About The Poet
Poet, novelist, short story writer, teacher and rancher, J. V. Brummels was born and raised in the West and educated in the East. His poems have been published in dozens of literary journals, little magazines and anthologies and collected in two previous books: 614 Pearl and Sunday's Child. His futuristic novel Deus Ex Machina deals with a poet's place at the end of the world. His short stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone.
Brummels is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Mildred Bennett Award for contributions to the literature of Nebraska. He is one of five surviving winners of the Elkhorn Poetry Prize.
A member of the English Department of Wayne State College since 1977, Brummels has directed the Plains Writers Series and edited Nebraska Territory. He and his partner Jim Reese operate Logan House, an independent publisher of contemporary poetry and short fiction.
Brummels lives with his family in western Wayne County, Nebraska, where they raise horses and cattle.
Fine Arts
I'm standing in the door of the barn
tonight listening to jazz.
I don't understand jazz,
and I could walk to the radio
and change the station,
but I don't.
The stars are out,
and the moon'll rise soon.
I'm drinking beer and listening to jazz.
I'm thinking we're all jazz.
As soon as someone wants to understand,
we're misunderstood.
It's rhythm, or what passes
for rhythm. It's jazz,
and I'm standing
in the door looking out and up.
I think it's a matter of shirts.
At this moment, a thousand American
Lit students in libraries, dorm
rooms, on busted davenports
in over-priced tenements, are reading:
Daisy, seduced by Gatsby's
shirts. Gold and silver
shirts flung about the room.
The students want to understand
but Gatsby's misunderstood,
Daisy's misunderstood.
Their teachers have told them
It's the Jazz Age,
but the teachers have misunderstood.
I'm standing in the door, listening.
Beneath the stars a colt
lifts his muzzle and whinnies,
an angel's horn. Colts
and fillies are misunderstood,
unknown, more so than horses
that already are more or less
what they will always be,
brilliant or merely dependable,
star or barn. We don't yet
understand colts, colts are still
largely unknown, still largely to be,
like a shirt that's not been worn.
Down a hundred halls grown
men will walk tomorrow
with sheaves of papers and books
stacked against their hips wondering,
is this a fit profession
for a grown man? Wondering,
should I have stuck with basketball?
The service? They'd be colonels
or sergeants and retired long ago
on good pensions, or at least coaches.
Or stayed with the trumpet or sax.
Right now they'd be standing on stages
in smoky clubs playing their angel horns
to young women of adventuresome spirit.
A friend wrote that her colleague, a gentle
man of open gender, has disappeared.
What drama! Here, hardly anyone
disappears. I am drinking beer,
thinking of the coming winter. I am
thinking of the coming winter's
poker games, how cards is an education.
No, how winter is an education
and cards just the text we study,
how that more than understand
we want to experience
the endlessly various riffs.
And I'm thinking I am around too many
young women of adventuresome spirit.
And I am thinking a farmer recreates
the old country, but a rancher
is a native American who recreates
what he's seen on a movie screen.
And I am thinking of the jack of spades
cut from a fresh deck
and a few new dimes,
some old nickels,
quarters bright as asters,
halves and greenbacks
stitched across a dark oilcloth
I am drinking beer
standing in the door of the barn
listening to jazz, listening
to the colts whinny and snort
like a heavenly host.
I am looking up at stars
bright as new dimes.
I think I understand
when the moon rises
like a hole card
misunderstood.
Krei
for D.W.
Some flutter at the end of our reach,
moths we swat away more often than grasp.
Some we cage in hands of will and age.
My grandfather Harry, blind near the end,
saw clearly a neighbor man eight decades gone
drive his team across the near ridge.
Or hands of history and weather:
This winter day I recollect Cedar County.
District 115. Prospect Hill.
A merry-go-round and a giant-strides-
a sort of Maypole; a couple acres
of brome grass on a south-facing slope,
a little brush in the northwest corner;
the barren apple between the outhouses;
the pie we stomped in snow for fox-and-goose.
Each family each week sent its own
tin water glass to stand inverted
on a tray beside a blue-striped crock
the teacher filled each morning
from a tin milkcan toted from home.
Rows of desks with inkwells descending
from the back of the room to the low stage
on which the teacher's desk stood alone
but for the piano bench where we sat
in turn to recite. White cursive loped
across black cards above the board
between the portraits of Washington and Lincoln.
