoined a local group of writers calling themselves Writers on the Avenue (WOTA). It was a solid group of writers who were like me – writers who wanted to improve themselves and to grow in their craft. Everyone needs a similar group or two or three or more if they want to see growth.
I did get this from WOTA. Without them, I’m not sure I would have moved forward on the projects which became my first two books, The Holy Fool and The Yank Striker.
However, there was a lot of reading and a lot of critiques between people interested in my work. In all honesty, a good portion of my contributions to our group was listening to and critiquing poetry.
Many of the WOTA members wrote tons of poetry – poetry about the natural world, their feelings, their history, their faith – things attracting strong emotions and imagery, which are natural fodder for poems. I would sit in these workshopping/critique sessions, attempting to provide feedback, while not having something for them to read. What parental pressure failed to accomplish, adult peer pressure did.
I started off slower than a soccer-playing turtle goalkeeper trying to waste time at the end of a match. Fiction was (and is) my priority, so it was something I just played around with.
I kept finding myself return to the theme of the Mississippi River, the body of water I’d lived next to for about 40 years of my life. The imagry of living next to this watery highway, the source of life for everyone around it, attracted me like nearly nothing else.
This theme continued to attract me as I spent four years away from the Mississippi while living in Chariton, Iowa, in the middle of south central Iowa and well far away from any significant nearby body of water. It was a nice little town, but mentally and emotionally I was missing something.
I was further inspired by living on an actual highway (Iowa 14) for the first time in my life and only a block and a half away from railroad tracks. The theme of travel, the road and rails, also started to creep in to my verse.
Eventually, I decided if I wanted to call myself a poet, I needed to start publishing those poems, even if it was only on my own platform. That’s when Poetry Night was born.
Forcing myself to publish my poetry every month ended up being a good thing for me. Eventually, I started to run out of my old work, so it forced me to start creating new poems and new verse. I started to get out of the old prose writer habits of adding in more words when fewer, more descriptive words would do.
Early in 2024, I ended up spending a lot of time driving, traveling, and staying in unfamiliar places due to personal circumstances. I spent more than a bit of time in unfamiliar hotels and apartments due to this, and poems about being on the road started to spring from my laptop.
It was around this time I wanted to try and put together a physical collection of my work. I didn’t want it to be something just half-hearted and scattered. The poets I knew in real life (including those from the now-disbanded Iowa Writers’ Corner, of Des Moines, Iowa, and the Society of Great River Poets of Burlington, Iowa) said it made sense to base the collection around a particular theme.
It was then I took a look at the topics which had been dominating my verse for at least the past couple years and perhaps longer: River life and traveling life. Rivers and traveling became The Flow and the Journey.
This is a chapbook I put together with the assistance of Dodd Printing in my current home of Fort Madison, Iowa. It contains 19 poems touching on the Mississippi River and river life in general, as well as what you experience and encounter in life on the road. They run the gamut of the first poem I like to say I wrote with intent all the way back in 2010 to poems from 2024. All of them speak of either what river life has meant to me or what a traveling life is like.
If You’re Interested…
…in poetry, especially river and travel poetry, this might be the book for you.
Other than running into me at book fairs and events around Iowa, I’m trying to put together ways for you to purchase my first self-published work out to people. I’m hoping to make them available at independent bookstores here in Iowa, depending on their interest.
Until then, I’ve set up a new online bookstore for The Flow and the Journey here at Liegois Media. Currently, it’s just $6 for a copy, and I’m limiting it to one purchase at a time due to limited supplies. But go ahead and click on the button below. I’d love you to take a chance on my poetry.
While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.
