%1 http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/ en Bill Tremblay http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/bill-tremblay <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Bill Tremblay </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2019-01-28T10:57:47-07:00" title="Monday, January 28, 2019 - 10:57" class="datetime">Mon, 01/28/2019 - 10:57</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/bill-tremblay" data-a2a-title="Bill Tremblay "><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fbill-tremblay&amp;title=Bill%20Tremblay%20"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p class="rtecenter"><img src="/sites/default/files/Bill_Tremblay.jpg" alt="Poet: Bill Tremblay" width="550" height="844"></p><p>Bill Tremblay is a poet and novelist. His work has appeared in nine full-length volumes including <em>Crying in the Cheap Seats</em> (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), <em>The Anarchist Heart</em> (New York: New Rivers Press, 1977). <em>Home Front</em> (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 1978), <em>Second Sun: New &amp; Selected Poems</em> (L’Epervier Press, 1985), <em>Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada </em>(BOA Editions, 2016), <em>Rainstorm Over the Alphabet</em> (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2011), <em>Shooting Script: Door of Fire</em> (Cheney, WA: Eastern Washington University Press, 2003) which won the Colorado Book Award, as wells as <em>Magician’s Hat: Poems on the Life and Art of David Alfaro Siqueiros </em>(Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2013), and most recently <em>Walks Along the Ditch: Poems</em> (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016).</p><p>He has received fellowships and awards from the NEA, the NEH, the Fulbright Commission, and the Corporation at Yaddo. His work has been featured in many anthologies, including Pushcart Prize, <em>Best American Poetry</em>, and <em>Poets of the New American West</em>. He directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Colorado State University, founded the <em>Colorado Review</em> and served as its chief editor for fifteen years. He received the John F. Stern Distinguished Professor Award in 2004. He is the author of a novel, <em>The June Rise</em> (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994/Fulcrum Publishing, 2002), which received a star review on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” A video of him reading poetry with Yusef Komunyakaa is available at: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir2c5r0XRP0.">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir2c5r0XRP0.</a></p><h2>Poems</h2><h3>Janis Joplin &amp; the Invention of Barbed Wire</h3><p>All morning gray flints of wind shoot down from the foothills across the horse pasture behind my house. Tumbleweed hard as coral bangs against the lapboard, scratching at window-panes with the quilled fingers of caged men.&nbsp;</p><p>I see them on porches after supper listening to wind pour over the grasslands, their minds spinning and creaking like windmills drawing waters up from underground.&nbsp;</p><p>This range full of unsettling music and they, bright wingtips of sinful kisses, sagebrush burning on lips of prairie night waiting for avenging thunderheads.&nbsp;</p><p>They will string wire on cottonwood stakes, draw squares on the land’s pure curve and at dusk return, asking nothing of their wives but to bank fires and lay down in cactus beds while they go dying, meteors in the whiskey town.&nbsp;</p><p>A woman stomps rhythm there in gold shoes shouting ‘get it while you can’ through the fence that owns her voice. She dies giving birth, flowers of Texas darkness still pinned to her dress.&nbsp;</p><p>I pluck barbed wire, singing with the wind. Clouds rush by like herds of ghost buffalo. First published in Delirium # &nbsp;1 (Spring, 1976); subsequently in The Anarchist Heart (New York: New Rivers Press, 1977).</p><h3>THE LOST BOY</h3><p>Across the Poudre River bridge stands a stone monument to a lost boy. Carved words fix the mystery. Did he wander off, or was he carried off by tooth or talon? Family, friends, searched the mountainside calling his name. The weather turned. Sleet, wind, snow in slants across the ponderosas. He blacked out under the canyon’s Milky Way. I hear his cries in echoing arroyos. Though his bones mouldered in cold drizzle he comes crashing through wild plum thickets clutching at my shirt, asking where I was in his sagebrush hours. Through his ripped jacket a flash of bone. I dare not touch his skeletal shoulder. He’s forgotten how to be alive. The climb is no relief, his weight dogs my knees. Breezes sough through purple yarrow aspen groves, dry waterfalls. I reach the cloud meadows, hairpin switchback until Mount Grayrock juts its granite forehead into one hard thought: what remains unfinished in the soul keeps doubling back until earth and sky are balanced aches like the cliff swallow’s swift flight.</p><p>First published in Luna #4; subsequently in Best American Poems: 2003, Ed. Yusef Komunyakaa (New York: Scribner, 2003). Collected in Rainstorm Over the Alphabet (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2001).