by James P. Lenfestey
Milkweed Editions
November, 2024

An exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life. In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body -- heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more--and astonishment at the powers of language: "the sound of 'n,'" our ancient alphabet, "the terror of publishing." Known for his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda's cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, "the language of crow," fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the "forgiveness of the Catbird" and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.

Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world "as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, unfaithful, filled with delight."

TIME REMAINING is the perfect title for a book that says, in every poem, there are so many ways to love the world and be amazed by it: don't leave any out! There is genuine wisdom in this book, hard won and generous. A book to treasure for its many ways of opening the reader to the world in all its amazements.
-- JIM MOORE

"Let me leave nothing on the plate of this life but crystals of salt," Lenfestey says, in one of these moving meditations. Yet, salt is to savor, of course, and that is what readers are certain to do with their Time Remaining. James Lenfestey is one of the most open, life-affirming, generous writers you'll ever encounter.
-- CONNIE WANEK

"What a marvelous collection of joy, generosity and wisdom! Lenfestey devoted his life to free poetry fossilized by daily grimes, to let language sing and dance again so we can have a glimpse of beauty and love. He succeeded greatly."
-- WANG PING

"James P. Lenfestey is a poet who loves the world, the body, language, and the work of other poets, deeply. He writes out of a place of wonder, curiosity, and joy. This volume has wisdom and wit, sustenance for the indignities of age. There is friendship and fellowship to be had in these pages."
-- SARAH RUHL

Selected and Edited by James P. Lenfestey
Red Dragonfly Press
Copyright 2009, reprinted 2022
32 pages
$10.00

A selection, with introduction, of the poems by Stephen Crane published in two editions, BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES, 1895, and WAR IS KIND, 1899, plus 3 posthumous poems, by a man who died, at 28, of tuberculosis. Famous for his war novel RED BADGE OF COURAGE and as author of some of America's finest short stories, he liked his poems best, writing his literary mentor Hamlin Garland in 1896, "Personally i like my little book of poems, THE BLACK RIDERS, better than I do the RED BADGE OF COURAGE. The reason is, I suppose, that the former is a more serious effort. In it I aim to give my ideas of life as a whole, as far as I know it. The other is a mere episode- an amplification." He is not alone. John Berryman, in his 1950 biography of Crane, called him "the important American poet between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson on the one side, and his tardy-developing contemporaries Edward Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost and Ezra Pound on the other...." I find his poems stark, singular and unforgettable. Many years ago I acquired copies of his small editions, and from them and other sources have made this memorial. Originally published by Scott King of Red Dragonfly Press in 2009, it has been reprinted for the first time by the press in 2022 in response to increased interest in Crane sparked by novelist Paul Auster's remarkable full length study, BURNING BOY: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, Henry Holt, published in 2021.

by James P. Lenfestey
Nodin Press
$19.95
October, 2021

"It's a wonderful book, and it does something most column "collections" don't manage--achieves its own narrative trajectory. I read with eagerness to see what would happen next. It's partly the wise choice of the seasons, four "movements" like Vivaldi. Also the super-local, even civic, commitment, moving deftly into the national and global. Finally it's the voice, so winning! Laced with a glinting thread of humor, this is a chronicle for our times."
--PATRICIA HAMPL, member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program, author of The Art of the Wasted Day

"These essays by James P. Lenfestey record 'the full catastrophe of life' (as Zorba put it) heartily embraced, family and nature deeply savored, social conscience thoroughly engaged. This essay collection adds up to a field guide for living and creating vital communities. Their generosity makes the rest of us grateful."
--ERIC UTNE, founder of Utne Reader and author of Far Out Man, Tales of Life in the Counterculture

"Boy, did I enjoy this book! I laughed out loud. I wondered. I shook my head in admiration. I vowed to change some things. There may be readers who could treat themselves to just one of these essays a day, but I couldn't keep from reading one after another. Seasons of the Urban Coyote answers the call in Wendell Berry's counsel: Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts."
-- BART SUTTER, author of Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map and Nordic Accordion

Edited by Robert Hedin and James P. Lenfestey
White Pine Press
263 pages,  $20
September, 2021

The Uncommon Speech of Paradise showcases the work of 120 modern and contemporary poets from seventeen countries-Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, and Anna Akhmatova-as well as works by such premier American poets as John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Robert Bly and Wallace Stevens. Together, they offer compelling voices, styles, and perspectives on the theory, practice, and purpose of the ancient and timeless art of poetry.

