Featured Poet: Aaron Belz

I was born in 1971, in Iowa City, almost literally in the shadow of the Famous Workshop. We lived in Muscatine, however, then moved to Cedar Rapids. So it was the smells of hogs and black soil that filled my nostrils, not those of carpet detergent and Marvin Bell's leather jacket.

When I was four we moved to St. Louis, where my parents have remained ever since. The only workshop in town was (and still is) at Washington University--at the time, Howard Nemerov was the big wheel rolling. I loved his poem, "Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry:"

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

After going to college in Tennessee and grad school in New York, I've been in St. Louis for six years, married, with two beautiful kids. These days I'm studying for a Ph.D. at St. Louis University in the daytime, splitting my evenings between family activities, corresponding, and writing poetry.

A FEW THINGS I LOVE/ AND OFTEN SPEAK OF

John Ashbery. In an interview with "Architectural Digest" he claimed that living in the city was less distracting than living in the country, because in the country you "might see a pumpkin."
Sir William Walton. Orchestral music that sounds like a movie about people watching a thunderstorm from their front porch.
Akira Kurosawa. Who knows the ways of Samurai? Who speaks with doves?
Joseph Mitchell. His essays about life in North Jersey and his essay about McSorley's wonderful saloon are some of the most lyrical, beautiful essays written during the 20th Century.
Johnny Cash. Perfect country songs--I walked through Antibes in February singing "How high's the water, mama? Three feet high and rising!" very loudly, to the chagrin of my wife and travel mate, Becca, who seems to fear the French.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Gulag Archipelago opened my mind.
Thomas Merton. The New Man opened my heart, but Becca recommends Seven Storey Mountain.
Steely Dan. "I would guess she's in Detroit/ With lots of money in the bank/ Although I could be wrong."
Wallace Stevens. "Call the roller of big cigars,/the muscular one?"
W.H. Auden. "What is in your mind, my dove, my coney;/ Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life."
William Stafford. "Mine was a Midwest home--you can keep your world./ Plain black hats rose the thoughts that made our code./ We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God."