Great Interview in the Missoula Independent

http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/literary-surprise/Content?oid=2099485

Take a look!

Lake Powell, Arizona (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Lake Powell, Arizone," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Tropic Trees (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Tropic Trees," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Spacesurfers (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Apacesurfers," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Yom Kippur in Montana (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Yom Kippur in Montana," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Birds of a Fin and Fish of a Feather (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Birds of a Fin and Fish of a Feather," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Geneva: The Grand Quai (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Geneva: The Grand Quai," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Passing By (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Passing By," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Winter at St. Legier (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Winter at St. Legier," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

The Obscenity (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "The Obscenity," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Raincoated Victory (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Raincoated Victory," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Omaha Beach (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Omaha Beach," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Hear Ye and Harken - Another Kind of Fire Rages in the West (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Hear Ye and Harken - Another Kind of Fire Rages in the West ," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Montana Young (audio)

Jesse reads his poem, "Montana Young," from the collection Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Q. I know what a “wild pitch” is in baseball. Is there such a thing as a tame pitch?

A. There is. A tame pitch occurs when a southpaw takes off his glove and throws the ball with his right hand. Vice versa for a northpaw. A pitcher throws with his opposite hand when he either 1) has sprained his pitching wrist, 2) is acting up like a wise-acre, or 3) has been given the wrong hormone shot.

Q. What was so wrong about the Norman king, Henri the Bad?

A. Plenty. I don’t want to talk about it. Let me just say that it started out with his not going to school. He was called all sorts of names, mostly by his mother. When he grew up, he married Anne of Aragon--or was it Aragon of Anne?--the one who pouted a lot and claimed her feet were always cold in the castles they lived in. “Why can’t we go to the Riviera?” she asked. But her inconsiderate and loutish husband would say, “There isn’t any Riviera--well, actually there is, but there aren’t any hotels yet--so you can’t go.” He never built anything himself, he just louted around. Their son, naturally enough, was Philip the Worse, but that’s another story.

Q. Why do lions sometimes eat zebras and, other times, lie around peacefully right next to them?

A. Your average lion, lolling about like that, thinks that zebras are horses and that they are behind bars. He believes that they’re in perambulating protective cages of some sort and forgets all about them. Then he gets his appetite back, his hunger releasing a certain chemical that affects his retina so that he can no longer distinguish the color black--the color of the stripes or bars. Contemplating the zebras, he thinks, all of a sudden, “They’re out!” And he, or she, as the case may be, and usually is, jumps them. And you know the rest, from all the colorful and educational TV programs on Africa.

Q. How come the plural of “gladiolus” is “gladioli”? How can us be singular and I be plural?

A. You see, it comes from Latin, and--never mind. Let me just tell you that people who still speak Latin--in a little-known corner of southeastern Romania--have a lot of trouble with English intrusions into their language: “squid pro crow” and “scrumptious est delicto” on their menus, “Sic Transit Glorious Monday” for urban subway strikes at the beginning of the week, and “Abe has the corpses” in their law courts. It’s pretty much a trade-off. We take “excelsior” (singular) from them and they take “wood shavings” (plural) from us. Don’t worry about it. Just add a little water and put the flowers in.

Q. Are “hollyanders” rabbits or ducks? And what are “fitzbergers” anyway? And “Canadian squidgins”?

A. The answer to your first question is neither; they are a new breed of goat, with forelocks on their chins. Keen interest in being displayed in them, since they may eat plastic. As for Canadian squidgins, they are in between a frog and a hard place: they are a mammalian insect that makes a soft plopping noise when it hits the water, trying to escape from I don’t know what. But you hear the sound quite often in the cottonwoods of upper Manitoba, and occasionally in Saskatchewan…. Coming back to fitzbergers, I never heard of them before, or never met them. I think you may be confusing them with the -geralds or -randolphs or -gibbonses. Say hello to Maud.

Tree of Northern Lights (audio)

From Jesse's poetry collection, Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk.

Q. I have a lot of trouble with memory aid techniques, especially the associational kind. For instance, in order to remember the name of a client I was recently introduced to, by the name of Henderson, I told myself the following short story: “der is German for the, which is so neutral that I had better not think about it at all, but turn to a gender sound like the syllable that follows: son, imagined as a big, strapping, hungry fellow who audaciously craves a chicken.” But I came out with--Wilcox. Of course, I wound up contacting a rival firm instead of a customer. This is embarrassing.