A Nebraska map. A tin locker filled
with aromatic supplies. Curtained shelves
for library books and tin dinnerpails.
A wall clock with a red sweephand.
Krei. Darrell Krei. Mister Krei.
First day, first grade, in those sane days
of post-Labor Day school starts,
I walked the county road in new jeans
stiff as tin. Mr. Krei waited
for us on the step, brass bell in hand.
Nineteen, he had his two-year certificate
from the Teachers College in Wayne.
What hopes for the settling flocks of neighbor kids
whirled and fluttered within the cage of his ribs?
What do I recall? Mr. Krei toted to school
a television set and rigged an antenna
in a near-blizzard wind and sub-zero cold
to show us the President's inauguration.
I still see Robert Frost's frail page
wind-whipped in the poet's hand, winter
glare and ghosts through the snow of poor reception.
Today marks the ninth inauguration since, and still
I picture Mr. Krei more easily than any President.
How, after recess, he'd study the mirror
beside the water crock, comb his hair just so,
a spiral of spitcurl over his forehead.
And how well he spoke! A flawless grammar.
One star-filled arctic night,
between stacks behind the hayrack,
I confided in my older brother my ambition:
I want to talk like him. He laughed.
Now he wonders if the laugh is on him:
Of the four of us Mr. Krei taught only he
is not some brand of language teacher.
*
The older I get, the nearer frontier
my childhood seems, as if by
some law of relativity
or artist's trick of perspective.
I see it now as a heavy wagon descending
a long slope, the team reined by a gentle hand.
Mr. Krei boarded in our home, then,
the bad winters when the roads closed.
After the morning swarm of chores and breakfast,
he led us out into the wind, busted the drifts
with his thin legs, toted books and papers
and gradebook and lesson plans and the cold
tin milk can of drinking water.
Through the day he kept us at our desks learning
while the red hand of the wall clock
swept its tidy face hundreds of times.
At night, after chores and supper, grading and planning
he would brush his teeth at the cold water tap
at the kitchen sink, drink from our family's tin
drinking glass, lie down to sleep
on our old busted-down davenport,
his glasses resting upon the arm.
It must have near broke his back.
*
But always a day came when winter's back
was broken. I recall the day after Mr. Krei's
fourth school picnic at Prospect Hill.
The last book was stacked away,
and each desk was emptied and scrubbed.
The red sweephand moved so slow
that some physical law seemed broken,
until Mr. Krei looked up from his desk
on its low stage, smiled and released us
into the swirl of that spring and the coming summer
and the winter and summers after.
He stood upon the step to watch
us disappear in a rush up the hill,
almost climbing into the sky,
little pigeons bound for home.
Did he wait to see if any of us looked back?
Did he cry out after us? And did we turn?
Review of Cheyenne Line by Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review
J.V. Brummels is a family man who raises cattle and horses on a ranch, teaches English and Creative Writing at Wayne State University, and somehow finds time to write poetry and novels. Every aspect of his life can be found in Cheyenne Line. These are the keen-eyed observations of an educated man who has also been sanded down by prairie winds. His words are full of heart and marrow, crafted so plainly that you won't have to wonder at their meaning.
"Golden" holds the essence of his genesis.
Mama was a beauty - still is.
And Daddy was a G.I. Joe,
a dog face so country-fried
they called him Broomcorn,
the only nickname he ever earned.
"Plain" sets forth the author's past, present, and future sense of place.
We prosper and we fail.
Sun and rain.
Hail and hoppers
and drought and flood.
Good years we fatten
on the produce of our fields.
Bad years, we cast
our wind-burned sight
down lines scratched
in the dirt....
I was surprised by what I found in Brummel's poems. "Krei" was his touching tribute to a childhood teacher and what it meant to be an educator in the past. Life's truths were discovered and shared while playing cards and mendng fences. "Running with Dogs" and "Teaching the Dawn" revealed a man and his solitary musings. Humor and honor, doing one's best, questioning life, all played a part. I saved my favorite for last. "Dead Men's Fences".
For all my children's lives I've built a herd,
and no one builds without taking, from an Indian
or some other stranger, at best from some ghost
who can only wander his land as a shade,
his herd and tribe dispersed. It seems
all my life I've mended dead men's fences.
J.V. Brummels takes the measure of himself as man and poet in few words, skillfully.