"This extraordinary anthology acts as both a capacious gathering of meditations on the art of poetry and a stunning testament to the lasting power of language in our experience and in our lives. This collection is not a retrospective 'lament' for the makers but instead a true celebration of the making itself, spoken by poets in (sometimes troubled) praise of-and always in intimate conversation with--the act and art of the writing of poetry.
-- DAVID ST. JOHN 

"In Lenfestey and Hedin's deft arrangement, the one hundred twenty-five contemporary poems gathered here reignite a centuries-old transcultural conversation on one of the most enduring arts.  How fortunate we are not only to be granted access, but to be inducted into its intimate vocabularies.
-- MIHAELA MOSCALIUC

by James P. Lenfestey
Finishing Line Press
Chapbook, 15 pages, $13.99
January, 2020

"In Thirteen September Moons, James Lenfestey, generally a poet of robust, solar, high-spirited voice, surprises us with a new voice, nocturnal, literally lunar, perhaps the solar voice at low ebb. This voice is "angelic" in the way of Wim Wenders's contemporary angels who watch half-envious, half-horrified the brash glories of human life from a disincarnate distance. This moon-angel voice is a cunning vehicle for mirroring back to us earthlings our abundance of terrestrial treasures and our reckless endangerment of them. Profoundly environmental, these poems ask utterly necessary questions of us, such as "what terrible more / are you capable of?" and "what do you say / to the darker person next to you / forever a part of your life?" This book is an unsettling gem."
--THOMAS R. SMITH, author of Windy Day at Kabekona and The Glory

by James P. Lenfestey
Red Dragonfly Press (reddragonflypress.org)
Paperback, 66 pages. $16
August, 2019

"What lively, charming, thoughtful poems! I'll be coming back to them many times. The mere example of a poet looking carefully at a bird, a mouse, a bat, and finding just the right, accurate words to describe it, is infinitely valuable in this age of abstract and vaporous lies."
--EDITH RYLANDER, author of They've Packed Up the Rock and Roll, New and Selected Poems.

"In East Bluff James Lenfestey shares the heart-shaped agates and wind-kissed feathers he has gathered over many years.  The poems delight us, an unknown bird in cedar boughs; they strike us, an owl swooping down on the garden vole.  Yet we sense, coursing through the whole collection, like the ever-present current through the Straits, a wisdom that comes only from a life well-lived, where there is 'so much known, yet you still wake wondering.'" 
 --THOR BACON, author of Making the Shore.

"Not much gets by East Bluff Bard James Lenfestey.  From sunup to moonrise, he is on watch registering the phenomena of Mackinac moment to moment. He defines spirits out of the fog and has the nerve to eulogize the presence of omnipresent mice. The odes and lyrics of East Bluffare cunningly and curiously arranged as witness to wonders simple and wonders, but for him, unseen."
--JAMES BOGAN, author of Mackinac Suite and Seven Wonders of Mackinac. 

'James Lenfestey's poetry is by turns wide-open and up-close. In East Bluff: Mackinac Poems Old and New, he turns his seasoned eye and ear to the flora, fauna and families that echo and distill the magic of Mackinac.'
--GLEN YOUNG, teacher, poet, editor, and literary columnist for the Petoskey News Review. 

by James P. Lenfestey
Milkweed Editions
Paperback, 104 pages, $16
December, 2017

"James Lenfestey after a lifetime of attentive writing, has lately done poems for family and for marriage that put most of us to shame."
--GARY SNYDER, By the Book, New York Times Book Review, 28 April 2019.

"Rooted in Passion, Desire, Sensuality, and the 'Shared Heat' of Love . . . an Absolute Joy to Read."
--ROBERT HEDIN

"In this age of cynicism, or at the very least irony, it is good to come upon a book that celebrates marriage and family without either sentimentality or ambivalence. 'So much poetry is about storms . . . bruised fruit, locusts eating everything,' Lenfestey writes. 'This poem is about a harvest that satisfies.'"
--LINDA PASTAN, former Poet Laureate of Maryland

"Think of Jim Lenfestey's A Marriage Book as a talking photo album or an unfolding epithalamium. What a fine tribute to fifty years of real world love!"
--Minnesota Poet Laureate JOYCE SUTPHEN

