THE ICE HOUSE by Floyce Alexander (Audio Clip)

Can you remember what it was
to feel the sun on your skin
at noon & walk among the lovelies
in their sunshine dresses & lean
against adobe downtown...
At night it was another story
no one knows but the mothers
of those dark-haired beauties
walking alone by the Rio Grande
calling for their children, calling
for them to come home, calling
them to forgive, to forgive them all.

from 'La Llorona'

In this, his fourth full-length collection, Floyce Alexander ranges a gamut of experience, from the paradoxical 'Pariah' to the apparent leave-taking of the title poem. In between, the origins of a sensibility are found in the dreck of murder, rape, and racism, with infamy providing a way into seeing what at least one portion of an American legacy may amount to. Here he bids farewell to those who embodied joys and sorrows that in all their contradictory richness fulfilled the task the poet Rilke set in confronting "the horror of death" by leaving behind no "unlived lines in our bodies." Here too is work that attempts to respond to the perhaps impossible benchmark incised by the colonial American John Wise in 1772: "If a man any ways doubts, whether what he is going to do to another man be agreable to the law of nature, then let him suppose himself to be in that other mans room."

Floyce Alexander was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, December 31, 1938, the son of a western Arkansas coal miner whose own father was a cotton tenant farmer in eastern Oklahoma.

Growing up in the fifties in the lower Yakima Valley of Washington state, where his father homesteaded a farm near a town of eleven hundred souls, Alexander was paid ten cents per column inch for writing high school sports for a weekly newspaper for four years. Upon graduating from high school he was offered a football scholarship by a California college after having played the game only one season. Choosing to accept a journalism scholarship instead, he was sports editor of a nearby college weekly & editor in chief of the college yearbook before making his way to the University of Washington in Seattle. There he discovered not only his first city but another world of writing in fiction & poetry. He showed some of his work to Theodore Roethke, who encouraged him to continue.

For seven years, during the sixties, Alexander worked full time as an editor & writer at Washington State University, Pullman, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in English. He also holds the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, & has a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Since 1989 he has lived with his wife Karenlee in Bemidji, Minnesota.

His other books include Bottom Falling Out of the Dream (Lynx House Press, 1976); Red Deer (L'Épervier Press, 1982); Succor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2002); & American Fires (Lynx House Press, 2003).

The following audio clip is from The Moe Green Poetry Hour hosted by Rafael F. J. Alvarado and Stacy Mangiaracina, February 6th, 2008. A night of Red Dragonfly Press poets Floyce Alexander author of The Ice House; Freya Manfred author Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle; and Dale Jacobson author of A Walk by the River and Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast.

Floyce Alexander reads 'From Minnesota, Remembering Joseph Langland'; 'Flowers of Amsterdam', 'Cuban Missile Crisis', and 'House Made of Rock' from his book American Fires (Lynx House Press, 2003); 'La Llorona' from The Ice House (Red Dragonfly Press, 2006); and 'March Seventeenth' from Succor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2002).