Like his bond with the earth, Salvatore Marici sows literary seeds and tends to them until they grow into meaningful, uncommon poems.

“This is accessible stuff, poetry for the masses,” the 61-year-old Chicago native said Tuesday at the Bettendorf Public Library, where he’ll read from his latest collection at 7 p.m. today. “I don’t like to preach. I let people make their own interpretations.”

Steve Semken, Mr. Marici’s publisher at Ice Cube Press, said the Port Byron poet is “a true gem in the Q-C art world” and proof artists can be “born” in an area.

Mr. Marici retired from the Rock Island Arsenal in 2010 after a 31-year government career. He writes on a wide range of subjects, including nature. His new book “Fermentations” is a celebration of yeast, places, elements and transformations.

Xavier Cavazos, Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellow, wrote that each of Mr. Marici’s poems “is anchored in rich syntactical soil and sunlight. ‘Fermentations’ is full of lyrical meditations on migration, pop-culture, religious wonderings, hunger and war of the body, soul and land. The reader is left well fed and satisfied.”

Mr. Marici’s poetry appeared in a chapbook, “Mortals, Nature and Their Spirits” in 2012 and “Swish Swirl & Sniff” in 2014, also published by Ice Cube.

The Western Illinois University alum got his master’s in agronomy from the University of Illinois in 1989. He was an agronomist for the government, writing conservation and management plans for real estate leases across the U.S.

He’s written poems since the ’80s, with his first published in 2002. He said he draws inspiration everywhere — including bike riding, exploring nature, sitting in traffic and growing his own garlic and tomatoes. He writes four hours a day.

“You need to sit down and write every day, regardless if anything good’s coming out,” Mr. Marici said. “Maybe a line or something will click. Work on that line or imagery. You might find something that wakes you up.

“If you don’t write every day, the muse will come knocking on your door and there’ll be no one there to answer it,” he said.

Surprise in a poem is vital, Mr. Marici said. “If you know where a poem is going, it’s doomed.”

Though “everything’s been written about, Robert Frost once said, ‘You’ve got to fool your reader that this is the first time they’ve read about something,'” he said.

He said he’s received a lot of help from Midwest Writing Center readings and workshops, and received feedback and encouragement from other writers, including the Quint Cities Poetry Group, which meets the first Wednesday each month at the Bettendorf library.

Mr. Marici was MWC’s first poet in residence in 2010 for a month. He led a blog, workshops and readings; he continues to participate in their workshops and occasionally reads his work at Davenport’s Bucktown Revue.

Mr. Marici said he divides his year between rural Port Byron and Naples, Fla., where his 94-year-old mother lives. The craft comes into poetry through revisions, he said, to strengthen the imagery.

“I like that part; it makes me feel like I’m getting something done,” he said. “You do try to create images — you try to get the touch, too, the feelings and the smells.”

He cited the influence of poet Thomas Lux who supported him and died in February in Atlanta.

“He really emphasized imagery, concise, how to read a poem,” Mr. Marici said. “He, too, wrote so much about mundane stuff.”

source: http://www.qconline.com/news/local/port-byron-poet-finds-inspiration-in-the-everyday/article_61a4cd87-29bf-5243-bbe4-8725b882d2ef.html