Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
The year 2013 ended auspiciously for your humble curator. On Dec. 24, I learned I won a grant for the museum from the Popular Culture Association. Two days later, I was run over by a semi-truck and lost my lovely Black Panther (Ford Ranger) and am still without a vehicle, but I survived.
What will 2014 hold for the museum? The biggest news is that I am expanding. Continue reading “ROMP Shop”
Oklahoma has created some stellar poets, to name a few–John Berryman, Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, and Kevin Welch. Our fly-over state has also produced some first-rate songwriters who have the musical poet strong inside them: Garth Brooks, Roy Clark, Wanda Jackson, Reba McEntire, Leon Russell, Dwight Twilley, Bob Wills, and Kevin Welch again, among them. But our greatest poet has to be Woody Guthrie. And yes, he was a poet. Just read the lyrics to “Harness Up The Day”: Continue reading “Harness Up The Day”
Ida Red, one half of the museum mascot team, has decided that she needs to contribute more to the ROMP mission. Thus, she will occasionally make a post on this blog. Though she is a redbone coonhound, she does not hunt so much as she . . . waddles around on the land and hogs the golf cart. She needs to at least exercise her mental and creative faculties, so in her first blog, she would like some help in writing a poem:
RRRRRuff! RRRRRRuff! RRRRRRRuk uk uk uh uh . . . Pardon me, got a bark caught in my throat. It’s getting cold out here in the sticks. Anyone got some kibble? Yeah I know I just ate. Continue reading “Add-A-Line for Ida”
In the general store north
Of Toronto, Kansas, I bought
Handmade postcards from
A local artist, a rusted Ford
In a field of weeds, rooster,
Meadows of sunflowers.
The dusty baggie held
Five cards. It is hard to find
Postcards anymore. Gone
With them are letters
And notes and notebooks
Full of notes and notes on
Lined paper or stationery. Continue reading “Ephemera”
Way back in the 80’s, in the time before the interwebs, my college friends and I threw a birthday party for Lloyd, a guy who loved Spam. I’m not kidding: he ate it almost every day, and not because he had to. We made an elaborate Spam boat decorated with marshmallow and cocktail toothpick rigging on a sea of blue-food-coloring-tinged icing. No one could have imagined that the meat product would become one of the most common terms online. Lloyd, did you know? Continue reading “Thankity You!”
What are your earliest poetry memories? Mine seem to revolve around narrative poems. I particularly remember reading Longfellow’s “Evangeline” in junior high and getting to actually illustrate parts of it. I remember drawing Evangeline and thinking the situations in that very long poem were so far-away and unreal to me, and I tried to make her real by drawing her. To this day, I can picture the little white bonnet and apron I put on her and the long plain green dress, only a few wisps of her brown hair visible coming out of the bonnet. Continue reading “Story-Poems: Which Do You Like?”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 