Products tagged with 'poet laureate'

It seems that everyday life is dotted with moments that one wants to remember and share. When the circumstances and situations of my life provide me such moments, I try to make notes or a rough draft of a poem as soon as possible. Such events might be coffee with a friend, a walk around a park, a weekend camping trip, cleaning the house, a family celebration, or vacation travel.  Sometimes I read, hear, overhear, or glimpse similar events of other people. In those cases, I imagine the cause or result of a situation of which I don’t have actual knowledge. After a period of informal meditation (usually days or weeks, but sometimes years) I revise the draft into a poem to share my experience, insight, discovery, or surprise. My lifelong goal as a writer is to have my readers, at least for a moment, perceive something as closely as possible to the way I perceived it. This collection of my recent work features the perceptions of a post-retirement guy paying attention to the current events of his life and times, and often commenting on his discoveries of how he and the world have changed through the seasons of the seventy-some years of his existence.

Available early December 2023

David R. Solheim, the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet, has published writing in more than two dozen periodicals and had work in several anthologies. He wrote two poetry chapbooks published by Dacotah Territory. His four previous books of poetry and a literary travelog related to Thoreau’s 1861 visit to Minnesota are available via buffalocommonspress.com. Solheim is an English Professor Emeritus of Dickinson State University, where he taught for almost 30 years, and, thanks to the late Larry Woiwode, an Emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. He holds degrees in English and creative writing from Gustavus Adolphus College, Stanford University, and the University of Denver. Early in his career, he was a temporary faculty member at NDSU and conducted numerous programs for the North Dakota Humanities Council (now Humanities North Dakota) and the ND Council on the Arts. After residing in Minnesota for the last 10 years, he and his wife, Dr. Barbara Laman, also an Emeritus English Professor of DSU, have resettled near family members in the Portland, Oregon, area. Between them, Dave and Barbara have five adult children and seven grandchildren.

ISBN: 978-1-946163-52-3

Page Count: 78

Paperback

Publication Year: 2023