By D. R. James
—after Richard Jones
Then, it was easy to believe
the gentle world to be
sad. While rereading
for class, feeling
the old and scribbling
a few new remarks
in the margins
of thick anthologies, heavy
as brick—
(denying Pope
his idiotic confidence
in the dumb licking
of a gamboling lamb;
seconding Ivan Ilyich
in all his too-late
second-guessings, the
light he could only see
at the bottom
of his suffocating sack;
or granting Beckett’s
every twisted take,
those mad clowns marooned
at the dead ends
of their imaginations)
—I’d think of my students,
strolling across campus
in their innocence
to my classroom,
where, for fifty minutes,
I’d rant and they’d maybe
consider the many things
that couldn’t make us happy.
Qualifications
By D. R. James
The visiting writer, balding dignitary wearing
his Pulitzer on his pullover, was saying
Screw the MFA, since he had never taught
till he was forty and Viet Nam had made
going to Kosovo and Belgrade child’s play.
If you want to be a writer (and, oh, he is
a writer, so much so the State Dept. begs him
and a name-dropped handful of others
to travel as American emissaries to semi-
dangerous but troubled re-building zones), okay,
get your god-damned undergrad, but then go for
some real life—like a couple of nosy years
of the Peace Corps, alternate shifts
in a pickle factory, a full season picking
choke cherries, or working construction
in the cold with rugged regular folks—because
otherwise, you’ll just end up a pencil-necked
English professor, writing who-gives-a-shit
drivel about your seamless, sorry-ass college life.
But then I had to duck out to go teach a class.
D. R. James, a year+ into retirement from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.
