Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
If you don’t believe a story
Can stay with you in the background
Like a picturesque tree you pose before
For all of your life, witness this:
I loved the baking powder can
That Billy saved his money in to buy
Those two redbone coonhounds. Continue reading “Red Fern”
I first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in an old high school literature textbook. Parked like a shiny convertible amongst the hearses of early twentieth century American literature, she called to me. Now granted “Renascence” wasn’t a horn-honking kind of poem, and it was certainly death-haunted, but it was written by a woman, one of only twenty at that, and it sang of possibilities.
High school textbooks, of course, would not publish some of Millay’s best works that came later, poems about sexuality, love, and longing, that were certainly ground-breaking topics for a female writer in the early twentieth century. She lived life on her own terms, had many affairs, was openly bi-sexual, went to jail for supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, and traveled extensively.
Today, February 22, in 1892, Millay was born. Her friends called her “Vincent.” Continue reading “Today, Remember Edna”
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
–T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
What to think of April? Is it the cruelest month? The “idiot, babbling and strewing flowers” as Millay called it? The time when the “shours soote” bathe “every veyne in swich licour” (the sweet showers bathe every plant vein in such liquid), as Chaucer spoke of? Well, it’s all of this and more with cummings’ goat-footed balloon-man whistling far and wee through the “puddle-wonderful” world. Continue reading “The Cruelest Month: Coming Attractions”
We parked the truck and stepped out
Onto the road that used to be a highway
Of my childhood, winding through Mayes County
To the Grand River bluffs, where my mother
Said hobos made cave camps and where a train
Ran a solitary line amidst the blackjack
And sawbriar. I am holding your hand. Continue reading “Holding Your Hand”
Don’t fear the poem.
Baby take my hand.
We’ll be able to fly.
Don’t fear the poem.
La la la la la la la . . .
Apologies to Blue Oyster Cult. When I tell people I am a poet,
A. They run screaming far to uninhabited lands.
B. They want to share their own poems with me.
C. They make a hand gesture to ward off evil.
D. They stare blankly and then change the subject. Continue reading “Don’t Fear the Poem”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 