Dad

I’m trying to remember if my dad ever read a poem, I mean really reading a poem, a real poem that is and reading as if he was caught up in it. Since I can’t remember him ever reading a poem I can’t conjure the image, the picture in my mind of dad reading a poem which is, after all, a work of fiction. I want to think that my dad read a poem, at least once in his life, but I can’t imagine it after all this time.

Dad would be turning 109 later this year. And perhaps it was Edgar Allen Poe he was reading? The name Poe rings a bell, as does the name Edgar Arlington Robinson, a poet too.

But who cares anymore about such things, poetry, fiction and suchlike? )Suchlike is now on the menu as is everything like that). Far too much fiction, poetry or otherwise, is published these days, more fiction than anything else. At some point the books all look and sound like the same book to me, the book everyone else has written but me, the books  ow appearing in the window of the bookstore or inside on the bookstore shelf, almost the exact same book written by the previous writer, a voracious writer of new fiction. Many of the newer books too are available as audiobooks which make real book sounds and so forth.

My late 109-year-old dad might enjoy one of my poems, had he ever known I wrote one. But he didn’t know that I’d ever written a poem, having died at the age of 52 in 1967, long before I started writing. Mom lived long enough to know I’d written poems, and read some of them in my first chapbook, The Second Dream published by Momentum Press in 1986. I remember Mom saying after she read my little book, “Why can’t you write like Edna St. Vincent Millay?”

Painting—‘The Brain Braining’ (after Stan Rice), 20” x 20”, acrylic, paste, sandpaper, 2023.