"Warning Label: Prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way you will be healed."
--JIM MOORE

"These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. James Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated. They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight."
--CHASE TWICHELL

"James P. Lenfestey's poems encircle a marriage while opening it out into the depths and heights with tenderness, I might say reverence, and grace. The poems move from outer rituals into the interior world of the self that wants to make sense of birth, joy, damage, death, and grief, but can't, entirely. You want to know how it is to stay through the long haul? Look to these poems. 'It is gravity, / which limits us totally, / which makes all life possible,' Lenfestey writes. These are the poems of a brave heart and a skilled poet. They will make you want to kiss your sweetheart."
--FLEDA BROWN, former Poet Laureate of Delaware

"These generous poems, attractive in their emotional directness, content in their subject matter, bring us into contact with the intimacies of an intensely lived life, insisting both on their frequent joys--there is playfulness, there is fervor--and on disclosing the vulnerabilities that demanding relationships reveal in us over the decades."
--MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE

Edited by James P. Lenfestey

University of Minnesota Press
Forward by Bill McKibben
Founder: 350.org, author of "Oil and Honey"
Afterward by Dr. Marla Spivak
Macarthur-winning entomologist

Hardbound, embossed bee on cover, 225 pages, $24.95.
Please order from bookstores or at online retailers.
Proceeds go to The Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota founded by Dr. Spivak.

"Next I'll speak about the celestial gift of honey from the air."
-Virgil, The Georgics Book IV, Bee-keeping.

It is said there are 20,000 species of bees in the world - a genus fifty million years old - although in the fertile imagination of the world's poets, there is no beginning and no end to bee buzz. Sappho wrote of bees, "neither honey nor bees for me" in the 6th century BCE. As did Virgil, Rumi, Shakespeare, Bobby Burns, Clare, Coleridge, The Earl of Essex, Emerson, Herrick, Issa, Machado, Mandelstam, Neruda, Dickinson prolifically, Whitman, Tennyson, Yeats, Frost, and on into the buzz of the 20th and 21st centuries from Sherman Alexie and Carol Ann Duffy, current Poet Laureate of England, and many more.

The poems in this anthology (ancient Greek, literally a "gathering of flowers") were foraged over the past decade, including these lines from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee./ One clover, and a bee./ And revery./ The Revery alone will do/ if Bees are few.

Emily's line, "If Bees are few," today contains a terrible poignancy. In the 21st Century, bees are indeed becoming "few"- hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. This anthology is poetry's response to that crisis, dedicated to celebrated entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and other scientists and beekeepers who are the best hope to maintain populations of gentle honeybees and gorgeous and productive wild bees in our lives. All proceeds support research on bee and ecosystem health at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota.

by James P. Lenfestey
MILKWEED EDITIONS, $16

FINALIST, MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD

"Full of vivid characters and poetry and coincidence, delivered against the landscapes of a foreign culture, James Lenfestey's delightful story of pilgrimage to the source of Cold Mountains poetry possesses great bravado, attentiveness and honesty." -TONY HOAGLAND

"Seeking the Cave is part travelogue, part literary history, and part spiritual journey. Lenfestey is a lively and entertaining tour guide. Modest, funny, curious, and wide open to the world, he gives us perceptive glimpses of Chinese culture, ancient to contemporary, and into what it means to be a poet, both now and twelve centuries ago. The account of his quest to find Han-shan's cave is a delight from beginning to end." -CHASE TWICHELL

"James Lenfestey's ranging, big-hearted book of pilgrimage and quest recounts the meeting of two poets, one a twentieth-century American, the other a surprisingly gregarious T'ang Dynasty hermit known for both his poems of deep solitude and the warmth of his friendships. The story of Lenfestey's late-life search for his own self's unfolding portrait is, in happy sympathy, replete with deft portraits of others, from the translator-scholars Burton Watson and Bill Porter to the sincere and enterprising Buddhist nuns opening a new shrine and its accompanying gift shop. Seeking the Cave intertwines landscape and language, poetry and prose, foodstuffs and culture, and above all, the explorations of inner life made outward, step by step, on the steep paths of China's cities and mountains." -JANE HIRSHFIELD

