Christal Cooper
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*Article With Excerpts – 2,214 Words
All excerpts have been given copyright privilege
by Jonathan Travelstead and Cobalt Press
Jonathan
Travelstead’s
HOW WE BURY OUR DEAD:
A Meditation In Grief
O God
Deliver me from the cramp of this water
and the terrifying things I see through it.
Put me back in the play of your torrents,
in Your limpid springs.
Let me no longer be a little goldfish
in its prison of glass
but a living spark
in the gentleness of Your reeds.
-excerpt
from Prayers
from the Ark “The
Prayer of the Goldfish” by Carmen de
Gasztold,
Public Domain
Jonathan Travelstead’s
first poetry collection, How We Bury Our Dead, has been
published by Cobalt Press (March 10, 2015).
www.cobaltreview.com/cobalt-press
How
We Bury Our Dead are intimately autobiographical poems based on
Travelstead’s journey of meditation and grief over his mother’s cancer battles
and death, his experiences as a firefighter overseas during the Iraq War and in
his home state of Illinois, and his wandering through Alaska during the winter
of 2008.
The most compelling
poem for Travelstead, age 33, to write was “Prayer of the Motorcycle”, which he
wrote in the style of French nun Carmen de Gasztold’s Prayers from the Ark.
“Prayers from the Ark it is a collection
of poems written from the point of view of a different insect, or animal, in
which the speaker is thanking a higher power, and also requesting something.
I
love motorcycles, and oratory language, and so my “Prayer of the Motorcycle” is
one that I find myself flipping to.”
Prayer of the Motorcycle
“I tell you,” he replied,
“if the
disciples keep queit, the stones
will cry out” – Luke 19:40
Lord, cover my machined skeleton
with soft muscle rippling beneath skin.
Trade me an irregular beat
for the perfect timing in my finned chambers.
Powder-coated steel. Ninety-two octane.
I too am a collection of precious dirts
plucked, fashioned from the earth’s heartbox.
I need sweat air, fluids. Spark.
A master.
Give me hunger
beyond the bite into a curve’s pavement.
Lord, give me sight where I have a filament.
If I am their creation, I am yours,
so give me the freedom of a misfiring voice
and the tiny loping engines of cells
whose fuel is bread, meat.
Then let me ascend your highway
with the sputter of wings.
“My
mother had overcome skin and breast cancers before, ultimately losing one
breast. Witnessing four years of chemo treatments and radiation, there is a
point that gets lost in the fog when after remission the doctors would find
another, unrelated cancer.”
Travelstead’s response
was to run away by volunteering for a tour in Kuwait during Operation Iraqi
Freedom as a firefighter for the Air Force National Guard, only to experience
another form of grief via the things he witnessed, his own struggles with mortality,
and PTSD.
“If
I suffered from PTSD- and I want to be clear that the condition is not confined
to the military, or any certain occupation- then it was from separating myself
from friends and family during a time I needed them most.”
He found temporary
escapes via running the treadmill at the base gym and watching The
Sopranos and The Wire religiously, but was not
able to find escape in sleep, and ended up 20 pounds underweight.
“There
was a period of a few weeks while I was overseas in which I was diagnosed with
'Battle Fatigue Syndrome'. I chuckle at that a bit today, as battle had nothing
to do with it. I was an airport and structural firefighter, and so the worst
hazards I had to deal with were extreme temperatures and hazardous atmospheres
or fuel spills, not bullets.
The
diagnosis came from my inability to get more than an hour or two of sleep, what
I believe now was a repressed response to everything in my home life I was
desperately trying to avoid.”
In 2007, he began the
years long process of writing the first two poems from How We Bury Our Dead: “Alaska” and “Moose.”
I name you Passage and Forgiveness
to a Cheechako’s camo coat
and for a brief moment
I believe again the prayer
my mother recites
in her hospital bed
where an invisible Jesus
carries the speaker
over sand primordial as glass.
-excerpt,
“Moose”
One
year after he began writing “Moose” and “Alaska” Travelstead decided to pursue
his MFA in Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry at the University of
Southern Illinois Carbondale.
“I never had any natural talent as I saw
it for writing, and so I always thought I would have to work harder at it than
others. I knew someone like myself would benefit from an MFA program, possibly
more than the person of average interest in pursuing an MFA. I always knew I
wanted to write- needed it- and because of that I joined the Air Force National
Guard for the GI Bill so that when I was accepted I would be able to focus more
completely on the craftsmanship of writing.
I stretched a 3-year program into 5 years.
Because I was already working fulltime in my firefighting career I could only
take one class at a time, which was perfect because I loved working with my professors
Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Allison Joseph, and Jon Tribble. In that I was able
to give full attention to, say, blues poetry immediately post-prohibition, or
working on my slant rhyme in a formal, Shakespearean sonnet.”
In March of 2008,
Travelstead learned his mother was dying due to terminal cancer. Travelstead dedicated How We Bury Our Dead to
his mother Jean Ann Travelstead.
http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Bury-Our-Dead-ebook/dp/1941462073/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443113945&sr=8-1&keywords=How+We+Bury+Our+Dead
After returning home from Kuwait for a
few months, he watched his mother endure cancer treatments at St. Louis’s
Barnes-Jewish Hospital and he went through a broken romance. His response was to runaway and hitchhike through
the Alaskan wilderness in the winter of 2008.
