BONUS POEMS TO WHET THE APPETITE
I can't say he was a real big poet. There are a few of them sprinkled in among the box of tales, but they don't have the same pull for me as the stories. A couple of them are gushingly sentimental or appear to be creative writing assignments. The two here are the cream of the crop.
I see a lot of his themes from the short stories here. Getting older, not being a tough guy anymore. Click below to listen––I've tried to do justice to its tone of defeated defiance.
I'm not a huge fan or rhymed couplets (unless in the hands of someone who truly understands meter) but I love the irony of this next poem. It makes me feel like my father got how hyper-romanticized writing was, how commercialized the teaching of it was. And he wrote this almost forty years before the great debates about the glut of low-residency MFA programs.
You can listen to this one below, too. The guy was ahead of his time, I tell you (though he probably would have jumped on the low-res MFA bandwagon right away, if he'd stayed alive long enough and earned enough money to pay for it).
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