Information Woman!: April is Poetry Month: Day 7

What a Cat Can Do in Katmandu

The meanest barn flies of the summer buzz

around my head, and sweat runs down my back.

I put the milker on the fourteenth cow.

The radio plays the saddest country song.

My six cats aren't underfoot but sprawled

in a corner. We're bored with our lives.

The music stops for five o'clock news,

And things are happening in Katmandu.

This Katmandu sounds magic, like the name

of a jazz saxophone player or

a mountain pleasure palace. I begin

to chant softly, Katmandu, Katmandu.

The cats perk up. They recognize the word.

Yes sir, cats, Katmandu is where it's at.

Here you crawl around all day in a road ditch

for one scrubby gopher--in Katmandu

they'll serve you lightly poached goldfinch,

the feathers removed. The hotels have

green velvet rooms. World travelers rave

about the cathouses of Katmandu.

I say we split for Katmandu. Just drop

it all, get on that long road for Nepal,

because a cat can do in Katmandu

what a cat can't do in South Dakota.

--Leo Dangel

A Little Book of Barns, compiled by David R. Pichaske, publication supported by the Minnesota Humanities Commission, printed at Quality Printing, Luverne, MN undated

I'm not sure where I picked up this pamphlet; a little research from the acknowledgements page showed that it was created in conjunction with a traveling Smithsonian exhibit called "Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon.

I first picked this poem back in May, 2020 when I was posting a poem daily during the pandemic. I researched enough to be able to contact the compiler of the booklet and we had an interesting email exchange. Somehow, I never got around to publishing this. I'm feeling contrite about missing this opportunity, but Easter seems like a good day to reconcile my failure.

Here is our email exchange, lightly edited for length:

Good morning! I'm seeking some information about "A Little Book of Barns" that you are credited with compiling. Somehow this little booklet made its way to my bookshelf and has been nestled in with about 130 other books of poetry and verse.

I'm a retired Minneapolis public school librarian/district library coordinator (bookseller, furloughed sales associate, gardener, sometimes poet and photographer) who's had a blog that was lingering in neglect for a long time but that I've just recently revived when Covid-19 drove us indoors. I decided to take a book a day from that poetry shelf and share a poem from that volume. I began on the 18th day of the declared pandemic and I am now on day 68.

As the days passed, my little project got more involved--researching the author, the book, the poem; adding commentary and context, links and illustrations. I chose "What a Cat Can Do in Katmandu" by Leo Dangel for a current posting. As a girl I grew up on a dairy farm in Mille Lacs county and this really resonated with me--the cows, the cats, the dreams of exciting faraway places...(Such dreams lead me to actually go to Kathmandu and camp all across Asia and Europe)

So far, I've learned a little about the poet and that this was produced in conjunction with a Smithsonian exhibit, but there are no dates in the booklet. Any further inside information or insights would add some special panache to this posting. Thank you for your time...I look forward to reading some of your essays that I discovered on your website. Stay safe and well. Jean

Wow. I spent most of the day cleaning up our third floor library/storage spot, recovering all kinds of personal history and school history (I teach--still--at Southwest Minnesota State in Marshall), and now I check e-mail and find this message from you. More history.

I figure you know enough about me from my web site, so no need to go into detail there--except to note that I spent a year on a Fulbright teaching in Outer Mongolia, which is reasonably close to Kathmandu. You ever overnight in a yurt while you were over there?

But about Leo Dangel. That poem comes from Dangel's book Home from the Field, which I published back in 1997 as publisher/editor of Spoon River Poetry Press. I had published a few shorter books by Dangel and this was a collected poems. I can send you a copy if you want--it's a good book. Garrison Keillor was fond of Dangel's work and read him occasionally on his radio program. there's a great story there, actually--one weekend on his Lake Wobegon monologue Keillor went into a dialogue which came right out of Dangel's poem "After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries a New Recipe for Hamburger Hotdsh." It sounded familiar to me. When I got to school Monday, Bill Holm came over to my office and asked, "Did you listen to Garrison over the weekend?" "Yeah, I did." "Wasn't that Leo's poem he was doing?" "I thought so. Let's go to the ITS room and see if they can pull up the broadcast and we can listen. . . ." We did. the student at the desk, who had taken my class in rural-regional literature the semester previous, found the broadcast on line and started playing the Lake Wobegon monologue. When garrison got to the point in question, the student scratched his head--"Isn't that the poem we read last semester . . . ?" So we contacted Keillor, who apologized and told us that he thought this was something he had written back when. What the heck--Holm, Keillor, I and in a way Dangel were all . . . well, not close friends, but connected.

Anyway, I came to Minnesota in 1981, bringing with me Spoon River Poetry Press from outstate Illinois near Macomb, and I continued publishing books here, both prose and poetry. I have now reached about 150 books by other people on Spoon River Poetry/Ellis Press. Leo was here when I got here. He was in a wheelchair--had been since an accident in high school (he was not wearing a seat belt)--and had grown up in South Dakota, right across the Minnesota border. He had come to Southwest after finishing his M.A. at the University of Kansas because it is wheelchair accessible. Leo taught in the English Department until he retired. He had the office down the hall from Bill Holm, Adrian C. Louis, and me. He was a tough guy who drove his own car . . . and got himself into the car from his wheelchair by himself. He died three years ago--just before he checked out, I did a little chapbook of his unpublished poems titled When Threshing Ended. Anyway, that's a little background on Leo.

The barn booklet was something we did at the Minnesota Machinery Museum in Hanley Falls for a traveling exhibit from the Smithsonian Institute on barns. I think that was back around 2005, 2006. Part of the deal was they would provide the exhibit and we would have to invent some publicity event. (I am on the museum's board of directors.) So some board members set up a tour of area barns of various types, and I threw together a collection of barn stuff to hand out to people on the tour. We/I didn't want to publish it officially, because that would tangle us up in all kinds of copyright issues, and we were not selling it anyway, it was just for the tour. People just gave verbal or written permission (Robert Bly is part of this crew too, and Fred Manfred, and Meridel when she was alive--I think it all goes back to the Marshall Festivals Phil Dacey and I put o
n back in the 1980s and early 1990s), and we got it done. How a copy of this ended up with you, i can't imagine--maybe you came down to a Marshall Festival or to the barn tour?

Anyway, if you want any Spoon River Poetry Press or Ellis Press books (the web site is ellispress.com), or my books, I can provide them. Blei, Holm, Etter, Louis, Kloefkorn are all good. These are dark days for selling books, and I have inventory, inventory, inventory.
Oh, there's Leo Dangel another story. When I was doing my anthology Late Harvest, my editor at Paragon House ran copies of the manuscript by half a dozen readers from all over the place, asking for pre-publication review advice. And to justify the $100 honorarium, they all gave advice. I include ten or twelve Dangel poems in that book, and Leo was not at the time very well known (if he was ever well known!), but not one reviewer recommended cutting poems by this unknown poet.

We're staying well--life is good out here in the country. I'll actually go in to school tomorrow to print off a file Jim Heynen sent for his next book of stories--I'm supposed to write a foreword for that. Heynen is part of the crew too. It's been a fun trip, although so many have now left the boat.