A Sort of Honey

In his writing, Paddock ever seeks to find harmony with self and place, and in these poems you will discover outcomes of decades of dream work and the collecting of oral history. More often than not Paddock is a narrative poet: he believes deeply in story, that to make a point it is best to tell a story, that stories are containers for us that make sense of our lives and keep us from going too far astray. Risen from Paddock's home ground, these poems are a revelation of local wisdom, local wonders.

Immersed in local story and in love with the little lakes and hardwood hills of his home region, Joe Paddock grew up in the small central Minnesota town of Litchfield. He went to the University of Minnesota where he wrestled, got a degree in philosophy, and studied under poets Morgan Blum, Allen Tate and Howard Nemerov. In the late 60s and early 70s he spent much of a six-year period living and writing in an unimproved cabin on Minnesota's wild Kettle River. These were critical mid-life years during which he concentrated on nature observation, meditation, and dream work. In 1975, he was drawn back to the agricultural prairies that stretched south and west of his home region. He became a first National Endowment for the Arts Poet-in-the-Community in Olivia. Then, working with his writer wife, he became a regional poet for the Southwest Minnesota Arts and Humanities Council and a Poet-in-Residence for Minnesota Public Radio at Worthington. During these residences he discovered the use and value of oral history, and he developed a poetry based on local story and its underlying myths. Living on the Kettle River, the ecological vision of interconnectedness took hold in Paddock, and the land organism became the central metaphor in his writing. Practicing a "soft activism," he next became a land theme developer for the American Farm Project and then a founding member of the Land Stewardship Project. His book length poem Handful of Thunder: A Prairie Cycle and his Sierra Club book Soil and Survival were outcomes of this work. In the early 1990s, Paddock discovered wilderness preservationist Ernest Oberholtzer's "university of the wilderness" on tiny Mallard Island on Rainy Lake. Through the 90s, in this place that fulfilled his long-held dream of a cultural center in harmony with nature, he spent much time researching and writing Keeper of the Wild, the biography of Ernest Oberholtzer. Paddock has returned to Litchfield where he has coordinated an extensive oral hist