David Pichaske

  

Southwest Minnesota: A Place of Many Places

   This book's immediate predecessor drew on the writings of many southwest Minnesota authors to create a portrait of the land and its peoples. In Southwest Minnesota: A Place of Many Places Amato and Pichaske explore the region's rich culture in their own words. From Amato's analysis of regional lead cities like Worthington and New Ulm to Pichaske's meditations on smaller towns like Minneota, Slayton, and Hanley Falls, the authors examine the ways this region has reacted to the changes and challenges of the late twentieth century. Along the way, they explore tiny points of interest like baseball diamonds, coffee shops, cemeteries, and small-town ethnic celebrations. Extended essays like "A Meditation on Enclosed Space," and "Seen and Unseen Faces" offer penetrating reflections on the long arc of history in Southwest Minnesota and on the natural and constructed landscapes.

UB03: A Season in Outer Mongolia

UBO3 Cover

  

This book about Outer Mongolia was written and printed in Ulaanbaatar, Outer Mongolia. It thus truly embodies its subject. However, the true uniqueness of UB03 (Ulaanbaatar 2003) is that is an unsentimental, unromanticized portrait of a country which is still the edge of the known, looking out at the unknown. From the photo of a ger district on the front cover to the photo of the author, herder, and camel on the back cover, and through 150 pages of words and four-color photos, Pichaske describes the Mongolia he experienced on his Fulbright lectureship at National University.

Pichaske writes about the trash heap behind his apartment, about the black market, about excursions into the countryside, about opera singers and concerts at UB Palace, about Mongolian does and Mongolian fences, about the Gobi, about Mongolian reactions to George WMD Bush’s war in Iraq.

“[The book] provides some interesting vignettes about everyday life in a country we know little about and the frustrations American teachers can find for themselves when far away from home. It also contains provocative and sharply reproduced color photographs.”—Library Journal
Exercises Against Retirement  

Exercises Against Retirement is a selection of poems, displaying a multi-faceted author: father, son, lover, man of the world. Most poems in this book have previously appeared in little magazines and in two chapbooks, Jubilee College: Retrospective by Way of Explanation (1980) and Visiting the Father (1987). This collection presents Pichaske’s most original (and self-possessed) voice.

These poems open subtly to larger subjects: time and the passage of time, the American Dream, familial relations, religious themes. Several poems stand out as worthy of special attention: “Jan Jensen / Raku Jar / 1977” for its statement on the nature of art (and poetry); “Something on His Mind,” a critique of feminist clichés on men; the title poem, “Exercise Against Retirement #4,” in which Pichaske contrasts his own compulsion to explore further and then further to the stability (and reliability) of a clergyman friend.

70 pages
$5.95 paper
0-944024-29-7

A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties

Generation in Motion cover

 

Pichaske recreates the heady sixties in all their kaleidoscopic complexity. Disdaining the usual parade of presidents, generals, and politicos, this book gathers evidence from the people’s world, especially the music in which the real sixties mythology was created and distributed: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, even lesser known singers like Phil Ochs and Leonard Cohen. Illustrated with 26 photographs, this rich and compelling book captures the idealism and pioneer spirit of a whole generation in motion.

“Pichaske goes beyond the usual litany of stars and hit songs to examine the music in the context of political, social, and cultural events . . . a very readable book which will be useful in larger collections where there is an interest in popular culture.”—Library Journal

“Pichaske’s analysis is thorough and generally thoughtful. . . . His book is pop sociology, but for its broad analysis of cultural trends, it is among the best of its kind.”—Publishers Weekly

“David Pichaske has been a favorite academic writer of mine since the publication of his anthology Beowulf to Beatles and his article, ‘Freshman Comp: What Is This Shit?’ The man has voice. His prose is so readable that it seems you’re not reading it but listening to it. . . . Buy this book.”—Darryl Hattenhauer, Journal of Popular Culture

“Although it is not specifically a Woodstock book, A Generation in Motion says the most, the most intriguingly, about the rise and fall of the Nation. . . . The real body of the book is extraordinarily moving . . . a skillful evocation of a period in which music was the primary art form of a social revolution.”—Eve Zibart, The Washington Post

262 pages
$14.95 cloth 0-944024-12-2
$10.95 paper 0-944024-16-5
(original publisher: Schirmer Books)

The Jubilee Diary

    

Late Harvest: Rural American Writing

   From American fiction, poetry, and non-fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, Pichaske has selected generous and representative readings related to rural America, placing the new writers in the context of Old Ones like Henry Thoreau, Jean de Crevecoeur, Sherwood Anderson and Zona Gale. His general introduction and the foreword by Eugene J. McCarthy are followed by three sectional introductions to literature of the American small town, the farm, and the wilderness. Brief authors’ biographies suggest books for further reading.

Among the 32 writers represented are Jim Heynen, Patricia Penton Leimbach, Donald Hall, Leo Dangel, Linda Hasselstrom, Maxine Kumin, Meridel Le Sueur, William Kloefkorn, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Mark Kramer, Noel Perrin, Wendell Berry, Garrison Keillor, Dave Etter, Carolyn Chute, William Gass, Carol Bly, Frederick Busch, Bobbie Ann Mason, bill Holm, Ann Zwinger, Paul Gruchow, Annie Dillard, Ed Abbey, Gary Snyder, Greg Keeler, Barry Holstun Lopez, Norbert Blei and Wallace Stenger.

