Happy Saturday!

Thanks for taking the time to read my poem today. I got up early this morning and workshopped this poem with my poetry advocate before it became the version you see here.

If you enjoy seeing that process you can read the entire transcript here. There is a lot there. I leaned into speaking with my poetry advocate (aka Chat GPT) today which led to an interesting exchange on the process of us talking itself.

My influences this morning were Garrison Keillor’s book Good Poems and the poem “Waiting” by Raymond Carver.

Keillor writes in the introduction about a number of things that make a poem “good”. One of those things is that good poems often tell stories, and as with good stories, good poems are also memorable.

Keillor says though that “most poems aren’t memorable” and but that when a poem tells a story, there is a chance that you will hold that poem with you, that it will matter.

And of poems mattering, Keillor says,

What makes … all good poems matter, is that they offer a truer account than what we’re used to getting. They surprise us with clear pictures of the familiar.

So I had these thoughts in my head this morning and the poem you read here popped out.

I tried to tell a story here and to keep that story brief. I let the repairman have his own voice and let his voice have a bit of poetry itself, which, if we were to transcribe ourselves, perhaps much of us would also have.

I’m going to keep my commentary on this poem brief as I have a lot more gossiping to do today. Well, yard work, actually. I’ll talk to the dogs a bit.

That’s all the news that fits for today then.