</p><h3>Streetlamp</h3><p>To be a street lamp giving off a globe of cold cadmium light to a cul-de-sac​ is to make an opening in the sleepless dark through which comfort pours like a fountain, inviting those who enter to imagine underground cables connecting to the Rawhide Flats power plant twenty miles north which turns black coal into this sentinel that only wants to shine on the flat brows of houses held in the winter murk of what passers-by feel is locked, yet promising, a dream that leaves them reaching into the tense within, that lets them go past this made thing of glass and incandescing wire, this tree of light with the face of a small god standing between dusk and dawn, weary from making another false day, blotting out the stars and the spindrift darkness inside.&nbsp;</p><p>First published in The Ohio Review (Spring 1992); subsequently in Rainstorm Over the Alphabet (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2001).</p><h3>Brief Encounter</h3><p>I crunch through crusted snow west on snowshoes along the ditch. Winged clouds stand pearl white above the foothills ridged in lodge pole pine that summers ago blazed orange in swirling dragons from tree to tree. The sky shifts from silence to chartreuse. A breeze in flocked box elders shimmers flakes down on a hump of crystal, a frosted apparition the size of a yearling sheep. We look at one another a long moment. I can’t tell if she’s afraid or hungry. What do I look like to her? A walking stump? I turn east where the ditch divides into stubble cornfields. A minute passes before her black nose sticks out from a juniper bush. She must’ve crossed ice, run behind and past me, quiet as fog, calm yet curious about another animal abroad in the same winter hunting different sustenance. She and I fade inside blizzard / winds so cold my lips crack. She writes herself in my breath. I hold her like part of myself I hardly ever see.&nbsp;</p><p>First published in Stringtown (Spring 2016); subsequently in Walks Along the Ditch: Poems. (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press:, 2016).</p><h3>The Larimer-Weld Ditch</h3><p>You hand in your keys, and it’s over. Thirty-three years and a gold watch. You walk outside and all is green shade against the immense wrinkles of foothills crowned with blue reflected in water, an hour-glass running out so smooth you wonder if there’s time to clear your soul of debris before the ditch rider lowers the sluice-gate to release the spring flow. A narrow sparkling in sun and moon split off into a canal that runs on like a sentence to rolling plains, yet pooled where black clouds of catfish spawn shift shape like a bluebird flock into peaches or whales, flexing and relaxing its soft current caressed by dragonflies in July with Japanese fans serenaded on a mother-of-pearl concertina in the hands of a poet flush with warm beer. It can be walked along and sat beside and read as its surface gets clawed by bear| clouds that make muscles bloom, sinews stretch, the world and the earth it lives on. No breeze in still August yet the water is dimpled with swirling whirlpools like a long row of Sufis spinning light from their balance. Time to open up and let heaven through. You are alone with your memories carrying every regret you don’t forgive yourself for beside this water course that curves in wildflower banks. You walk all afternoon watching darkness rise to devour the trees and things go on— cities of people, their flashes and flaws, the many things they make that own them, the burden of what comes next. Nail-guns fasten; wrecking balls swing. Nations find provocations for drums. It’s a miracle you don’t stumble down a banking into the drink.&nbsp;</p><p>You imagine yourself drawn through a flaming womb, a coffee can filled with your ashes buried by an apple tree with the Medal of Worthy Owls you lusted for stamped on your memorial bench posthumously, but you are beyond victory or defeat. You are flecks of carbon settling on branches and leaves, lifting and falling in the dark beside a soft trickling from low falls, the ditch as tongue, as film stock, as Milky Way. Time to ponder what is of the earth, what is of the world, what is of heaven. Perhaps the Sumerians learned to write from trenching ditches in the earth with picks and shovels and white-lathered horses, the song of it a struck tuning-fork in the mind that reminds us that change is hard, change takes time.&nbsp;</p><p>Walks Along the Ditch: Poems (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016).</p><h3>Water Gazing</h3><p>Sitting in an afternoon mountain meadow, rabbit brush at my feet, floating in a lake of purple bee balm, 6000 feet. I’m reading the syntax of wild plum bushes, angel-wing cactus opening canary-yellow waxed flowers, white asters. 86 June 1st degrees. These waters are not for telling the future. They are for plumbing the deep silence, except for three Stellar-jays calling, keeping touch across a deep arroyo tumbling down to a five-mile reservoir blue as a piece of sky fallen between the hogbacks. Like a long white streak on a mask the creek bubbles down to where a rattlesnake lisps on its banks. Water is life for snakes to sip. They know every animal must go there not just to drink. A spirit lives there. I spell out words to the pool, stones and trees. Tall weeds with nine yellow mullein stalks rock in a breeze local as shadows from passing clouds with grey sandals, sunlight, the holy thistle fields. What does not come with the air? It stretches the ponderosas into its cycle, dropping seeds, the seam between seasons. Whoever eats these seeds inherits the earth.&nbsp;</p><p>Walks Along the Ditch: Poems (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016).