Casa Jonsson

Men and poetry don’t mix. Never mind that this is historically untrue, as Douglas Jones pointed out several years ago in his “Poetics” column in Credenda/Agenda.

In previous millennia, poetry was overwhelmingly a male passion. Your manhood would have been questioned if you did not share in the longing for a metrical weave of words. But what has happened? Why do most modern men hate poetry? Why is poetry now largely considered the domain of effeminacy?

[…] Even if you show some men less-sentimental poetry, they don’t have the stomach for it.

I dare any man—or woman—to try not to appreciate the two poems by Mark Turpin that Garrison Keillor read today on “The Writer’s Almanac.” Turpin writes as though he’s walked more than a mile in a carpenter’s shoes, and, in fact, he has.

When I see driven nails I think of the hammer and the hand,
his mood, the weather, the time of year, what he packed
for lunch, how built up was the house,
the neighborhood, could he see another job from here?

And where was the lumber stacked, in what closet
stood the nail kegs, where did the boss unroll
the plans, which room was chosen for lunch? And where
did the sun strike first? Which wall cut the wind? […] (“The Box”)

On Monday returned the man I fired
wanting the phone number of the laborer he loaned money to,
and stood while I wrote it out on a scrap of shingle
and the crew on the floor kept hammering

with the silence of three hammers tapping out different beats.
I scratched down the name and seven digits with a flat pencil,
scrawling across the ridged grain and then with it.
He thanked me with an uncomfortable smile and left.

He was incompetent, but incompetence is not a crime
—I never liked him. […] (“Last Hired”)