Klutz-The Story of a Poem: guest blog by Jon Obermeyer

In the spring of 1985, I finished my MFA in creative writing.

I was burned out. Two years of writing poetry and short stories and presenting them in writing workshops for searing peer critique is brutal. Don't try it.

I had drained the well and the water table. For a year, I wrote nothing.

I went to work for a bank, in a back-office clerical role, processing mortgage loan payoffs and cancelling deeds of trust. I was hardly T.S.Eliot working for Lloyd's; far from it. Plus, I had no Pound or Hemingway to arrange a private fund so I could escape from my day job.

And then one night I was washing dishes and this poem arrived, unannounced:

The Klutz

The sink narrows like a vise

and the wineglass I'm washing

pings against the porcelain sink,

sprinkling shards into the suds.

I assume a constant state

of genuflection, retrieving

pills, pens, coins: they flee

my grasp like Mexican jumping

beans. Please do not ask me

to carry the groceries, hang

pictures, dust the mantle. I

succumb to indexterity.

Made for the moon maybe?

Where everything fragile

gives a second chance,

and the Blue Delft figurine

knocked from the counter

floats over my fingertips,

whirliong above gravity,

a dervish of the divine.

If you have ever felt like objects in the physical world are working against you, you will certainly appreciate a kitchen sink that "narrows like a vise" and futile attempts to hang an uncooperative picture or dust elusive figurines on the mantle. The poem also looks for some form of "divine" intervention, where gravity might suspend and the wineglass stay in one piece for another day.

I also had fun with ther self-deprecating title, from the Yiddish klots meaning "clumsy person, blockhead," which derives from the Middle High German klotz, "lump, ball."

There is humor and wit in the piece, and domestic insight (please don't ask me to do household chores that we both know will result in something broken!) The poet speaks to himself, and perhaps to an adjacent spouse who shakes her head in dismay. The poet, in wondering if he is made for the moon, admits he may not be entirely at home on the planet or in his house.

There's also a spiritual subtext here, as the poet speaks of genuflection, and a zen-like acceptance, succumbing to the minor god, indexterity.

At twenty lines, this blank verse poem reminds me a bit of a sonnet. A more accomplished poet might have been able to pull it off in one of the classic sonnet forms: Petrarchan, Shakespearian or Spenserian.

But I'm not that guy and I know I'm not that guy. 

"The Klutz" has its moments and I'm glad the editors of Tar River Poetry concurred when they published it.

Jon Obermeyer lives in Durham, NC and is still klutzy. But he has no problem writing blogs and new poems. Jon's third poetry collection is titled "Wingspan", reflecting his totem animal the California condor and the art of living on both sides of the country in one lifetime.