"Is it 'yuan' or coincidence that the mountain both Han-shan and James Lenfestey reached is called Tientai: a heavenly landing, stage, abode, home, reachable only through poetry? Instead of taking over his family business, Lenfestey devoted his energy to poetry and education, and followed the path of the wild, elusive Chinese poet who vanished into Cold Mountain. Han-shan released the vibration that traveled a thousand years, and it sprouted, grew, bloomed, now fruited into poetry through the hands, feet, and mouth of an equally wild American poet, who chased that echo across the Pacific, over the Cold Mountain, into the cave, where time and space are tangled, entangled, collapsed into one-a true co-incidence, correspondence, concurrence. We should all read, or rather, experience Seeking the Cave, a journey wild, magical, quantum-leaping - a pilgrimage we must take if we want to know who we are, why we are here, where our home is." -WANG PING

"Like Parzival on his search for the Holy Grail, Jim Lenfestey is on a quest to find his heart, and, though he didn't realize it when he embarked on his journey, to claim his identity as a man and a poet. Through story and poem, he takes us half way around the world and deep into Cold Mountain cave, the sanctum sanctorum of his beloved (legendary?) hero, Han Shan. "Seeking the cave" is a journey we all must undertake. Lenfestey shows readers the way in. The pace is leisurely, the territory exotic yet somehow familiar, and his story flows swiftly and abundantly, like a spring river." -ERIC UTNE, founder, UTNE READER

by James P. Lenfestey

Milkweed Editions, Minnesota, $24
Paper Over Board Hardcover (ISBN 978-1-57131-346-1)
(Publication Date: September 2014 )  
FINALIST, MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD

” A lively account of a visit to the cave where Han-shan actually lived. It unites our brief literary life with the ancient richness of Chinese culture. ” - Robert Bly

When award-winning poet and essayist James P. Lenfestey stumbled upon Han-shan's Cold Mountain poems in 1974, he found more than just literature, he found the medicine his spirit desperately needed. So thirty years later, when he decides to depart from his career in advertising and journalism to travel across the world to find the location of the legendary Cold Mountain cave, he embarks upon an inner journey as well.

Exploring the history of Chinese poetry and religion as he goes - from the enormous chanting hall of ten thousand Buddhas in Bailin Temple to the birthplace of Confucius - Lenfestey's road-trip across China is a pilgrimage through language and landscape. His journey reveals his desire for calm reflection along with his unbridled curiosity and passion for knowledge. In the end he discovers not only the cave he seeks, but also the transformative power of poetry, the best tool we have for expressing the ”incomprehensible joy” of our brief and precious lives.

Interspersed with poems by the author and Han-shan, Seeking the Cave is a journey suffused with humor and deep honesty that will appeal to lovers of poetry and travel writing alike.

” A profound, and profoundly personal book. It's very captivating, warm and friendly, personal, unguarded, idiosyncratic, pointed but also finally apolitical, and eminently charming. ” - Gary Snyder

Limited Edition by James P. Lenfestey

Blinc Publishing
Size: 8 3/4" x 14 1/2"
(Publication Date: July 4, 2013 )  

Limited edition broadside printed by Bill Moran of Blinc Publishing in an edition of one hundred copies on July 4, 2013. Signed and numbered. $25 plus $5 shipping.

Edited by Thomas R. Smith with James P. Lenfestey
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Hardcover, 306 pages, $34.95
 
To celebrate acquisition of Robert Bly's archives in his 83rd year, the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota sponsored a major conference, "Robert Bly in This World," organized by James P. Lenfestey. This volume, with a preface by Lenfestey, is the record of that historic event. Scholars and authors from America and England presented papers on Bly’s poetry, translations, criticism, mythopoetic storytelling, and other major achievements, including his annual Great Mother and Minnesota Men’s conferences. A trip to Madison, Minnesota, where Bly’s writing studio has been restored and preserved on the Lac Qui Parle County fairgrounds, is also chronicled here, plus intimate appreciations by Bly’s friends and admirers Coleman Barks, Donald Hall, Jane Hirshfield, Lewis Hyde, and others. A vintage documentary on Bly, A Man Writes to a Part of Himself, screened at the conference, is included as a DVD in a supplement to the book. 

$35.00 order form

Coloring book with short poems in it,with drawings by Peter Kramer, Neo-Functionalist Press, Minneapolis, ©2004
dedicated, as it is, "to all the women we have loved, and the precious few who noticed."
$5.00 order form | sample poems