In Good Company



Suppose you were a pretty good high school baseball player in your day and have been for your whole life an avid major league baseball fan.  One ordinary spring day you go to your mail box and find a roster of this year’s All Star game.  You read it, and notice that your name is on it—along with old time players like Willie Mays and Rod Carew and current players like Mike Trout and Nelson Cruz.

That’s a little bit how I felt when, a couple of days ago, I went to my mailbox and found a book of poems with the title Final Exam.  It was a book containing eighty-five poems written by sixty-five different poets, all of the poems about teachers and their students.  As I perused the index I saw names like Jane Kenyon, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Theodore Roethke, Carl Sandberg, William Stafford and many more, a Who’s Who of American Poetry over the last hundred years.  I saw some of my favorite poets and poems:  John Ciardi’s “On Flunking a Nice Boy out of School,” Howard Nemerov’s “September, the First Day of School,” Linda Pastan’s “25th High School Reunion,” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.”

Three major American novelists had a poem included:  John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Louise Erdrich.  And, as you have figured out by now, I also had a poem in the book--two poems, as a matter of fact.

As I perused the book, I recalled that well over a year ago I had been asked by someone named J. Barry Koops if I would give him permission to use a couple of my poems in an anthology he was preparing.  I had, of course, given him permission.  I did not know Koops but I recognized his name as a Calvin College name.  That explains (though I don’t know precisely how he knew of me) how I managed to be included in the anthology and why a number of other Calvin grads are included as well:  Rod Jellema, Stan Wiersma (Sietze Buining), Randall VanderMey and Carl Kromminga.

This little blog is my not so subtle way of patting myself on the back, and encouraging you to buy the book if you love poetry or are a teacher who has loved your students, past and present:  Final Exam—Poems About Teachers and Their Students, edited by J. Barry Koops, Brooks Street Books, 2020.  $28.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the poem immediately preceding one of my poems is by a guy named Geoffrey Chaucer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Santorum Takes His Gospel of Individualism to Dordt College

“You go to Dordt College and you ask me that question?” Rick Santorum said to Ryan Walters, Dordt College freshman, when Santorum spoke in Sioux Center recently. And the question that Santorum seemed amazed at was this: “If not for our [government] social programs, how can we take care of our poor?” Santorum asked the audience who should take care of the poor, and the answer he got first was “the church,” and then, the answer he wanted, it’s up to “the individual” to take care of himself. Before we parse those three answers, I want to comment on Santorum’s amazement at Walters question. Why was he so amazed? I can only speculate. Santorum was amazed because he had been led to believe that Dordt College is a bastion of conservative Republican political views. Where did he get that idea? Again, I can, only speculate. Perhaps his colleague in the House of Representatives, Steve King, told him that. Perhaps the fact that Sioux County is called the most conservative county in the country in...
Read more

A "Plumbline" I wrote that will run on KDCR Friday, 3/19

What Glenn Beck Does Not Know Should one even bother to reply to Glenn Beck? Clearly, he does not use reason when he tries to convince folks to think like he does. Often, he attempts to frighten people by using words that carry all sorts of emotional baggage. Sometimes he talks as if he knows a lot about something, but in reality he’s not very well informed. I would hope that people would see through this sort of manipulation, but I hear that Beck has a huge following—even in a town like Sioux Center. So I am going to respond to something he recently said. Beck said that Christians should check their church’s web pages for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” and if they find them, they should resign from the church. Why? Because those words are really code words for communism and Nazism. Now for those Christian Reformed folk listening, if you bother checking the website of The Christian Reformed Church in North America, you will discover—if you did not already kno...
Read more

Doing Something Useful

Image
As I write this, two men are in my kitchen, sanding and sawing and hammering. I know them slightly, they are good men, a father and son team that restores old floors. We discovered a fir floor underneath the linoleum of our kitchen, and we hired these men to take off the layer of gunk—linoleum adhesive, I suppose—and make the floor smooth. Some of the boards were damaged and there were other places where non-flooring boards had been inserted in a remodeling project of the past , so our workers had to replace some of these boards with fir, carefully fitting in the tongue and grooved old fir pieces they had found at a store in Paulina. The father of the team must be 75 years old but he crawls around the floor on his knees with no knee pads (his son uses them) and seems happy in his work. He saw my boat in the garage and commented on it, saying, he found no pleasure in fishing: “A half hour on the lake and I’m ready to come in.” His joy seems to be his work. His son, who knows I recently ...
Read more