Publisher Description

"Full of spondaic gravity and grit." -BRUCE BONDShowcasing the fortitude and wisdom, the honey and fire, the jab and embrace of a master poet,With Mouths Open Wideis a landmark collection of more than three decades of writing.Including work from John Caddy's previous five books as well as new poems drawn from his experiences recovering from a stroke, the sum total of this expansive career carefully mediates the balance of outside and inside, sequentially rebuilding a delicate web of cognition, identity, and perception. From the revulsion on a child's face as Caddy's recovering body struggles to walk, to the gift of a night nurse revealing her tattoo, these poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. Caddy engages readers with his acerbic wit, his base profundity, his downright honesty, and a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude.With the blinkers off, this poetic vision comprehends a fulsome picture of human, and animal, experience-a flawed and loved slideshow of the world.

Author Biography

Winner of the 2012 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, poet and educator John Caddy is the author of The Color of Mesabi Bones(Milkweed Editions, 1989), a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner for poetry, Eating the Sting (Milkweed Editions, 1986), and Morning Earth (Milkweed Editions 2003). His "Earth Journal" poems circulate daily to teachers, naturalists, artists, and students around the world. A founder of Minnesota's Poets in the Schools program, Caddy has taught poetry to adults and children in over eight hundred settings over the course of forty years.