</p><h3>What I Learned About Wyoming</h3><p>That a broken robin’s egg contains more archeology than a petroglyph. That nurses learn to tell which relative won’t let the dying die. That when the lake surface is the same color as the sky is the right time to fish. That thunderstorms iron dusty roads. That deer know when it’s hunting season. That as we kill off species we name streets after them. That living in Wyoming in winter is a form of meditation. That its open steppes give everywhere to run and nowhere to hide from the things we do when cabin fever drives us loopy. That clouds reflected in a horse’s eyes are like smoke boiling from a borrow-pit fire. That everything you need to know is right there out your back kitchen window. That blood and death are the sun’s two eyes. That love is a kind of fear when night skies bleed over rooftops like octopus ink. That the reintroduction of wolves has stirred the wildness of married women.&nbsp;</p><p>First published in Louisiana Review (Summer 2005). Subsequently in Walks Along the Ditch: Poems (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016).</p><h3>Extended Family</h3><p>Evening brings news of families turned to dust by something called a drone. We see it speed through air from its point-of-view— people dancing at an open-air wedding— a quick, final slip and then the black plume. I walk along the ditch trying to divine what tempts a man to trigger such a weapon. Small eddies dimple the water’s clear depths. Sharp rocks litter the bottom and make these swirls into bomb craters where once a wedding party danced. Mirrored on this surface, &nbsp;shark- toothed clouds linger over the invisible line where foothills spring into hogbacks, bristling with pine.&nbsp;</p><p>On the bank a goose stands sentinel. He has seen me before I him. Another, half-way down the banking strips grass seed, one eye peeled for crouching foxes. A flotilla of Canada geese drifts east where dark comes first, masters of the ditch in whose wings six fuzzy yellow goslings float, one of whom, caught in current, is far wide of the flock. Three mothers pump webbed feet until they form a line past which the prodigal cannot go. All tolled maybe forty geese. Forty years. Maybe forty days. No matter the dispensation, they are stars in the dark rift.&nbsp;</p><p>First published in Walks Along the Ditch: Poems (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016). Subsequently in Relative Wild, Ed. Arron A. Abeyta (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).</p><h3>A Day Without Ambition</h3><p>Gray-white gulls, green-necked mallards. armadas of Canada geese bob in the swells, then wing their dozens into blue skies above Long Pond, each to its mission among bare cottonwoods or turquoise water. My eye traces the horizon down Bonner Peak. Everything visible and invisible, each moment passing through me.&nbsp;</p><p>Must I give up ambition to align myself with this radiance? Can I hollow myself out so heaven can charge through my body? And what if I should be deluding myself? A rising breeze ripples my surface. The soul lives in everything that sees us as fact. Nothing lacking, no props needed on such a day.&nbsp;</p><p>Sure, the freight train horn is horrid as it slams northward toward Cheyenne, but a sumac’s crimson fruit hangs above the water’s face like someone leaning down from sky to kiss me. Shadows re-knit what is broken. I don’t need to get somewhere. I need to stay awhile and watch birds launch themselves out of my chest into the air.&nbsp;</p><p>First published in Walks Along the Ditch: Poems (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016).</p><h3>Where The Ashes Go</h3><p>Gold light enters through a line of cottonwoods winking as leaves shiver in rising breezes. Snow that frosted Long’s Peak this morning has disappeared from mid-October sun just as now a sunset darkening shadow turns the ditch water the color of wild plums. A boy on a bicycle pumps along the dirt road, his red dog wags its tail, and soon they pass out of sight heading east toward coming moonrise, the heron’s slow wings lifting it west where along the trail to Arthur’s Rock a meadow of blown bee balm waits for me.&nbsp;</p><p>First published in New Poets of the American West, ed. Lowell Jaegar. (Kalispel, MT: Many Voices Press, 2010). Subsequently in Walks Along the Ditch: Poems (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2016).&nbsp;</p><p>Copyright 2018 by Bill Tremblay</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p></div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/literature" hreflang="en">Literature</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/geography" hreflang="en">Geography</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/music" hreflang="en">Music</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/janis-joplin" hreflang="en">Janis Joplin</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/windmills" hreflang="en">windmills</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-landscapes" hreflang="en">Colorado landscapes</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/buffalo-herds" hreflang="en">buffalo herds</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/buffalo-herds-elegy" hreflang="en">buffalo herds. elegy</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/mt-grayrock" hreflang="en">Mt. 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