MARK YOUR CALENDAR! 

On Monday and Tuesday, February 6 and 7, 2012, the Department of English will host Visiting Writer Jeff Gundy, who will read from his poetry (Monday) and deliver a lecture titled "Songs from an Empty Cage: Some Notes on Theopoetics" (Tuesday).  Both reading and lecture will take place at 8 p.m. in Dow Center A and B.  Both the reading and talk are free and open to the public. For further information, please contact Dr. John Somerville at (517) 607-2431.

Jeff Gundy’s five books of poems include, most recently, Spoken among the Trees (Akron 2007), winner of the Poetry Award from the Society of Midland Authors, and Deerflies (WordTech 2004), winner of the Editions Poetry Prize and the Nancy Dasher Award.  Earlier books include Rhapsody with Dark Matter (Bottom Dog 2000), Flatlands (Cleveland State U. Poetry Center 1996), and Inquiries (Bottom Dog 1992). His prose books include Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing (Cascadia 2005), chosen for the Dale W. Brown Book Award; Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye (SUNY 2003); and A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara (Illinois 1996). He was the Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Salzburg in Austria in 2008. Other honors include multiple fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, two C. Henry Smith Peace Lectureships, and (as a regular reviewer of poetry and nonfiction for The Georgia Review) a share of a Silver Gamma Award. His poems and essays have appeared in, among others, Kenyon Review, Christian Century, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Image, Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Quarterly West, River Styx, Tampa Review, Shenandoah, The Common Reader, Poetry Northwest, and Pleiades. He teaches writing, literature, and other courses at Bluffton University in Ohio, where he was Faculty Scholar in 2004-05.

(Information provided by Image journal; see its profile for further information about Mr. Gundy and links to his personal web page.)  

You may also want to read the poetry and interview from the Mennonite Poetry collection at Goshen College; the profile and links at examiner.com; and the following poem:

Passage

On the swift cruise there was only time and water, twin mothers
of an anxious son. And money. In the long end of day we pushed

right at the sun and failed again except at witness, the beauty
softened by mist and latitude until we could almost bear it. What else

could we do? We could drain the tanks in a long stern chase
and never get closer, two-footed, chilled, awkward as we are,

the vast ship tiny on the sea. When the captain spoke we couldn’t
understand. When the cruise director spoke we didn’t listen.

There was free champagne but we didn’t get any. If there were stars,
we missed them. On the sea only the surface matters anyway,

the whitecaps a fresh sign of the spirit, happy in the cold surge,
foaming toward the full north, sliding calm as paradise away

as we watched for a tail, a spout, some sign from underneath.
So the wake curled endlessly, the radars whirled, meals were

heaped and spread all day, and the servants pretended to love the work.
The fog had its charms and the chill breeze too, and we learned

that the coast range and the island range allow anyone passage.
They were parents aging gently, good providers with little to say.

Then they were long books written in the old tongue, the one
God made up before she had company. Then they were houses

for any spirit brave enough to make the journey. Then the fog
was laughter, was music, was long hair combed out damp at the fire.

And we walked the slick deck in the long dusk, and the ship
bore us north, and in the dawn the mountains were tattered sail

at the fringes of memory, and the summer home God built
when all our speaking was too much, and the tousled hair

of a quiet daughter, her face too sweet to bear except in fog.