WINONA, Minn. (AP) - Holding his newly published book of poetry, Scott Lowery stood behind a microphone at the Blue Heron and The Book Shelf on a cold January night.
His bright face contrasted with the dark window behind him. Friends, neighbors, students and strangers stared expectantly at him from the packed room.
Many people in Winona know Lowery as a longtime educator, currently with the Winona Area Learning Center, or as a guitar player in two popular bands: the Beef Slough Boys and Turkey Creek.
But many do not know Lowery is also a poet.
For the past 20 years, Lowery has been sending poems out for publication in journals like North American Review and Great River Review. His latest book of 16 poems, “Empty-handed,” won the Emergence Chapbook Prize at Red Dragonfly Press and was published this year.
“It’s a bit like coming out,” he told the Winona Daily News (https://bit.ly/1mslIoB). “It’s interesting new territory to be more public with my writing to people who aren’t really tied in with whatever the literary community is.”
Lowery has been writing poems for as long as he can remember.
“When I think about what I love about poetry, I hear my mom’s voice reading me A. A. Milne,” he said. The music of Milne’s poetry collections has stayed with Lowery his whole life.
Lowery belongs to an informal writing group with other poets in Winona. Jim Armstrong, who teaches English at Winona State University and hosts the group, said Lowery was the force behind the group rekindling after a hiatus.
Like many others, Armstrong knew Lowery first as a member of the Beef Slough Boys. Getting to know him as a poet for the past few years has been rewarding, he said.
Armstrong said Lowery’s work, which he characterized as lyric poetry, centers around “making sense of his own experience.”
“It has a connection to important things,” he said.
Lowery has worked in the Winona Area Public Schools district since 1993, when he and his wife, Connie Blackburn-Lowery, moved their family to the Winona area to get away from the bustle of Minneapolis. Lowery teaches work-based learning, where students get credit for learning in the workplace. He has about five or six students in his classes, which makes for a close-knit family atmosphere.
“What I like to encourage the kids at school to do is think broadly about work -as your life’s work rather than your livelihood strictly, although your livelihood is very important,” he said.
Other kinds of work, such as maintaining relationships or writing poems, don’t come with an hourly wage but are just as crucial to a meaningful life, he said. Lowery’s poetry connects with this sense of meaning in work. Several poems in “Empty-handed” concern his father’s work as a lithographer in 1950s Minneapolis, or Lowery’s own teaching experiences.
Lowery’s day job doesn’t make the creative process easy, so he finds time whenever and wherever he can.
“It’s rewarding and exhausting in equal parts, which makes it kind of challenging to fit in the writing,” Lowery said.
“I get ideas all the time, and a lot of them just don’t make it. I keep little notes and stuff randomly, but I just have to shoehorn the time in.”
In addition to the challenge of making time to write, Lowery struggles to use his teaching experience as inspiration. “I can’t really explain why it’s kind of difficult for me to write about teaching, but I’m finding that it is,” he said.
Winona State education professor James Reineke has known Lowery for 16 years. They met as educators when Lowery was leading a program for underrepresented minority students at Winona Senior High School. Reineke said Lowery is the most caring of all the educators he has met.
“He’s very good at recognizing all of the good qualities of people and helping them build on those qualities,” Reineke said.
With “Empty-handed,” Lowery hopes to reawaken people to the power and accessibility of language.
“Poetry doesn’t have to be this highly specialized, mysterious, off-putting thing,” he said. “If I get some chances along the way to share poetry with people who don’t ordinarily read poetry, that’s a good work to do.”
Lowery said someday he would like to teach poetry and writing workshops - and, of course, write more poems. He’d like to have enough material for a full-length collection at some point.
His reading earlier this month was part of the Laureate’s Writers Series at The Book Shelf, a monthly event coordinated by Winona’s poet laureate, Emilio DeGrazia. The event occurs on the first Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m.
“It was very rewarding to look out and see a bunch of people that I knew sitting back with smiles on their faces listening to my poems,” Lowery said. “That was a brand-new experience.”
And, like in an improvised guitar solo, Lowery discovers something new about his poems each time he reads them aloud.
“Poems are meant to be read aloud, they’re supposed to be word music,” he said.
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Information from: Winona Daily News, https://www.winonadailynews.com
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