POETRY IN WINTER [R, 6-13-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—POETRY IN WINTER [R, 6-13-24]

 

Good poetry does not

slap you in the face

unless it is about a purple cow

or the shooting of Dan McGrew

A good poem works

around the edges

wording little windows open

so we can come inside…

 

Well, that’s as far as I got this morning, writing my daily poem for my poetry journal, remembering the poetry of Bryan Bowers. I never found any windows in Bryan's poems.

Bryan Bowers is an extraordinary musician. He makes his major instrument, the autoharp, sound like a whole orchestra. He is a warm and rustic performer, inviting you not just to listen to the music but be part of the music. He is a gruffly sparkling dinner guest and raconteur.

All this is doubly true in the twenty-below reality of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in January, where for many years he sang at Dean and Betty Premo’s Second Sunday Folk Concert & Dance, and then stayed over for a 2^nd Monday dinner and front parlor sing-along, during which Helen and Mountain Man Mike compared bear stew recipes.

Bryan recognized me as a fellow-traveler. He said we were “hash brothers.” I was always afraid to ask what that meant. He and I became close once-a-year friends. One year it was even twice, when his tour brought him close enough to Bloomington--after Helen and I were “back home again, in Indiana”—that I was able to book him into IU’s Old Time Music schedule at The Hoagy Carmichael Room.

I had gotten the reputation, at least among The Second Sunday crowd, as the UP’s poet in residence, primarily because I had written the lyrics for a theme song for the 2^nd Sunday dance. Since the dance was held at the Fortune Lake church camp, it started out, “It was on the second Sunday, in January’s stormy cold, that I braved the snow up to the lake, to have my fortune told…”

Yes, not great poetry, but available for understanding, which, when your brain is frozen, is what you want. This was not true with the poetry of Bryan Bowers.

Since he had heard that I was a poet, after he had sung to start the 2^nd Sunday festivities at Fortune Lake, he would lead me off into a far corner to read his poems to me. Since I hadn’t seen him for a year, there were “several.” It irritated Helen no end, since this was during the dancing part of the evening and she was left without a dance partner. But Bryan was so earnest. I didn’t know how to say no to him. I also didn’t know how to comment on his poems. It's quite possible that a real poet would have found Bryan's poems to be classics. I did not, because there were no edges where I could get in.

I nodded, and said “Hmm…,” and tried to look interested, which is what I do now when someone looks like they just said something that I should have heard…

John Robert McFarland