The project still in process was partially inspired by a welcome e from a former local poet, Barb Robinette who now lives in semi-retirement with her good huz in rural Arkansas. She is a fine poet in her own “write” (<–I know, how Tinker Toy of me) who is one of the most encouraging people I know when it comes to my sporadic safaris into the wilds of writing poetry. I say safari because poetry is a mind-dangerous pursuit. The writer often returns to camp with nothing bagged, and even if you land something worth chewing on and mounting on a page, there’s usually as much or more regret over the ones who got away. Barb tot me thinking about my own poetry while sharing her appreciation that I’m still writing. I’ve not written ONE poem this year. I know because I checked my computer and the cupboard was bare. Perhaps my legacy will be a few thousand pictures of poets I respected, on a shelf somewhere at the Sangamon Valley Collection downtown. I think, I pray that it will be more than that.
When I headed off to substiteach at Washington MS Wednesday, I took along the poems I had clipped from the New Yorkers over the past several weeks. I THOUGHT I was going to be teaching Art, but circumstances changed, and I was assigned Hall Monitor Duty for three hours. They even gave me my own AK-47 <– just kidding. So for three hours, I stood at the intersection of a quiet hallway with a sheaf of clipped poems, reading most twice, pocketing those I did not care to keep and setting the keepers into my copy of Lee Gurga’s most excellent Haiku For Poets, which I’ve been savoring while waiting for my renewed subscription to Poetry (the magazine; not the misnomer given to prophetic babble) to resume. It was a long drought reading throough so much desert (poetry too smart for my softening head) in search of something to slake my thirst and leave me wanting more. I’ll write more about this in a future blog after I’ve read all the poems, and that depends on when my next sub teaching assignment comes. In the meantime, try to imagine my froggy countenance, standing poet-erectus in a middle school hallway in Springfield’s East Side, head buried in poems by John Updike, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver and Charles Simic (and others; those I remember off the top) and wonder, as I wondered, Is this the best place a guy with what I have to offer can BE?
And then my microwave died. I’ve lived with a microwaye since 1987, with the one I owned up to last night at 7:19 since 1994 when I inherited Dad’s and gave mine to the Octave Chanute Museum in Rantoul, Illinois. (<– long story; aisle spare you). Suddenly I’m a PRIMITIVE!. Of course I had to wash a small pan to heat coffee water, and I did, but I’m thinking strategically re the acquisition of another microwave oven, used mostly for heating water for coffee and tea and warming pre-cooked sausages and baked chickens . . . or a tea kettle. A few Saturdays ago when I explained to Vachel Lindsay Home State Historic site director Jennie Battles how unhappy I was with microwave heated hot tea (put the bag into the cup of water and cook for three minutes), she urged me to get a tea kettle, and that may be what I do, at least until I can afford a new microwave. If you have a microwave for sale on the cheap, let me know — I’m in the book. Mayhaps we can work a deal; aye?
<>I’ve launched an aviation blog, also at WordPress. Will post a link to it on the side here when I get some halfway decent content posted. As far as my relationship with YOU, I’d rather be known as a writer. And a hummin bean. Aviatin history, like Vachel Lindsay’s life and poetry, is best left with “specialists,”
BTW, the current Newsletter of the American Aviation Historical Society, just arrived in my mailbox this morning, has an article by Job Conger entltled: Tomorrow’s Anachronism; the Disappearing Hyphen.
Live long . . . . . . . . . . . and proper!
Venting is never pointless. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you from having an aneurysm.