[Tim Murphy]

Unposted

Abandoned where the grass grew lank and damp,
the antiquated grain drill seemed a toy
some Lilliputian farmer might employ
to plant a field small as a postage stamp.

Kelly opened a hopper filled with seed
nutty and sweet as Wheaties in the bag.
Where were the plowman and his plodding nag
to run that good grain through the metered feed?

Flushed from a pigweed patch, a pheasant sailed
over the leafless tree row flecked with red
where shrunken apples hung unharvested
or fallen to the stubble, lay impaled.

Squinting into the distance, Kelly said
“It was the farmer, not the seed what failed.”

[Jim Hayes]

There will be no prizes for guessing the author here,
the wry, wistful humor, the eternal, and not always successful, struggle against the land so poignantly related, reveal him to be a close cousin of Kelly, at least in a geneological sense.

Aye, to be read again.

[Roger Slater]

Anyone who frequents this board and doesn't own the book wherein this poem appears should have a star taken away from his name.

This poem is reminiscent of one of my favorites in the author's previous book, called (I believe) "Failure," and both sonnets give very little comfort to the person who fails.

Wonderful poem. (Shouldn't L13 end with comma?)

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

This is a quintessentially American poem, with its moving combination of tough, high expectations and roughly-phrased compassion. I understand Kelly. And the view of the American landscape conveyed by that opening quatrain takes my breath away. The sense of human smallness is perfectly accurate, as I remember it from my first look at the American agricultural West, with its gorgeous, terrifying, endless space, and tiny structures dropped on it here and there.

[Julie Steiner]

Tim, after the cook-off, you will post the authors' names, won't you? I don't begrudge the Star-Belly Sneetches their well-deserved fun, but you can imagine the ridiculous but well-researched attributions I'll come up with if left to my own devices!

Julie Stoner

[Jim Hayes]

"Star-belly sneeches" just you wait till you get your star Julie Stoner, just you wait!

Honestly, that's as good a laugh as I've had in a while.


Thanks greatly;
JIm

[Tim Murphy]

One of Kelly's drills is 60 feet, and the marker disks extend 30 feet out each side. It can plant 160 acres in two hours, and it can't even turn around in a small field. The drill we found in the weeds was 6 feet wide.

As our many members in Newburyport know, this is one of those donnee's which are simply given to us. Kelly and I really did find that antiquated drill in NW Kansas, and he really did say that last line. I immediately thought, "What a great line of pentameter. I'm going to get a poem out of this." Of course it took ten years for the poem to come. Actually it's one of my West Chester poems. By the time we got up to the Berkshires to see the Wilburs, I had a twelve line draft which I recited at breakfast. Dick, Charlee, and Alan persuaded me that it wanted to be a sonnet. Oh sure! Just triple rhyme a sestet!

Alan has always felt that I over-rate this poem, and he might be right. It may be that it is just too "Murphyesque" in its diction, its assumption of the reader's familiarity with agriculture, to communicate effectively with the general reader. But it's a hell of a good example of where my poems come from, and I thank George Core, the legendary editor of Sewanee Review, for printing it.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Tim I knew these things were very large, but not HOW large! Yes, this New Yorker is finally surprised. I wonder if poems whose background involves an understanding of highly specialized items, procedures, and so forth suffer from the ignorance of most readers. For instance, if I wrote about my mother making coffee in a thoroughly stained and fragrant "colador," or about the clever little gizmo that makes buttonholes on my Singer, with a dance-like motion under the needle, would lots of potential readers be "out of the loop"?

[Alfred Nicol]

"Alan has always felt that I over-rate this poem, and he might be right." --Tim

I beg to differ. As you know, Tim, but others may not, I wrote about this poem at length in an essay published in The Edge City Review 17. It is a skillfully crafted sonnet, an innovative use of the form. As for being "too Murphyesque" in its diction, is that possible? No one who's heard Murphy read could conceive of such a criticism.

[Tim Murphy]

Alf, would you consider cutting, pasting and posting your comments on Unposted, and your comments on that other guy's "sonnet?" Might be the best thing ever written on the Murph.

I am amused that Gerry Cambridge voted after the fact for Hard Winter and Unposted. Balls on the anvil. Note however that he is a sucker for cat poems.

Rhina, if you were to write about anything so technical as your sewing machine, you would make it accessible to all. I retire from the field.