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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

Carp and Pabst and Poetry and Population 485

This post about my bowfishing habit reminded me of a top ten favorite Nobbern moment, from Population 485:

I was cleaning carp out behind the house one afternoon when the rawboned neighbor guy walked over. He had been fiddling on a junk car. “Nice ones,” he said, looking down at the fish. And they were, a bodacious passel of Ictiobus bubalus, as my carp-shooting buddy Mills and I like to call them when we’re all dressed up in camo on our secret log, sweating in the sun and smelling of fish slime and Off!. A little Latin to offset the caveman behavior and stink. Mills got me into bow fishing, and now it’s a problem. I sneak off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills smokes them up with apple and hickory in his old concrete smoker, but first I have to clean them. The neighbor stood there silent while I sawed off heads and peeled out guts. Every now and then he took a drag on his Marlboro and a pull on his Pabst. Finally, he spoke.

“So. Yer a writer.”

“Well, yeah, I mean…”

“You do poetry?”

“Well, I’m not much of a…”

“I do some poetry.”

“I, uh…”

“Good shit.”

He walked back to his car. We never spoke again.

 

More Bruce Taylor

When I am deep into writing a book, I return to certain reliable sources, poetry among them. And so deep in the muddy vortex of stubborn prose I was relieved when something crisp and new from my long-time friend and mentor Bruce Taylor (I wrote of him in Truck) popped up yesterday. You can read it here. Also do be sure to click the audio link and note that despite all the cheese in Wisconsin Bruce has never quite shed his east coast mother tongue…

Here is a previous Bruce post.

And it was Bruce who introduced me to the work of Lucille Clifton.

Bruce Reading Poems

Friend, mentor, and I-wouldn’t-be-doing-what-I’m-doing-today-if-not-for-him guy Bruce Taylor (featured in Truck) had his poem featured on The Writer’s Almanac Sunday. Poem’s called “His Good Felt Hat” and it’s right here.

Here is Bruce reading the brief, lovely, “In Class Exercise”:

And here is “Our Body.”

 

A Poet and Pork

A friend forwarded this video of the poet Kevin Young reading four selections.  Last Saturday we had a whole crew of kin over to the place for a meal that included a big ol’ tank of pork in various forms, and Mr. Young is right on the money regarding the joys of that meat (“Ode to Pork”, commencing at roughly 4:35 in the video, but I’d watch the whole thing, this is good stuff) (and catch that “B/babe” joke in there).  Kevin Young will be appearing here, by the way.  Based on our schedules, we’ll likely cross each other in the airport.  The “Ode to Boudin” is a gorgeous thing, a poem for his departed father, the universal intersection of grief and food and joy and memory: …his sisters/my aunts dancing/in the yard to a car radio...

Lucille Clifton

A woman who greatly influenced my writing is gone.  We were not acquaintances.  I seem to recall seeing her speak once, but I might have been remembering a video I watched in a Bruce Taylor poetry workshop long ago.  Her work is on my bookshelf, and – if she would allow me to say so – between the lines of my own pages.

Some of her work is here.  Hear the power of her reading here.  [Sometimes that audio link doesn't work.  Here's the text of the poem she's reading.]