Like Mother Tried To Tell Me… And I Wouldn’t Listen, I got this book last May at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale. It is a short collection of poems dated June 2015 through March 2019, and the Print on Demand date in the back indicates the book was printed in May 2021.
The subtitle is “a tribute to living life on the open road”, and the first poem is about a van she named Frida, and it sounds like she’s planning to live in it, an early representation of Van Life or perhaps homelessness, but the poems are not exclusively about travel. They’re about relationships, et cetera. And although they hint at some poetic sensibility, some underdeveloped moments, most of them are not very good–they’re just prosaic thoughts broken into lines, sometimes lines with only a word or two on them, and not especially descriptive or evocative.
Sadly, in reading a lot of lesser poets (and modern magazines), I’m still concluding that the changes in education over the last, what, century and a quarter? have really diminished the depth of poetry across all levels of skill and professionality. Some of the grandmother poetry, or, heck, the poetry my father wrote (which I’ve posted on the blog, somewhere, but I cannot find it now), has depth that the casual poetry writer today lacks. Because they’ve not been fed the classics as input, so all they have is tweets and insta-poetry to learn from. And it shows. Even the college-trained poets these days suffer from it.
Ai.
At any rate, this is book 37 for the year (and the third on the night when I also read browsed Up Close! and Mother Tried To Tell Me… And I Wouldn’t Listen). Annual book count: PADDED.
