UW-Eau Claire professor Jon Loomis’ new book of poetry is available September 1.

At a reading series in Massachusetts several years ago, UW-Eau Claire professor Jon Loomis hosted several high-profile readers.

As he was getting ready to close the doors to the reading, a man wearing plaid pants, a white shirt, and a white belt pulled up in a Cadillac and asked who was reading that evening. When Loomis told him, the guy responded he thought “for sure” the paper said Jon Loomis was reading tonight, and he really wanted to hear him.

“Then he got back in his car and drove away, and I thought, ‘that guy is my audience,’” Loomis said. “’I’m writing for the man in the white belt.’”

He kept that guy in mind as he finished his newest collection of poems, Mansion of Happiness, which will be published Sept. 1.

Compared to his two previous books of poetry, Vanities Motel (1998) and The Pleasure Principle (2001), Loomis said he felt he was finally able to break the poetry rules and write what he wanted without “hearing the voices of his professors over his shoulder.”

“I think it’s wilder, it’s darker in some ways,” he said. “It is sort of willing to go further out on a limb and then start sawing it off.”

Since 2001, Loomis has taken a break from his poems and written three mystery novels, but said he had been tinkering with several poems for a while and the timing finally seemed right.

Through a series of voices ranging from happy to thoughtful, serious to sad, Loomis takes the reader on a journey of the ranges of emotion as people struggle to find the meaning of happiness.

“As Americans in this culture we’re constantly driving, worrying, accumulating stuff,” Loomis said. “It invites you as the reader to sit still for a minute, put down your phone, and just kind of be with yourself and the poems. Let them explore you and you explore them.”

With a variety of themes including love, death, alien abduction, middle age, and the end of the world, he tries to get readers to think about their own mortality.

“There’s a multitude of disasters that are potentially currently happening, so how do we respond to that?” Loomis asked. “Anybody who has been in the hospital for anything serious has encountered that concern. As you get older it starts to encroach a little bit more, so how do we carry on?”

He tries to answer those questions in a humorous, yet insightful way.

His wife and colleague, Allyson Loomis, said she’s read and re-read the poems several times and thinks it’s an enjoyable collection. “I know people think of poetry as being oh-so-serious, as some kind of sacred monolith, but poems can be playful and saucy as well,” she said.

She really enjoys the imagery, and said the book is “a colorful and fascinating landscape” if one reads slowly.

His first two poetry books were written pre-marriage, pre-kids and pre-Sept. 11, and Allyson Loomis said she can see an immense difference in his writing simply because he’s a different person.

“Jon’s writing has become a touch more irreverent and surreal over the years,” she said. “Part of what contributes to this evolution is his confidence as an artist. After years of writing and teaching poems, he really knows what he’s doing and can take creative risks in composing his own work.”

Jon Loomis said he feels that way about his newest work. Stepping back and working on his fiction gave him a chance to renew himself as a poet.

And while he still isn’t completely sure how he feels about it, he is proud to call it one of his more mature works.

“It’s the kind of work I want to be doing right now,” he said. “One of the things I really wanted to do when I worked on this book was to tell the truth, be very up front about how I see and feel about things. And I think this book for better or worse does that.”

He is still working on several poems, so another poetry book in the future isn’t unlikely. But Loomis is around 100 pages into a dark comedy set on a university campus. He hopes to have a “reasonable draft” within a couple of years. He doesn’t know how much of what he has written will stay, and he finds himself at the “100-page hump” where he is starting to doubt his writing.

But at this point in his life he knows that’s OK. “Part of the practice of being a writer is enforced boredom,” he said. “Inspiration is great if you have it, but it’s probably not going to get you through a whole book of poems, or much of anything else. The lightning strikes once in a while but sometimes you’ve just got to do it.”

Jon Loomis will read from his new book of poems, Mansions of Happiness, at 7pm Friday, Sept. 16, at The Volume One Gallery, 205 N. Dewey St.