Review

From my own seminal experiences in the Adirondack Mountains, I know how difficult it is to commit entirely to landscape and creature. John Caddy's poems in "Wave," the first section of With Mouths Open Wide, presents a total immersion, body and soul, without cell-phone interruptions or reminders of the frantic human world back home. In the "Stroke" section which closes the book, Caddy's sudden impairment reveals a medical establishment which blames and tyrannizes the patient, but by that same love for the light and beauty of the earth the poet recovers enough his "eye for every shade of green." -- Greg Kuzma author of Adirondacks, Good News, and A TurningThe poems in John Caddy's With Mouths Open Wide compel and startle with their freshness, their lucidity, their lyricism-and with coinages worthy of Hopkins: windcraze, batebreath, springwood, birthbite, hugholds, dapplesun. There are echoes also of Whitman and Mary Oliver, Loren Eiseley and Aldo Leopold and Emily Dickinson: "why so much patterned / beauty of chaos born?" Survivor of a life-threatening stroke, Caddy awakens with his already heightened senses further heightened. He includes all of us as he reveals those sensibilities, whether he is writing before or after the stroke. We are all of us here in this wild, a wild of past and present and a challenging future where "We are children staring / at ourselves shrinking rapidly away from childhood." But Caddy says that we can do the shrinking with both gusto and dignity. And crow and grosbeak, cougar and cardinal, heron and snapper and chickadee and vole, and those nighthawks and swallows and swifts that "swoop the lake . . . with mouths open wide" burn brightly and hungrily in all of us. -- William KloefkornWith unflinching grace, John Caddy's poems offer up a highly realized natural world energized by lavish attentions and an intensely physical music, full of spondaic gravity and grit, full of affection and reverence for the intricacies and enormity of the small. What begins as a mythic space becomes increasingly inflected by a personal encounter, such that our going outward deepens the journey into vulnerability and heartbreak. Thus the extremities of nature and, increasingly, the horrors of abuse make repeated claims upon the poet, putting him at risk, calling upon the terrible resources of memory and the redemptive power of song. The result is work that distills experience to elements of most primary significance. Such is this book's great gift, its emotional honesty, its archaic resonance, its generosity rendered with a clear eye, a sure hand. A remarkable achievement. -- Bruce Bond Talking with poet and naturalist John Caddy, winner of the 2012 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award
By Courtney Algeo, Lit Lyfe, Twin Cities Daily Planet, May 16, 2012 For the occasion of his being honored with the 2012 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award--an award that, now in its 15th year, is given to one artist each year and comes with a hefty $50,000 cash prize--John Caddy gave me the opportunity to chat with him over the phone about the award, nature writing, and the poet's life as a stroke survivor. While I, as noted earlier, am not particularly an "outdoors person," be this either by profession or fate, talking with Caddy made me wish, in some respects, that I were. Caddy, 75, is a lifelong resident of northern Minnesota, and poet extraordinaire. He has written numerous books of poetry (four of which have been published by Milkweed Editions) about the lands, critters, and environment. A "student of nature" in terms of both his formal and informal education, Caddy has a love for the Earth that is hard to come by these days. In 1994, he suffered a stroke that slowed him down, but did not destroy him or his drive to write. There has been some talk lately about how nature writing is dead. Why do you believe people are saying that, and do you agree? Utter nonsense. Never a shortage of damn fools. That's a city person's perspective on the world. An urban notion but not urbane. Well then, what is the future of nature writing? There's a lot of ignorance. There's a nature deficit right now, but nature writing is at a peak, and it's going to stay there for a while. A lot of people are gradually realizing that we are nature and that our longing and our hopes reside there in many ways. We're even afraid of what's been natural within us for a long time, and we're busy demonizing nature. People are worried these days that nature is pissed at us and is actively trying to get back at us, but this is pure idiocy, it's like blaming yourself for stubbing your toe. Americans are learning that we screwed up. We've been making deliberate war on nature for hundreds of years. Right now we're busy wrecking the ocean. What do you believe has been the greatest act of war on the Earth perpetrated by Americans? I don't go for greatest or smallest. The list would be a thousand pages long, but I'd start with [the destruction of the] Native Americans, I guess. You have said that your relationship with Mother Nature has at times raised eyebrows. Can you explain this a little? It's a joke. I love her, she loves me back. She likes jokes. She plays jokes on humans all the time. Like how everything is based on sex and there's always lots of cross-pollination going on. And frogs singing. Frogs are all male, but they're still all trying to say, hey baby, I'm here, I'm big enough. When writing as a naturalist, but also as a man who understands science, is it hard to parse facts and feelings regarding nature? No, not at all. The science has the pretense of objectivity, which no science is truly objective. We are highly subjective beings. Of course, as an artist, I think more as an artist than as a naturalist. I'm a poet. As a poet I don't have to pretend to be objective. Scientists are told to be objective and they try, but that's silly. You can't escape subjectivity even if you try. What do you see as the differences, if any, between nature writing and eco-writing? Eco-writing is about being pissed off about issues but nature writing is about celebrating gifts, like the sun, air, water, and laughter. Ever hear a squirrel yelling at you from a tree? God you're ugly. You're so ugly out there! It makes me laugh, and it's a good laugh. There are also gifts that are hard to take. Like knowledge. Joy delayed. You're bigger for it. Eco-writers are not so interested in nature but more interested in themselves. Utilizing poetry and science, have you done everything you can? Certainly not. I've done some of it. I do what I can. I'm crippled, so it puts some limits on me. I spent a long time resisting much, obeying little--that's Whitman. But I can't do much of that any more. What is it about the landscape of Minnesota that as held you here and kept you writing about it? The boreal forest saved my ass when I was a kid. We lived in a cabin for part of the year. My parents weren't always that nice to each other. They would fight hard. Yell and throw things. I would go out and hang out in a tree. That was my healing place when I was lonely. What was the first thing you learned out there? That I didn't have to listen to my parents. Gosh, you sure have won a lot of awards. Not recently. I was doing a lot in the early 90s for a while. I was on a national radar, which is kind of weird. I never accepted that. I was going on fine and all of a sudden I had a stroke. And when you have a stroke when you're a public person it means you should have died publicly. I was essentially dead for a long time and I still am as far as most people outside of Minnesota know, which I don't like, but I'm coming back somewhat. What will the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award mean for you then? It means I'm 75 years old and live on Social Security. This award means security--more money in the bank. I can live longer and not worry about it. I can give my kids each a couple thousand dollars. I have two kids, a great plenty. My son is sailing around the world with his family. He is a naturalist by trade, and my daughter is a nurse. I went out with her for birthday dinner recently. She found the best pizza in Minnesota. It's at a place called 'Za! in Forest Lake. The name is a shortening of "pizza," and it's the best Italian food I ever had. Their pepperonis are the size of six pepperonis and you can really taste it. Didn't you say you're a vegetarian? Who, me? Yeah! Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Some days a good pizza is worth it.

Review Quote

From my own seminal experiences in the Adirondack Mountains, I know how difficult it is to commit entirely to landscape and creature. John Caddy''s poems in Wave," the first section of With Mouths Open Wide , presents a total immersion, body and soul, without cell-phone interruptions or reminders of the frantic human world back home. In the Stroke" section which closes the book, Caddy''s sudden impairment reveals a medical establishment which blames and tyrannizes the patient, but by that same love for the light and beauty of the earth the poet recovers enough his eye for every shade of green."

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