It is so great to get news about a friend, acquaintance, fellow writer making the national scene. So a shout out to Wisconsin poet Robin Chapman for U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser including her poem “Time” in his “American Life in Poetry” column. Here’s the column:
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American Life in Poetry: Column 429BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATEHere’s a poem by Robin Chapman, from Wisconsin, that needs no introduction, because we’ve all known an elderly person who’s much like this one.Time
My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to askif I might have seen her clipping shearsthat went missing a decade ago,with a little red paint on their shaft,or the iron turkey bank and the porcelaincoffee cup that disappeared a while backwhen her friend, now dead, called the policeto break in to see if she were ill, and have wehad trouble with our phone line, hersis dead and her car and driver’s licenseare missing though she can drive perfectlywell, just memory problems, and her sonis coming this morning to take her upto Sheboygan, where she was bornand where the family has its burial lots,to wait on assisted living space, and shejust wanted to say we’d been good neighborsall these how many? years, and how luckyI am to have found such a nice manand could she borrow a screwdriver,the door lock to her house is jammed.American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Robin Chapman, whose most recent book of poems is the eelgrass meadow, Tebot Bach, 2011. Poem reprinted from the Alaska Quarterly Review, Volume 28, nos. 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2011) by permission of Robin Chapman and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Kudos, Robin!Please visit the CWW website at www.wiswriters.org