“It was arrogance”, says Patrick Ryan Frank in a recent interview when they asked him how he became a writer. PRF was wow-ing me when he was a student fifteen years ago, but only from afar, wow only reported to me by the poetry faculty.
It’s poetry month, and I would like to say that I would be SUCH A GREAT TEACHER OF POETRY, but I suck as a poet and there are so many poets whose jobs depend upon a gig in the academy. So I plod along with the fiction and nonfiction kids, both sorts writing mostly about magic wands and dragons, and, nonfiction-wise, eulogies for magic wands and dragons.
AFTER THE BREAK
Almost five months, no job, it falls apart;
The bills all due, the money’s running out,
but everything is coming out okay
across the cooking shows, makeover shows,
the home-improvement shows where a man stands up
his ladder like a capital letter, an A
that stands for anything. For anything?
For another afternoon and all of that?
I can’t help but believe Patrick wrote this for his ferocious but devoted mentor, Mary Kinzie, who asks her students to imitate JV Cunningham, whose depressing poem “Monday Morning”, full of hopeful enjambment that always deflates in the next line, gives in:
It is now a January world,
An after Christmas waiting. For what?
Not for this snow, this silence. There is
No resonance in the universe.
I must buy something extra today
And clutter up my house and my life.
Patrick’s poem is not a pastiche of Cunningham, but a new translation, and that, I must say, is what I love most about Frank’s poems—they translate the world, literature, the self, and even the reader, for others, and that’s a lot.
Patrick Ryan Frank, you were never my student, but you were often in the hall outside my office complaining that Wallace Stevens was over-rated, and so I feel just fine saying that you and your books were great in bed—not necessarily in that order.