Publications
Critical Praise for River Road – A Mississippiad
Robert Bense’s River Road is a masterwork. It’s a book, a levee, worked land, wild land, and a river itself–-a river that stands for the American psyche, implacable in its forward motion. Custer is here, Bessie Smith, Crazy Horse, Robert Johnson, Stagolee, Madame Cecile, Elvis quaffing ‘Doctor Pepper for breakfast,’ the Jesuit missionaries, the Ogallala, and an anonymous Delta wedding, ‘holler and call traded like/pork bellies at bidding time.’ Bense will take you on a journey ‘to the American quick.’ There’s something of Dante in this book’s exemplary scope, humility, and temerity–-its will to frame an image that will hold and reflect our vanishing lives.
D. Nurkse
Whiting Writers’ Award winner
In River Road the reader journeys back and forth through time to follow the meanings of the great river. At once communal and intensely personal, the stories the Mississippiad convey wash over us and push us forward into our own memories.
Poems from Bense’s Readings in Ordinary Time
Flat Out
Trucked your U-Haul
up the Great Divide.
Over and down.
Way back on the Garden State
you lost a dirt bike.
And Cincinnati was from nowhere
but safe at least
since nothing happens there
first.
Ragtime, swing, the blues, jazz
follow rivers like weather.
Manifest destiny, you say, runs
east to west.
So in St. Louis
you catch something.
Burn and foam later
taking a piss in Kansas.
You boiled over
at Donner Pass.
American iron. Plastic hubcaps.
Last gas.
Never get caught
too far from a deli.
In winter yet.
You head on toward that blue
and white diaphanous
through purple haze, eight straight
lanes each way free
to the last authentic city.
Fingers tapping out
happy trails.
A place for ducking out.
Packing it in. Jumping off.
Winter in July.
In the rearview mirror
five days of stubble,
a grim set mouth. A smile
breaking through.
The continent’s slow fade
into North Beach.
The sharp Pacific drop.
Sun in the eyes, the one way
fare, sunset or last main chance.
Snow in the Forecast
I’m number 23 in the
12 items or less line:
8 or less doubles past saltines,
extends into produce. The man
in front of me has herring, sour
cream, 6 limes. We don’t know
each other but I have olives.
Except for me, all will pay
by check.
An age of ice recalled in the cells:
a sleet-grey wind lashes out
of the northwest, a wood thrush
close-in, wolves on the hill
above everyone’s cave-
the five pheasant eggs pickled
in the shell, gone; the last bear’s
claw in aspic, gnawed and done.
Snow already six feet deep.