“On New Year’s Eve, 1940, Paul Southworth Bliss, a veteran of the Great War in Europe and a Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, took his service revolver from its holster in his small apartment at the Kansas City, Missouri, YMCA, put the pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. He was just 51 years old. He left a …
“The Badlands Call” By Clell Gannon Land of a thousand voices Beckoning unto me, Land of the zigzag valleys Shadowed in history. Land of a thousand coulees, Pastures without the bars, Land of a weird beauty Under a million stars. WildDakotaWoman will be on hiatus until sometime in 2023.
I’ve known a lot of funny people in my life. Rodney Nelson was probably the funniest. A cowboy rancher from down in the Heart River Valley west of Mandan, N.D., Rodney succumbed to cancer Wednesday. He was just 71 years old. Now 24 hour later, wherever he is, he’s making an audience laugh. You might remember Rodney as a cowboy …
OK, if you came here looking for that sappy poem “Billy Peeble’s Christmas” that I usually put on my annual Christmas poetry blog, you’re going to be disappointed. Even Lillian rolled her eyes when I headed for my office to start writing. She didn’t say much, but I got the hint — aren’t you tired of that by now? Isn’t …
Paging through an old book of poetry, I came across this poem by North Dakota poet Paul Southworth Bliss, from “Poems of Places.” The poems in the book were written as Bliss traveled the country in 1937. This one came from a stop in Oklahoma, which got oil a long time before North Dakota, but the similarities are striking, 80 …
By Lillian Crook and Jim Fuglie As many of you know, Jim and I have a fascination with a North Dakota poet named Paul Southworth Bliss, and we are writing his biography. For the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day, we wrote an accounting of his military service, from my research. Joining the legions of Americans sent to France to join the …
Up early on Sunday morning, in time to hear a gentle rain begin to fall, a brief reprieve from the coming heat of a Texas summer. As I sat listening, this phrase popped into my head. “Go placidly amid the noise and haste …” I saw it years ago on a poster hanging on the wall of a friend’s kitchen. …
This early morning quiet Many inches on the ground Falling softly still, six-fifteen Straight down, not a sound. The sagging branches, wet white Up north Dakota Territory The way of it at thirty degrees Another clean winter story. Tip toe up and down Whisper softly to each one No school today, ice and snow Maybe heaps before it’s done. Really …
When I was in college, an English professor once devoted an entire lecture to discussing a single poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” created in 1916 by the Irish writer William Butler Yeats. I still own the text book, coverless now and much worn. I thought of and reread the verses Monday before walking to a nearby pond to take …
Eric Bergeson, The Country Scribe, offers his take on the classic Robert Frost poem, “Stopping By Woods On Snowy Evening.” Imagery, personification and repetition are prominent in the work, written in 1922 and published in 1923, by one of the most celebrated poets in America.