“David Pichaske has shown rare intelligence in selecting stories, poems, and essays that build on and complement one another. The result is a unified, but multifaceted, view of American rural life . . . The writings wrestle with themes that are as ordinary yet as powerful as the seasons—birth and death, the uneasy balance between private and public life, the proper relationship of humans to the natural world. Late Harvest may draw on America’s agrarian roots for its inspiration, but it makes relevant and rewarding reading for city dwellers and rural residents alike.”—Osha Gray Davidson, Utne Reader

“Pichaske has pulled off an almost impossible task—he has put together a thick, meaty slab of a book of rural American writing that is highly entertaining and a good piece of scholarship as well.”—Glenda Burnside, The Bloomsbury Review

512 pages
$24.95 cloth
1-55778-049-8
(original publisher: Paragon House)

The Poetry of Rock

    

Poland in Transition

  

With the sharp eye of a sympathetic outsider, Pichaske examines life on the Polish streets during the country’s difficult transition from communism to free market capitalism. Recounting adventures in the markets, bureaus, hospital, and shops of his own working-class city of Lodz, and in the great old Polish cities of Krakow, Warsaw, Poznan, and Gdansk—as well as auto and train trips to Berlin, Leningrad, and Greece—he introduces artists, businessmen, bureaucrats, foresters, shopkeepers, street workers, students and intellectuals.

“Lively and interesting.”—Thomas Swick, author of Unquiet Days

“‘The old symbols are dead,’ muses one of Lech Walesa’s countrymen in this perceptive and seductive portrait. ‘All our lives it’s been the Party of the Church, but neither works any more.’ From 1989 to 1991 Pichaske was a Fulbright lecturer living in working-class Lodz. In these personal essays he chronicles the inflation, political chaos and economic reform as well as the cultural transformations that would result in Stalinist memorials being replaced by ads for Diet Coke and Levi jeans. . . . Pichaske loves the old Poland and realizes that the country’s venture into free market economics is not without its painful lessons. Still, his descriptions of Poland are always entertaining, especially in poetic ‘cityscapes’ and his comparisons of U.S. and Polish student life. . . . With a scholar’s analysis, a traveler’s practicality—as well as 95 worthwhile photographs—Pichaske illuminates many facets of the nation and its inhabitants.”—Publishers Weekly

“An interesting picture of Poland as it enters the 1990s and the world of capitalism.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

246 pages
illustrated
$11.95 paper
0-944024-27-0

Southwest Minnesota: The Land and Its People

    Southwest Minnesota: the Land and the People, a 128-page coffee table book, is a portrait of the region in photographs and the words of Robert Bly, Carol Bly, Phil Dacey, Leo Dangel, Hamlin Garland, Paul Gruchow, Jim Heynen, Bill Holm, Garrison Keillor, Meridel Le Sueur, Frederick Manfred, Joseph Nicollet, Tim O’Brien, Ole Rolvaag, Barton Sutter, Southwestern Minnesota is a haunting landscape marked by rich farmlands, forgotten villages, patches of vestigial prairie and slough, surprising rivers and wooded rills . . . and, everywhere in the countryside these days, signs of abandonment and depopulation. The photographs in this book are elegiac, and many of the texts—written by some of the region’s and the nation’s most respected writers—reflect upon an issue best expressed by Frost: “what to make of a diminished thing.”

Historian Joseph Amato has argued that the Minnesota countryside is presently undergoing a reconfiguration as profound as the original land-taking a century ago. At such a juncture self-assessment is especially helpful. Who are we? Where have we come from? What is our history? What are our roots? What crises have we weathered? What resources remain?

In Southwest Minnesota: the Land & the People a group of historians, visitors, immigrants and natives reflect upon the human and natural landscape of the area that Frederick Manfred called “Siouxland” in brief selections reprinted from existing works or written specially for this volume.

Editor Joseph Amato is Dean of Rural and Regional Studies at Southwest Minnesota State University. He is the author of many book, some localized in this area: When Father and Son Conspire, The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus, Countryside: A Mirror of Ourselves, and most recently A Community of Strangers. Amato has written on popular subjects such as golf, by-pass surgery, and dust; on philosophical subjects like Guilt and Gratitude and Victims and Values; and on scholarly topics like the French philosophers Mounier and Maritain.

David Pichaske is Professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University. He is the author of many books, several related to rural literature and themes: The Jubilee Diary and Late Harvest: Recent Rural American Writing. He has published on popular subjects like rock music and American culture (A Generation in Motion; The Poetry of Rock) and on scholarly subjects like Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer. A three-time Fulbright Lecturer to Central Europe, Pichaske is the author of Poland in Transition: 1989-1991. As editor of Spoon River Poetry Press, Pichaske has published Leo Dangel, Bill Holm, Norbert Blei, Linda Hasselstrom, Bill Kloefkorn, and Dave Etter, among significant rural writers.

116 pages
$15.00 paper
ISBN 0-944024-38-6
Site managed by David Pichaske, Editor in Chief
Copyright 2003-4