Of Dragonflies and Men

Minnesota, like Maryland, has a lot of coastline, so we weren’t surprised to find a lost sailor stumbling around a pond, photographing reed canary grass with a lens that rhymes with doom. Chasing dragonflies and ice fishing are only a small part of Scott King‘s life. The editor and printer has published several volumes of his own poetry and numerous letterpress chapbooks, pamphlets and broadsides. Among the thirty authors his Red Dragonfly Press has inked into books are Dorianne Laux, Larry Gavin (read the review here) and the longtime Salisbury State College poet Michael Waters. Many of these authors have had their Red Dragonfly poems read by Garrison Keillor on NPR’s Morning Edition. Scott is also a chemical and environmental engineer, which doesn’t mean he works on the railroad, and a translator of works from Spanish and Greek. What, you may wonder, were we doing in our Bayliner in the land that gave us Hubert Humphrey? We’d been passing around our thumb-smudged copy of Scott’s Rice County Odonata Journal (read the review here) and knew that some things in life must be believed to be seen.

We believed.