Words to Live By: Bigfork poet publishes new book about Midwestern life

Life has a way of softening people. And so it is for Lowell Jaeger.

Once full of frustration at the world, he’s taken a back seat to his younger over-exuberance and now enjoys writing about the life that’s been played out before him.

This life is chronicled in his new book “How Quickly What’s Passing Goes Past,” a fairly brief but intimate look at his life growing up in a working-class family in a Wisconsin lumber town. Much of the ethos and culture that has played out in Montana over the last 50 years seems similar to the lifestyle of the Wisconsin family Jaeger grew up in.

Jaeger is professor of English at Flathead Valley Community College, and has lived in Bigfork for 30 years.

Don’t touch the bastard, Dad said.

My brothers and I stood closee, wincing when the bullhead’s quick spines cut Dad’s thumb to bleed.

Had to admire the monster’s huff, gills gasping in the catch-bucket, beady eyes glazed light-blinded and still staring back.

— From “Bullheaded,” a poem by Lowell Jaeger in How Quickly What’s Passing Goes Past

After three of his former students passed away within a few months of each other Jaeger decided to honor their poetry skills by publishing their work in Poems across the Big Sky. The book featured poems in five languages, including Native American languages.

That process helped launch Many Voices Press, an imprint of Flathead Valley Community College. His newest book, from Grayson Books, reflects Jaeger’s own fascination with the lives of working-class people in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I’m especially proud of this book,” Jaeger said. The poems examine what was a very difficult in Americans’ lives, with issues of Civil Defense, nuclear war and the Cold War. Set in the midwest, the book of poetry takes elements of Jaeger’s own life, but it is not about him. The poems stand on their own, but are part of telling a larger story. “It’s meant to be read front to back,” he said. Jaeger’s father was a working-class man who spent much of his life working in a Wisconsin lumber mill. When the mill closed, just as many in Montana did, his father found work “in town,”and began to wear a suit to work instead of boots. His parents had only eighth-grade educations. Their lives “were lively, but sometimes very tragic,” he said.

“The Botany 500” is a poem about a suit his father began to wear to work when he got a job in the city.

One of Dad’s union cronies campaigned for mayor and Dad canvassed neighborhoods, knocking on doors.

A year later the mill locked its gates for good; Dad stumbled from job to job till his buddy — the mayor — fixed him up  with a desk and a nameplate in the City Government Office Complex.

Dad was done with dinner pails. Done dragging home sawdust and woodchips brushed from his cuffs, dug from his ears, raked from his hair.

Done with leather gloves caked with pitch. Done with torn flannel work shirts and three pairs of pants – all the same except where they’d been patched.

He’d never asked for fancy, never owned a new car, never complained about what wasn’t good enough. Now he stood before the mirror, slapped his face with aftershave, tied and re-tied his tie till the knot snugged his starched collar just right.

Walked careful  in the streets to keep his shoes clean. Came home for lunch one day wearing a thick coat, same coat he’d been eyeballing in Ramsey Brothers’ window, same  coat he’d tried on and tried on and put money aside for — a Botany 500. None of us has known a coat with a name, this coat of coats, the king of coats, woven especially for a man who’d surprised himself with his good looks.

A man of consequence about town, whose quick footsteps echoed on the walls. A Botany 500 man. Who taught us not to put ourselves above the rest. His best advice: be who you are and do your best. Who checked his reflection sideways in the storefront glass. Smiled, lifted his shoulders, and puffed his chest.

“All of a sudden my dad after losing his job was worried about what he was going to wear,” Jaeger remembers now. “I made a bit of fun about him, but you also couldn’t blame him for wanting some sense of upward mobility.”

His poem “The Pillow” talks about Jaeger coming to terms with the fact that his family was not perfect and never really got it together, he said. This poem reflects him accepting the “ridiculous and the miraculous” in his family. “We found our way.”

The witnessing reflection of society and of himself is something Jaeger has developed over the years. Yes, he’s softened a bit in his tenure as a poet and professor, but he hasn’t lost an edge; only refined it.That’s a change from when he wrote his first book of poems, “War on War,” in 1988 nearly 30 years ago. “I’ve learned not to take myself so seriously,” Jaeger says now.

“War on War was kind of an angry book that made a lot of judgments.”

Now his poems seem to be about giving witness to what’s going on around — not so much as what’s going on inside him.

Still, the poem The Wall helped him vent on his feelings about the apathy the world showed when the Berlin Wall came down in 1991. “When I  started writing the Wall I realized how mad I was about the Berlin Wall,” he said.

As it should, writing reveals one’s soul. Jaeger said he’s stopped the self  criticism of a poet who took the academic life, and has learned that he has, in fact, been living the life he always dreamed of. His job, he says, is something they’ll have to pry from his cold, dead fingers. He loves academic life and being around people who are learning. His long, narrow ponytail swings behind him as he struts the halls of FVCC. People nod knowingly at Mr. Jaeger, the third-longest tenured professor at the college.

See JAEGER on Page 9

“I love nurturing the potential in people, and the diversity and freedom of my job,” he says. “Some people might say that teaching is commiting academic suicide, but I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

As a professor of English, journalism and creative writing at Flathead Valley Community College, Jaeger, 62, said his blue collar parents were a lot like his students of today.

Jaeger’s own body of work at the college has been his contribution to the larger community. That became apparent last year, when he would visit with Montana Conservation Corps workers out doing trail work.

He would take a watermelon and poem out to the workers and hang out with them in the woods. “I realized I’m too old to swing a pulaski but I knew I could bring them a watermelon and a poem,” he said.

The work with them was about meaning of service — to self and the community. “It got us talking about the larger meaning of their work, not just the next three feet of trail,” he said.

FVCC helps instill a sense of equal-opportunity education and he’s proud to have been a part of that for 30 years, from when the college was in downtown Kalispell to the sprawling new campus it is today. Seeing how far the school has come, Jaeger said, “I get a tingle walking across campus.”

FVCC is a mix of people from those who are unprepared to those who have high expectations of themselves. Somehow the people get shaped into new lives and the community college is part of that shift. “Five years later I see them and they’re my pharmacist, or a highway patrolmen,” he said. “FVCC is not about weeding people out, it’s about boosting people up.”

How Quickly What’s Passing Goes Past is published by Grayson Books, West Hartford, Conn.