Editor’s note: In her Ad Astra Poetry Project, Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low highlights historic and contemporary poets who resided in Kansas for a substantial part of their lives. Eventually, she will collect the biweekly broadsides into a book, to be published by the Center for Kansas Studies at Washburn University, in cooperation with Thomas Fox Averill.

John Moritz (1946-2007) attended Kansas University during the late 1960s and remained in Lawrence the rest of his life. He founded Tansy Press and Tansy Bookstore. Steve Bunch remembers: “With his ‘Putpenny Pomes’ you could put a penny in a jar and take away a small folded mimeographed poem.” Moritz was no capitalist. And through his advocacy of cutting-edge poetry, he advanced the direction of American poetics. Among the writers he published are Ed Dorn, Kenneth Irby, Alice Notley, Paul Metcalf, Joanne Kyger and Robin Blaser. In the 1980s, he sponsored a poetry reading series that featured some of these authors, and a broadside for each.

Moritz promoted poetry in every possible way; he was himself a fine poet. (I remember urging him to focus more on his own writing.) Reviewer Richard Owens notes his connection to Black Mountainwriters: “The writing leads back to (Charles) Olson via Dorn.” Focus on natural flow of language itself rather than traditional forms is apparent in Moritz’s work. Also, his verse has a lyrical emotional tug. He attunes to place as well as to literary tradition.

The poem “Omaha” has almost no punctuation. It illustrates Moritz’s concern with wedding his imaginative impulse to solid reality. The poem begins as a journey through neighboring Nebraska, where he turns an urban scene, 12th Street, into a western overland trail. But this quest ends at a restaurant, not the Missouri River (“Big Mo”). He finds a gar, a trash fish, imprisoned in a decorative pond. Its displacement resonates with “meat packing plants” – what hunting has become within a city landscape. At the end, as Moritz turns his thoughts to poetry – Dante and Ezra Pound – he connects movement of consciousness to the gar’s thrashing: all fight against confinement.

Omaha

The drive south on 12th is on an hispanic artery

pumped by the meatpacking plants

lots of mom and pop comidas

but we were questing

catfish at the end of the trail

while waiting to be seated

a gar circles aceramic pond counterclockwise

in fresh water, clear enough to see the coins

tossed for an aimless wish, the gar circles

out of its water which would be the Big Mo sludge

fishermen who snag a gar reeling in their line

take out a vengeance with a knife or boot

but this particular gar circles and thrashes

like Dante’s fornicators or late Pound

circling Language with one foot nailed to the floor.

Education: John Moritz was born in Gary, Ind., graduated from high school in Chicago (1964), and resided in Lawrence since the late 1960s. He attended Kansas University.

Career: Moritz was a poet, publisher, printer and bookstore proprietor. His recent books include “Mayaland/Catfish Frenzy” (First Intensity Press 2007) and “Cartography” (First Intensity 2002).