found out

Last week I mentioned Frank O'Hara and linked to a really interesting piece on him by yet another poet I didn't know, Elaine Equi. She's quite famous, and pretty soon agents of the Academy of American Poets are going to show up on my so-called poet's doorstep and relieve me of my laminated Poets Club ID card based on my dire ignorance of modern American poetry.

I'll plead with them, explaining that after all it was I who, as a work-study student at Wesleyan University Press in 1982, discovered Yusuf Komunyakaa's Copacetic in the slush pile and sent it breathlessly off to the Editorial Board, but they'll say, "That's no excuse for admitting in public that you had never heard of Elaine Equi until 2011. Just look at the kind of works she's been producing since 1978, long before you found yourself typing first-reader's reports in Middletown, CT on a manual typewriter using carbon sets."

They'll thrust a page into my hands. "Just look at this poem from The Cloud of Knowable Things! And you call yourself a poet!" Then they'll turn on their heels as I cry from my kidscribbled, catscratched teacher's doorway, "Please--I just need more time!"

[echo of "more time! more time! more time!" receding into the distance]

excerpt from

The Objects in Fairy Tales

are always
the most important
characters.
Then as now,
the power to transform
is theirs —
the story
a way of talking through
(and to) us.
Shoes of Fortune,
Magic Beans,
are unlike objects
in magazines
for they awaken
us against our will
from the spell of abject
longing for more.
Only then do we live
happily ever after.


2.

They speak
but not
to everyone,

just those
ready to hear
and endure

what they have to say —

impossible tasks,

shine wrapped around
the seedvoice.

Golden apples
in the grasp of time.

"I'll climb up."

~ Elaine Equi

I wonder: what kind of well-read do you have to be, to write well?

Explore this question and others at A Teaching Life with Tara Smith, host of Poetry Friday this week.

I promise a return to the Kidlitosphere next week...

work song in the key of f

Well. Sooner than we expected, the school system reviewers and the Superintendent made their recommendation against approval to the Board of Education, and in a whirlwind of events our public charter school application was denied on Tuesday. There was no way to catch my breath in time for Poetry Friday--these are the last days of the school year, after all--so here I am today with a poem that reflects (not sure how, but it does) a little of the hollow feeling that lurks beneath a determination to try again.

Work Song
~ Joshua Mehigan

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving--
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.

That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.

The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.

That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he's done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.