[Michael Juster]

With our "cool site" fame and the general momentum of the site, we have been adding members at a very fast pace. The other day the board briefly listed "Tom Carper" as our newest member. If you blinked, you missed it. If you haven't been reading very carefully, you missed the significance. Thomas Carper is one of the overlooked treasures of contemporary formalism--a quiet yet powerful voice. We could have an interesting debate as to who is the greatest living master of the sonnet, and there would be partisans for Rhina Espaillat, Mark Jarman, X.J.Kennedy, Vikram Seth, Marilyn Hacker and others, but I think one could make a compelling case for Thomas Carper. I am running below a sonnet from his book From Nature (Johns Hopkins University Press 1995) that is perhaps not his finest, but one that speaks legions about the man who has joined our midst.


Connections


We had some wires and some tools, and a vocation.
We'd make our mark. Inventing for ourselves
The Carper-White Electrical Association,
We stocked with parts a closetful of shelves.
Our plan was to fix lamps; communicate
With old transmitters ordered through the mail;
Run cables through a woodlot and create
A string of telephones along the trail.
We advertised by nailing to a tree
Beside my house a two-foot plywood square
With brightly painted letters--C-W-E
And A--to tell the world that we were there.
These early boyhood projects still are mine;
Making connections, putting up a sign.

[Alan Sullivan]

Now if we could just get Richard Wilbur to retire the 1948 Remington typewriter...

I'm always glad to see anyone over fifty venturing into thse new domains. It's good to know that Thomas Carper has taken an interest in the site, and my thanks to Mike for posting the sonnet. I missed this one in my previous reading; indeed the nature poems are Carper's most memorable. But it was the perfect choice for this occasion.

Alan Sullivan

[Tim Murphy]

'Tis the pity of this woeful world that all you would-be sonneteers aren't hitting on Michael's posting and buying Mr. Carper's books. Want to see how it's done? Read him.

[MacArthur]

Damn coincidence!
I heard of this guy on another Formalist site (Edge City) and went looking on the 'net, and found...nothing.
Can anybody supply links?

[Michael Juster]

I think you will look in vain. I checked the John Hopkins Press website, and all they have are two book titles and some blurbs, the most extensive one coming from Dana Gioia.

[Len Krisak]

Some other sites that might help:

try Poetry magazine, where Tom has appeared
numerous times; also Sparrow magazine and
The Formalist--which, come to think of it now, doesn't
HAVE a website. Oops.

I would STRONGLY recommend buying
both of his books from JHU Press.

[MacArthur]

Well, and you said he's a member...maybe he'll post?