The sky scrimmed by the Holgate’s sapphire
holds you beneath it all-
It is easier to remain in motion than to
stop.
Nothing in even the deadfall
you can point to and say is yours,
nothing you can say you are of.
-excerpt,
“Alaska”
While in Alaska, he encountered true friends along the way
who showed him compassion and welcomed him into their homes. He came to the conclusion the reason why he
felt so disconnected was due to the walls he himself built.
"Our seeming lack
of connection whenever we're going through anything is completely false," Travelstead told
journalist Chris Hottensen in an interview for The Southern Illinoisan in
March of 2015. "It's our own walls we put up between us and everyone else.
Everyone I met, whether they picked me up or whether I met them in a hostel,
were welcoming to me. The only thing that separates us is the fear of other
people."
He returned in time to
spend one more year with his mother, Jean Ann Travelstead, who died from
complications with a form of rhabdomyosarcoma on June 27th of 2009 at 9:37 a.m. at home with family.
The
year that Travelstead graduated with his Masters, in 2013, was the same year he
wrote his last poem from How We Bury our Dead, “DuPont Paint
Factory.”
“I wrote most of “DuPont
Paint Factory” in a whirlwind blur of about six months, in now what I see as a
need to process its autobiographical content. In it, my partner and I are
called out to an abandoned factory where we witness a protracted electrocution
in which we are completely unable to help.”
Entering the cavernous room,
I can smell it for the first time the way I
always will
(here on forever and forever amen)
the first few moments of each time the tones
drop
in the middle of the night-
rancid meat, bone’s charred power,
fear in a bundle of thick-wristed copper
wires.
-excerpt,
“DuPont Paint Factory”
“On a side note, this
piece won the Gwendolyn Brooks Emerging Writer Contest, and I was invited to
have lunch with the Secretary of State Jesse White and Illinois Poet Laureate
Kevin Stine in Springfield, Illinois. This piece is available in audio and print
online for the Google-savvy.”
Sweat is a cold layer of rubber coating my
body.
I hear a whine like the yipping of a trapped
coyote
and think an animal has made this place its
home.
But then I realize in the center of the room,
a substation,
inside it, whoever is stick, still
alive. Crying...
Sam, talking softly where she points her
flashlight,
then turns to us. Thirty
minutes, she says.
Thirty minutes electricity has been churning
through him,
leaving a blackened trail like wildfire
behind it.
-excerpt,
“DuPont Paint Factory”
During the five years it took for him to
earn his Master’s he encountered numerous poets- in person, or through their
works- that had a huge influence on him and the writing of How We Bury Our Dead: Judy Jordon, Allison Joseph, Rodney Jones,
Jay Meek, Philip Levine, David Bottoms, James Tate, and Larry Levis.
Travelstead
decided to turn his poems into a poetry collection when he noticed that all of
the poems had one theme in common – grief.
“When
I saw the repetition of a tone of grief, and my mother showing up in poems and
lines dealing with things I thought had nothing to do with her. But that's how
it is, isn't it, that what occupies our unconscious comes up and finds a way of
relating itself in strange, sometimes grotesque ways to everything we're doing,
from drinking a glass of orange juice, to trying to be intimate with our
significant other?”
The book of poetry is
divided into four distinct sections attached to their own geography: Kuwait, Alaska, and Travelstead’s work as a
fireman at Murpysboro Fire Department in Southern Illinois.
“I wanted to arrange the poems
chronologically, but in a way that challenged a reader's expectation that the
speaker is experiencing grief in any by-the-numbers way somehow tied to the
passage of time. I want readers to have the sense of how individual the process
of grieving is.”
The
next step was the publication process, which he described as a time of
exhaustion. His manuscript was rejected
by 22 publishers, but was finally accepted by Cobalt Press when Travelstead’s
poem “Trucker” won the 2013 Cobalt Poetry Prize. “Trucker” is one of six smaller poems that
makeup the powerhouse of a poem “Alaska”.
Steel, diamond-plate steps rise into his big
rig, into his world of flannel,
Old Spice cured into split vinyl seams and
cracked upholstery,
the green glow of radios for light. His gorilla palm claps my shoulder
and I believe it when he Jake brakes twenty
tons of chained snowplows
to a stop, says That’s what it sounds like to motorboat
a fat woman’s tits. Eighteen wheels of tractor-trailer unclasp
with an air horn blast, shocking the
heart. Beating it back to life.
He’s copied his favorite Robert Frost poems
by hand onto a legal pad
and scotch-taped them to crumbling headliner
with every pine tree
air freshener he ever bought, each poem dated
in red felt-tip.
I think of yellow-jackets and stringers,
amphetamines. Vats of
burnt coffee swilled down the iced macadam,
and when he says It’s cold
as a fart in a dead Eskimo, it moves through my gut as true as this
landscape’s breath. The doggerel he recites. Carnal.
