Mark Gustafson and Thomas R. Smith in conversation

How and why did Minnesota, distant from both dream coasts, become a literary mecca? Why up here in the North Country, and not Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St Louis, or Cleveland? What made the Twin Cities fertile ground for the birth and growth of the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Milkweed Editions, and an ideal place for Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press to transplant themselves? The literary renaissance of the 1960s and 70s here was due at the start to one generous and visionary poet, Robert Bly, and his gift for generating excitement all across the state, involving many young poets, and creating a community of mutually supportive writers. A florescence of poetry reading series, poetry magazines, small press poetry books, and literary organizations ensued. Read this book to appreciate fully, for the first time, the origins of the wondrous scene in which we are privileged to live.

Mark T. Gustafson has written ten essays on the subject of Robert Bly, also a bibliography, The Odin House Harvest, and the in-depth narrative book, Born Under the Sign of Odin: The Life & Times of Robert Bly’s Little Magazine & Small Press. He first attended a Bly reading in 1972, as a student at St. Olaf College. He has a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota. In 2012 Bly designated him as his biographer. Born and raised in Chicago, he lives in Minneapolis.

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In Poetry on the Side of Nature, poet and teacher Thomas R. Smith aims to inspire and equip poets at all levels of experience to employ the nature poem as advocacy for the natural world. Making a case for what has been defined as the Western “nature poem” as an act of survival and protest, Smith enlists 30 poets, new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, from both sides of the Atlantic to demonstrate the many ways poets can, for readers and themselves, close the distance of alienation between human beings and the natural world. Part essay, part anthology, Poetry on the Side of Nature is for any reader or writer of poetry who passionately loves and wants to defend the Earth.

Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. His poetry collections include Storm Island (Red Dragonfly Press) and Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications). He is editor of the forthcoming posthumous Robert Bly essay collection The Garden Entrusted to Me: Essays on Poetry and the Writing LIfe (White Pine Press, 2025). His first prose book Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival is available from Red Dragonfly Press. He teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center and posts poems and essays on his website www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.

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