A Poetic Break

I have written a few poems in my life. I wouldn’t call myself a poet, though, much the way I don’t call myself a writer. I like to write. I sometimes like to write poems. I sometimes do one or the other well. When it comes to poetry in general, with the exception of the Shakespeares, the Keatses, the Byrons and Yeatses, e.e cummings, and a very few others, I’m often left like the comic strip character – with a question mark hovering over my head as I puzzle over the meaning of a poem about which some critic has raved. A lot of contemporary poetry is like a lot modern art – it seems it has to be beyond description or comprehension, as if hiding some deep truth that only those with enough insight, talent, and awareness are capable of seeing – in order to be considered praiseworthy by the snobs in the world of art and literature. God forbid the art should be of something recognizable, like a landscape or nature scene, or the poem should tell a story with which we can identify. When that is the case, it most certainly is not art. It’s too mainstream, too commercial, and too mundane. Given that, you can probably imagine what I was prepared to hear when a poet was listed as the speaker during our luncheon at the library conference I attended last Thursday. I expected to be subjected to a reading of his works, after which I would sit, eyebrows knit in puzzlement, trying to make sense of them, praying during his discussion of said works I would catch some glimpse of his intent. To my delight, that was not the case.

Robert Wrigley is the poet in question. I was so moved by his work that I bought his book. He is a charming, handsome man who adores his wife (a respected writer) and children. He is not overly impressed with himself. He writes well. When I bought his book, which he signed of course, I told him I like that his poems make sense, and tell a story, and I hate ones that don’t. He said he felt the same. He gave me hope. He even made me want to write some poems. This link gives a brief bio of him. And here’s a bit of that bio:

Robert Wrigley was born in 1951, in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He was the first member of his family ever to graduate from college and the first male--in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany--never to work in a coal mine. In 1971, with a draft lottery number of 66, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After four months of training and duties, he filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection and spent the next five months attached to "Special Training Detachment #2" at Ft Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. For two weeks in October of that year, he dug a trench eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches deep by 80 yards long. It took him only four days to fill it back up. In November, he was honorably discharged….

Here’s an interview with him from the University of Idaho’s literary magazine. And another from Poetry Daily.

And here is a sample of his work:
The Local Myth of a Kiss by Robert Wrigley
That neighbor boy who tried to kiss the frost
from Alice Murtaugh's tombstone married
his lips to the legend of this place. Did he
notice the dates of her life at all, I wonder.
Or how despite the cold the flowers on her grave
were hardly spoilt at all: three red roses,
their petal edges kissed half as hard as he was.
There is someone, it is said, who remembers
just what it was Alice Murtaugh whispered
in the shotgun's mouth, who had tried
the tongues of love and found them wanton.
Remembers, and dies
a little every day, it is said, though no one
knows the source of the weekly flowers.
It's like the weather or the wind,
the way the fog crawls up the canyon walls
and freezes, until the cemetery's ornate gates
loom ghostly, and the stones recede in clouds
that cling. Had he not panicked
and snapped his head back hard,
the boy might have been all right.
Now, however, an odd blossom etched
in the polished stone, a faint gray rose
over the weekly, inclement others
no one ever sees arrayed.
How is it forgotten,
such desperate parting, the kiss
that won't let go?