Kind as
the diesel’s throb. Limericks of the North Slopes, clubbing
seals,
rhyming the Alyeska pipeline with you betcha. Slushing past
the weigh station and the cop hidden there, a
warning squelches too late
for salvation from his CB: Watch
out, Big Ben-wolf’s in the chicken
coop.
My bones begin to hum, then resonate, as the
radio’s copper-wound crystal
into the lambent night, and I feel like a
pinpoint aperture
widening just enough to let this
burly-shouldered, bearded light through
a light once corporeal and distant as aurora
borealis from the smell
of Illinois pollen. The truth is I can’t remember exactly like it
was
or what he said. Maybe it was that the Prudhoe Bay freezes
hard enough
to cross in winter. Maybe that like the song that is always
playing somewhere,
someone has to drive it all night long.
-excerpt,
“Alaska”
The editors Andrew
Keating and Stacie Keating inquired if Travelstead had a book manuscript and
the rest is history.
“What
I love about the editors Andrew Keating and Stacie Keating is that they choose
work they personally love for publication, rather than any other reason.
I
was included at every step of the publication process, to include even layout
and cover design- something authors don't often expect, as publishers' role
tends to be handling the business side of creative works.
On
another note, they also happen to be fantastic hosts. I only just returned from
staying with them in Baltimore for a Cobalt Press first book event in which
Cobalt Press authors read to a packed house.”
www.cobaltreview.com/cobalt-press
Travelstead now
resides in Murphysboro, Illinois, 6 miles west of Carbondale and two hours
southeast of St. Louis, where he works as a firefighter, writes poetry at least
90 minutes per day, and lives with his fiancé Heidi Kocher, and their two pets:
dog, Nora, and cat, Whisky.
He
can be reached via email and Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/writerjonathantravelstead?ref=hl
Photograph Description
and Copyright Information
Photos 1 (Murphysboro Firefighter
courtesy of Charlie Nance, https://www.facebook.com/charlie.nance.1?pnref=friends.search
6 (in Kuwait),
8 (Murphysboro Fire Department), 22
(in Kuwait), 26,
28 (giving a poetry reading on May 29, 2015),
32 (SIUC graduation party May 19, 2013 attributed to Cassandra Ponath
Stephens https://www.facebook.com/cassandra.bishop2?pnref=friends.search)
36 (giving a poetry reading October 12, 2013),
47 (Murphysboro Firefighter),
48 (with box of books March of 2015), and
50 (giving a poetry reading in Chicago)
Jonathan
Travelstead.
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photos 2,
17 (book on engine attributed to Lance Liggett),
18 (book on humvee attributed to Lance Liggett
19, 20, 27, 33, 34, 49
Jacket
covers and web logos of How
We Bury Our Dead
Photos 3 and
10
Jacket
cover of Prayers from the Ark by Carmen de Gasztold
Photo 4 and
53
Web logo
for Cobalt Press
Photo 5
Jean Ann
Travelstead in 2002
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 7
Denali,
the highest peak in North America
Alaska
National Park Service
Public
Domain
Photo 9.
Bordeaux
France French Nun
Public Domain
Public Domain
Photo 11
Phaedrus Travelstead the Motorcycle
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 12
Jean Ann
Travelstead on motorcycle
1998
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 13
Jean Ann
Travelstead
May 24,
2009
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 14
Joseph
Martinez and Jonathan Travelstead in Kuwait
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 15
How We Bury Our Dead Poster
Attributed to Caitlin Stoskopf
Photo 21
Web logo
for Southern Illinois University of Carbondale
Fair Use
Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo 23 and 37
Judy
Jordan
Copyright
granted by Judy Jordan
Photo 25
Allison
Joseph and Jon Tribble at the SIUC Creative Writing Gala
Copyright
granted by Allison Joseph
Photo 29
Web logo
for the The Southern Illinoisan
Fair Use
Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo 30
Travelstead
Family – Jennifer, Van, Jean, Vanessa, Jonathan, and Jarred (sitting)
May 30,
3009
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 31
Jean Ann
Travelstead’s gravesite
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 35
Standing: Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White,
Jonathan Travelstead, Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein.
Sitting
Pablo Otavolo and Richard Holinger
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travlestead
Photo 38
Allison
Joseph
Copyright
granted by Allison Joseph
Photo 39
Rodney
Jones
Attributed
to Jonathan Travelstead
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 40
Jay Meek
Fair Use
Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo 41
Philip
Levine
Attributed
to Dave Shankbone
CCASA 3.0
Photo 42
David
Bottoms
Fair Use
Under the United States Copyright Law
Photo 43
James
Tate
Public
Domain
Photo 44
Larry
Levis
Web logo
photo
Fair Use
Under the United States Copyright Law
Photos 46. (in San Francisco May 31, 2015) and
54. (May 17, 2012)
Jonathan
Travelstead and fiancé Heidi
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 51
Andrew
Keating
Copyright
granted by Andrew Keating
Photo 52
Stacie
Keating
Copyright
granted by Stacie Keating
Photo 55
Dog Nora
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
Photo 56
Cat
Whisky with jacket cover of How We Bury Our Dead
Copyright
granted by Jonathan Travelstead
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