A Southern Nigerian Community

Quite simply, he interviews the world around him, in the eastern Iowa he's grown to love. First (in Big Rig Souls), he interviews truckers – guys and gals encountered in truckstops around the Midwest, usually in Iowa; then (in Assemblyline Arguments) he lets assembly line workers become his speech – men and women in foundries, feed mills, packing houses; then he turns on inside him the voices of contemporary hog farmers in eastern Iowa. The result of this interviewing, this becoming the language of work in his own environment, is to give Will a new voice of his own, that of the continuity of labor. What he has given me to understand – I look back to my first encounter with his work twenty years ago – is that the shifting borders of poetry and philosophy are fixable stillnesses across which the subtle mesh of Being is constantly moving. In that mesh, of which Will and I have in fact become expressions, catch facets of what-is so brilliant that we must turn away from their glare.