An award-winning poet made an appearance on campus last week, speaking to a class about the book that earned him that distinction.

Garin Cycholl, winner of the 2003-'04 Transcontinental Poetry Award, spoke on Thursday to an English class taught by Michael Antonucci, visiting assistant professor of English. Antonucci said he met Cycholl while Cycholl was completing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"He is among the super talents that UIC's program for writers has produced," Antonucci said. "I asked him to come speak in class because I believe it's important for students to hear poets read and discuss their work."

Cycholl accepted Antonucci's invitation and stood before the Race and Ethnic Literature class wearing a brown suit jacket, colored tie and duck hunting boots while reading and answering questions on his "unconventional" book, "Blue Mound to 161."

"The text is unconventional, and very fragmented," Cycholl said. "But it's the story of a region, and the only way to tell the story of a land is by narrating fragments of the place's history and letting the readers piece the fragments together."

"Blue Mound to 161" is an epic poem telling the story of southern Illinois, more specifically the region of southern Illinois where Blue Mound Road and Illinois Highway 161 meet.

Cycholl said he titled the book "Blue Mound to 161" because "Blue Mound Road is a portal where the geography of Illinois changes, and Highway 161 was once used as a bootlegger's run through southern Illinois."

The book explores different aspects of Southern Illinois's history, including the excerpts of a Confederate soldier's diary during the Civil War, the murder of strikebreakers and company guards of the Southern Illinois Coal Company and the actions of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

"This poem is an exploration of how you recover the past. Was the past really so great or was it insanity? I call it poetry because it captures and American Jazz. …It's structured a lot like the (works) of Miles Davis," Cycholl said.

"Blue Mound to 161" is formatted as a book without page numbers that contains fractioned poems separated not by chapters or titles but by solid black pages.

"The black pages are what organize the book into sections. I think of the pages not simply as black pages but as pages where everything that could have possibly been said was typed onto the page until it was totally blacked out," Cycholl said.

Cycholl said he wants to encourage Marquette students to be readers who are patient and explore their sense of America; when they do this, it will make them "more intuitive of the experiences of life.

"I wrote an epic poem about an epic place, but the great epic poem of Milwaukee is just waiting to be written," he said. "Which of you is going to stand up and write it?"

Cycholl's poetry "has something to say," according to College of Arts & Sciences junior Wenxian Tan. "In an age where culture is dictated by advertising and the latest MTV fads I feel that it is important for one to be reminded of their beginnings."

Garin Cycholl will be returning to Milwaukee to talk about "Blue Mound to 161" April 1 at Woodland Pattern Bookstore, 720 E. Locust Street.

"If you have ever read Cycholl or if you enjoy poetry then Cycholl offers students an insight into a poet's mind," Tan said. "The man is so intelligent, so attend but attend with the intention of getting something out of it."