A. Please, no emotions--even in long questions. I believe that you are just trying too hard. Don’t be so sophisticated or polysyllabic in your associations; never use a word like “audaciously,” for instance. Use very simple words and concepts. For example, here’s how I remembered a man named Phillips: first “screwdriver,” then the logical sequence “hammer--nail--dead,” with the switch pair “head/hat,” turning to “parasol--sunburn--skin oi,” pivoting on the doublet “oil/petroleum” toward “energy--cartels--OPEX,” with a last diptych “OPEC/Gulf,” leading straight to “Houston, Texas--Bartlesville, Oklahoma”--the headquarters of: “Phillips”! Always take the line of least psychic resistance, and you’ll be all right--and normal. As in Norman, Oklahoma(!) again. See what I mean? God help you.

Q. If food and survival are even more basic than sex, how come most songs are love songs?

A. There is a bonafide food song, “Jambalaya,” though naturally enough, it’s half in French. There are a lot of drinking songs, of course, in every language, but they’re not pertinent. In fact, they’re downright impertinent, to say the least. And that’s what I want to say, because I can’t really answer your question. And why, when you come right down to it, there should be a ballad to shrimp and not, say, to roast beef or pheasant under glass, I’ll never know.

Q. What are anklebiters?

A. They are little kids, very little kids, starting out early to be general nuisances--asking for things, getting into the cookies, leaving their toys all over the place, invading swimming pools a full five minutes before the adult lap hour is finished, things like that. They don’t actually bite, they just look and sound like hell-bent irritants only just so high from the ground. But bless their little so-called hearts, they deserve a name of their own, don’t they?

Your Thigh Said Stay

       Your thigh said stay,
your legs under, dead asleep,
myself zonked out until the alarm leaped
when your thigh, flung across,
clamped mine. "No way,"
it said and clung with woman's might,
kept me down, you
in love-locked dispassion,
you the Turk
holding, ownerly tight,
knowing no other necessity after night's
pall, dim waning murk
of dawn, the lightening blue
morning...and grudging dispossession.
Had to fight
to gain my loss
into one more unmannerly day.

Anecdote in the Swiss Alps

         Setting: The Hotel Arosa, in German Switzerland. Easter Skiing Season. It is dinner time. My family waits for me in the little anteroom just before the dining room. I am in a water closet on the first floor hall, having pulled up the plunger on the commode. This machine is infernal to an American because instead of having an activating handle on the front of the tank, it has a plastic disc on the top. The device seems to invite a downward pressing palm motion to work the toilet, but, actually, one must lift it. I have been frequently confused between pressing and pulling the disc top.Now, after once again pushing or pressing it falsely, I over-correct myself and pull it up sharply. I do so too violently, however, and break it off. To my consternation the disc top flies right out of my hand and caroms off one wall and the ceiling above. It bounces down directly into the toilet bowl, whose seat is still up. Before my startled eyes it disappears in the whorl of flushed water eddying out of the bowl.

In the ensuing silence that beats on my eardrums, I find myself staring incredulously at my handiwork….But who is to know whodunnit? Either more cowardly than embarrassed, or more audacious than either, I quickly leave the scene of the crime. The concatenation of events still boggles my mind: my wrong initial movement, my impatient recovery and over-reaction, my fascination and paralysis at the quick course of subsequent events, demonstrating the immutable old law of gravitation or the unearthly new principle of magnetism between plastic and descending water.

Incident on the Clark Fork

      It had taken fifteen memorable minutes—from the time she was hooked, that is. Before that, he must have used four night crawlers, which she kept stripping off. He could feel her each time, big and emboldened with each success. He was just as good at bait fishing as fly fishing and he could not believe, with how cunningly he threaded the crawler on the hook the fourth time, that she would get away with it, but she did. He preferred fly fishing, but this early in the season on the delta’d but highwater Clark Fork, he fished bait the first part of the day. There was an art to it, which fly-men denigrated too easily because of the majority of lazy bums who practiced it grossly. But he had been taught better, by an expert who showed him precisely how to bounce a No. 3 split shot on the bottom so that it entered a hole repercussively; then you let the hook dribble, and, afterwards, lie and drift: it would generally be hit just then.