The Two Boots Word Vault

On January 20, 2024 The Tributary Reading Series hosted a literary tribute to the great Minnesota writer, Frederick Manfred. This is the first of two recordings from that tribute at the MCN6 TV studio in Minneapolis.  

On April 11, 2025, I spent the evening reading poems and telling two stories about my predicaments as a young man in Mexico and Alaska. Soul-singer David Ballman provided an acapella Soul-chorus commentary, and an percussion egg.  Thanks to Loren Niemi and Christine Mounts for providing the stage at the American School of Storytelling.

This is a recording from April 27, 2019 at the 92nd Como Cottage Salon.

The podcast is the third in my Music Critic Series of poems. This collection, The Music Critic at the Baroque Festival. all began as quick notes made at various concerts.  Later I turned the notes into poems. My wonderfully talented sister-in-law, Theresa Elliott plays beautifully and has educated me on the deep quality of some great baroque music.

This is one of my Music Critic chapbooks.  While accompanying my future wife to her weekly gigs at a Bloomington Tandoor Restaurant, I would quickly draft lines to form into cinquains. Her trio's instruments included tabla, guitar, and her violin. They played Hindu folk tunes and instrumental kirtans as curry clouds moved through the air.

Music has been a part of my poetic life for over 40 years.  Each of my published books holds poems about music and musicians, and I have performed and recorded poems with musicians throughout my life with poetry.  My Music Critic Trilogy of Chapbooks have been inspired by the music I listened to and the first drafts were usually written while the music played.

Walton Stanley and I gave a presentation on Communal Soul and its needs to The Fifth Direction, an online community interested in myth, poetry, story, and the development of community.  This presentation is similar to the one I gave at the 2025 Minnesota Men's Conference's Winter Retreat a week earlier.  The new intro is from Yata Peinovich's guitar work from the CD Snow Has Fallen by Young and Yata  2008.  The outro is the guitar work of Glen Helgeson.

Poets Mike Hazard, Patricia Barone, Norita Dittberner-Jax and I read poems about family relationships, going around one after another with deep feelings rising in the room among the poets and the listeners.

Brother and Sister is a folktale collected by the Grimm Brothers and was the springboard for my 1992 essay, Drinking at the Well of Instinct--the Way of the Hunter.  This recording was made as I told the tale to the Folktale Gardening Club of Minnesota.

From 1997 until 2006 I taught at-risk youth at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Red Wing Minnesota. This section of my 2010 book includes the poems I wrote about my time there.