Sitting Here Thinking About How Poetry is Presented (From the Archives, published 9/9/13)

Well, it’s been one of those nights during which I’ve spent a lot of time sitting here thinking…

One of my favorite singers is James Taylor.  He’s been a favorite of mine since I first started paying attention to his stuff in the late 1970s. And I must say, getting to see him live in concert is a real treat.  I saw him the first time he came to my hometown of Springfield, MO, back in the 1990s, and then also got to see him a second time when he was back in Springfield just last year.

He’s spending time telling stories prior to singing some songs, and he not only did that when he was here in 2012, but also in one of his latest projects, the show entitled One Man Band which was broadcast on PBS and also is available on DVD/CD.  One of the things he mentioned, before starting to sing the great romantic song “Something In The Way She Moves” is that sometimes when you write a song, you write it for someone or something in particular, and then you find out years later that you were really writing it for someone or something else.  In this case, he wrote that song for a lady he loved a long time ago, then found out years later it was really for the lady to whom he is now married.

I find I can say the same thing about one of the poems I wrote back in college, a poem that appears in my book Soul Sketches.  The poem is called “I Quit”, and it is a fictional account of what a man feels when he comes home and discovers his roommate has committed suicide. It is one of the poems that I refer to as a “frantic poem”, because it was written with the intent of portraying someone who is frantic, pacing about the room as he rattles on this endless stream of thoughts as he copes with his friend’s suicide. It has very little punctuation, and that’s intentional to portray the frantic emotion.

After the suicide of my friend James Shipman last month, I have to say that “I Quit” has completely changed for me. While I was not his roommate, we were good friends and I loved and respected him dearly, and his suicide was like a brick hitting my head and heart. The poem has now become about him, and there’s nothing fictional about how it feels. I’ve only read “I Quit” to a group one other time previously, but now it has completely changed in me. My approach to it will be different from now on. I plan to include it in my readings at the reading and booksigning I am doing next month, and I just hope I can get through it.  But I must read it, and it must now be for him.

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