Category: Notes on Original Poems

Walter S was my grandfather. In his later years he repeated the same stories over and over. Probably a lot of grandfathers do that. I’m not quite there yet; but I sense it coming on. Sometimes I tell a story and think, “Maybe I told them that one already?”

So much gets said in our modern world. Much less of it really makes an impact of any kind.

I had a thought one day, that making a true connection with another human being was something like catching a trout on a dry fly in the river. Something you can try to do patiently all day, and yet still fail to do. And when it does happen, it feels a bit miraculous. That was the basic idea for this poem.

My grandfather was born in the 1800s; our ages never overlapped enough to fish together. But I always felt connected to him just due to his patience and kindness. And now with the old stories coming back to be repeated over and over.

I wrote these little poems at various times over the years. None of them seemed substantial enough to warrant their own post, so they just sat for a while as notes jotted down. After a while I started to list all the ‘Little Poems’ in one place, just to keep track of them. Together, they seem like enough to publish, and I liked how some of them turned out.

The idea for this poem is the parallel between the process of bourbon being made, and the process of it being consumed (and maybe of it consuming us, or at least some of us from time to time). Bourbon gets its flavors from liquor that is pressed by temperature cycles into and out of the charred inner-layer of a wooden barrel. Later at the point of consumption, the same bourbon tastes hot due to it’s high alcohol content; and is sometimes placed on ice. All that ice, heat, warmth, cooling, char, cycling, and so forth, seemed to be a good metaphor for the solitary drinker, remembering while he damages his ability to remember, thinking of past relationships now gone, while at the same time dis-interested in the other human beings right there in the room.

The “memory of flames” was a line that just popped out without any foresight; but it carries the perfect double-implication… the inside of the barrel was charred by flame; and this drinker was himself charred by an old flame of some kind, not described in detail but just remembered in the moment. And remembered only by the drinker, who does not share all his secrets with us.

My first Covid-19 pandemic poem.  It took an hour or two to write. There’s not much to add in notes.  I feel this one can easily be ruined by over-explanation or heavy analysis.  It is meant to leave a light footprint.

I wrote this poem in the time around the death of my wife’s paternal grandmother.  She had dementia, which was quite severe in her last years.  The poem isn’t meant to be about her personally or specifically; just about her type of situation.

Poems like this, where every line makes a rhyme, are really time-consuming to write.  Good rhyme takes time.  It’s hard to write with a normal voice, saying things that sound at least somewhat natural, making the poem say what you want; AND at the same time hitting your marks to rhyme at the end of each line.  I returned to this poem off and on for over three months before considering it ‘done’.  I probably wrote over a thousand minor versions of it before it got this far.

Long ago a teacher taught me: rhyme makes you think of new ways to say things; and those new ways to say things are a wellspring of poetry.  So I prefer writing poems that rhyme.  And most people prefer to read poems that rhyme.  It just takes forever to write them.

This poem is a true story for the most part.  I was in Waffle House with my kids and some song from the 1980s came on the jukebox (or whatever digital thing they have now to stand in for the old jukebox).  The song contained that made no sense, back when I was a teenager.  But when heard it again after many years, I understood it entirely.  And it changed my impression of the song, very slightly … for the worse.  For some reason the new knowledge of that old line deflated the song just a bit.  It took some of the fun out of it.

The worst part of the story is that, while I recall the feeling and the place vividly, I honestly don’t remember what song it was, or which line.

I wrote this poem over 25 years ago, back when I was a student.  I think it was my best work of that time.  It’s the only poem from those days that I kept.

I was always inspired by large-scale, mundane engineering works such as highway overpasses, towers to carry high-voltage lines, etc.  They always seemed (and still seem) so majestic, even though no one thinks much about them.  Engineering works are that way sometimes: amazing, and utterly un-noticed.  Somehow they also seem a bit sad, especially these static ones that literally stand in one place for their entire lifetimes as the more interesting world changes all around them.

The original idea of these was to contrast such works to more traditional statues.  Most statues are build to recognize and remember powerful men.  Towers like this are built, well, just to serve a purpose, and not recognize or remember anything.

I have been roughly half of these, at some time or another.

The reference to ‘childhood home’ came after writing the rest of it and needing a way to end it; something to rhyme with the word ‘poem’.  These are really meant to be contemporary / modern-day things that I have done or seen other men do; so I am not personally meant to be the ‘reader’ in the last stanza  But I guess there is an implication that we watched our fathers do a few of these things also, when we were younger.