Library Spotlight

I love to read fiction about the writing life. This collection of short stories, The Poetry Life (Cavankerry Press, 2008), offers ten short stories by poet and novelist Baron Wormser. Each one gives the reader the sense that she or he is part of the imaginative and physical world of a poetry you want to know better. I think only a poet who is also a gifted prose writer, as Wormser is, could have rendered so vividly these portraits how the work of William Blake, William Carlos Williams, Elinor Wylie, John Berryman, Weldon Keyes, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Joe Bolton have affected their readers. And I suspect that this will be one of my summer re-reads!

Regarding Today’s Poem

We all have moments of seizing up, especially when a blank mind greets a blank page. Sometimes relaxing into memory helps. During my junior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was extremely fortunate to have had two back-to-back semesters under the tutelage of renowned English professor Standish Henning. These two classes covered the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays, along with a healthy slice of his sonnets. I not only learned about Shakespeare’s work, I learned how to write academic prose.

Last month, I learned of Mr. Henning’s death from a friend (who still lives in Madison and who thoughtfully sent me his obituary.

Rarely does a short obituary sum up a life so accurately. He was, indeed, “…a man of great depth, humor, and decency, a man much loved.” Clearly, he lives on in the many, many lives he affected, including my own.

That same junior year of college was the time I first encountered singer-songwriter-musician Tom Waits (Memorably at a live concert–for free, because I was an usher at the University Theater. I had no previous awareness of his work, but I promptly went out to by his Blue Valentine record album.) And it was while living in Madison that I first fell into the life-changing poetry of William Butler Yeats. In writing this poem today, I was thinking of his “Lines Written in Dejection” (one I memorized a few years ago in a zeal of memorizing poems I love) and “The Circus Animals Desertion.”

I hope none of these esteemed gentleman–Henning, Yeats, Waits–mind my slender effort titled “No Poem Today.”

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE