Following the current practice here on my blog, some poems return and some poems arrive.

The site, at least for now, will host poems that are returning — poems previously posted here.

Other poems, which have not been posted, will arrive quietly by email. If you’d like to be included, you can subscribe using your email address.

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“Barrow” was the third poem in my blog, posted back in June of 2023.

At that point, the blog’s goals floated in my head, the title of the blog with the word “POET” embedded in the word “projects” — “PrOjEcTs” — driving the content quite a bit.

My thinking was that each poem should be about one of the projects I was working on.

For “Barrow,” the project was a broken handle to the wheelbarrow I bought twenty-seven years ago.

The handle broke as you might expect: I was transporting mulch to the beds around our house and it simply broke. There was no sound, just a tilt and a collapse.

I made a very obvious allusion to the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, so clear that I even wrote the “so much does not depend/on the not-red wheelbarrow”.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

I took the poem much further into the life of not just the barrow, but my own, giving very specific time reference to a canoe trip I took with high school friends to Lake Wawasee in Indiana.

We canoed out onto the lake for four hours or so without shirts and without sunscreen. It was a teenager move, reckless, not mindful.

Which confuses me a bit now–why I would say this was a mindful experience.

I am more specific then, the “moment-full mind,” which does give context to the idea that we lived mindfully. Everything at that age was about the moment, at least that day, the four of us camping in a tent on a horse farm of our English teacher.

Our mission was to paddle to the home of our other English teacher, both of them favorites of mine, still, I think, two of the three most influential teachers not just of my high school education but of all of my years of schooling, getting my MA in English and then my MFA in Creative Writing included. Mrs. Sponseller and Mrs. Bales.

My third most influential teacher, Mr. Gilbert, was a close friend of theirs. When I write now, when I think about whose feedback on my poetry I would most appreciate, who I would like to show my poems, all these years after being a middle school science teacher.

I think I read Williams’ poem in Mrs. Sponseller’s freshman English class. We did a sweep of American Lit that year, as I remember, learning to read and write.

I found the first essay I turned in to Mrs. Sponseller that year, returned with several words and phrases circled questioning if these were my words, if I have not lifted them from others in doing the research.

I was quite the introvert back then and I was training my mind when I read, grabbing words and then trying to use them in my writing so that they would become my own words.

I kept a dictionary handy, looking up any word I did not know. I wanted to know them all.

“Ostentatious” became one of my favorites, defining the way I started to write, ironically, showing off with big words. I threw it in to a lot of my writing.

With their help my junior year I received the NCTE Achievement Award in Writing. Two students from each state won that year, 1984. I was one of those two for Indiana.

Students were nominated (I think) by their teachers, submitting for each student one polished writing sample and one impromptu writing piece.

Looking back I think it must have been a pretty big deal for our school to have someone get the award. We were a small rural school of around 500 students in our high school.

I hope it meant a lot to them. My success was possible only because of them. They motivated me. They inspired me. They mentored me.

And they still do.