Scott Lowery
CONTACT:
Email: slowery969@gmail.com
USPS: 1512 N. 51st St, Milwaukee, WI 53208
Teaching artist website: scottloweryblog.wordpress.com
BIO:
Scott Lowery recently became a full-time Wisconsin resident, after splitting time over the past several years between the Milwaukee area and his longtime home among the Driftless river bluffs of SE Minnesota. Besides spending plenty of time with his young grandchildren, Scott hopes to take part in the gradual re-emergence of live poetry events in the region. A 30-year veteran public school teacher, Scott has read his poems and presented writing workshops to young writers from grades 3 to college. After retiring, he coordinated the Teen Voices Project, a series of writing workshops for teen poets, culminating in live performance and a print collection of their work (Soundings, Book Shelf Editions, Winona MN).
Scott’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including recent issues of Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Nimrod International Journal, Briar Cliff Review, and Willawaw Journal. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for several national poetry prizes. A new chapbook, Mutual Life, is due out next year from Finishing Line Press, with poems that document everyday life during the past tumultuous five years. Empty-handed, Scott’s previous chapbook, won the Emergence Chapbook Prize from Red Dragonfly Press (2013, Northfield, MN).
Scott is also a roots musician and songwriter, and has performed at coffeehouses, farmer's markets, pubs and pizza farms throughout the Upper Mississippi Valley. He plays finger-style acoustic guitar, along with harmonica, Irish whistle, and various DIY percussion, such as washboard and spoons. As a charter member of the Beef Slough Boys, he has recorded 3 CDs. You may catch him playing solo at Milwaukee farmer's markets and other open-air venues during the summer.
PUBLICATIONS:
Mutual Life (chapbook): Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY, 2023
Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (anthology contributor): Cave Moon Press, Yakima WA, 2022|
Sheltering with Poems: Community and Connection during COVID (anthology contributor): Bent Paddle Press, Madison WI, 2021
Soundings: Poems from the Teen Voices Project (Co-Editor): Book Shelf Editions, Winona MN, 2016
Empty-handed (chapbook): Red Dragonfly Press, Northfield MN, 2013 (out of print)
Poetry
Epistemology
Softball season in the year of the metal-flaked
three-speed Raleighs, their coolness audible
at every show-off chance to calmly
backspin and shift, then stand on the pedals
to leave us pumping along behind. Well,
I’d learned last winter’s secrets from my dad,
how a pock-marked, second-hand wreck
could be wrenched apart, washed clean
in a series of sloshing Skippy jars,
anointed in grease, then fumbled back together,
right down to the insoluble rear hub.
When I looked down at my squawky steed,
bouncing and veering in the dry grass,
I knew I’d held that rattling spray can high,
like a crapshooter winding up and ready
to let fly, and remembering believed
in coaster brakes and Royal Red, the heft
and jolt of finished work in my two hands.
Originally published in North American Review, 2012
Art Class Field Trip
“Rainbow Falls, Watkins Glen, New York”, 1871, James Hope
Knowing how easily unimpressed
these kids can be, I’ve tagged along,
sharing their teacher’s sketchy wish
for long deep looks into gilded frames,
even a moment’s focused gaze:
some food for the half-formed dreams
they keep in their softshell teenage hearts.
Raised on plenty of not so much,
having had their fill of surprises,
they slide politely past Picasso,
shuffle and shrug at Monet and Van Gogh,
but in the American Landscape room
their feet at last touch down on a path
that leads each group through quiet woods,
drawn like moths to this mossy grotto’s
limestone light, filtered by hemlocks.
In unplanned confluence, their faces lift
to mist, bright riffles, layered ledges—
they’re only briefly speechless, then
one kid speaks for all: “I want to go there!”
which echoes softly off the dripping rock.
We can feel how our feet could find their way
upstream, against the current’s cool pull.
Not easy going, but we could do it,
slipping a bit as we climb from shadow
toward the unseen, sun-warmed field
just past that next turn. And why not,
when the painter's got a name like that?
Published in Naugatuck River Review, 2020