I Know It's the Day After the America-Makes-History Election, But . . .

I have Poetry Today on my home page, and today’s poem is “Responsibility,” by Robert Wrigley. I know him, such a handsome man, and he is a friend, but one whose connection I have allowed to slip away. He came to Boise one summer in 1989 or 1990 and did a poetry workshop/class. I got to be in it and was really glad. I never felt like a very good poet. My poems are too simple, say I. Too prosy, says my friend Neide. (As recently as two weeks ago Neide said of my most recent poem, “I like these first two stanzas, Carol, and the last stanza very much." Pause. “Why don’t you write about this in an essay, that you’re so good at?”) Hmmm.

Robert took my poetry writing seriously, what a gift, and was nothing but encouraging. He didn’t like that my poem “The Wall” was in second person, but he told me it was a good poem and I should send it off for publication. I’ve fussed with that poem over the years, putting it in third person, and just recently deciding to put it back in second person. My poem, after all.

A year or two after that workshop Robert Wrigley came back to Boise to speak. I had kept in touch with him, and he asked for some kind of help from me regarding Wallace Stegner’s, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, a book of essays on living and writing in the west, the last thing Stegner published. I remember that when Robert saw me the night of his presentation he said, “Wow, Carol, you look like a professional.” It was a compliment and, obviously, hard for me to just accept. I quipped, “A professional what?”

Neide and Robert are friends, too, and I suspect they keep in touch. Most people, it seems to me, are better at staying in touch than I am. Robert used to teach at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, which is where Neide first knew him. Now he is director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at University of Idaho.

I always like his poetry, and so I recommend it.

I’d like to find the road kill poem I wrote for him, even if it's a bit gruesome—he assigned each of us to write a road kill poem in response to his poem, "The Skull of A Snowshoe Hare." I’ve made a preliminary search and will carry on with that when my back stops hurting.