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For the English majors among us

Charles Bickford, senior editor

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If you scratch a carpentry crew you’re bound to uncover an English major. (I know, how else would they make a living?) If you scratched the staff here at FHB, you’d get some tail wagging, but you’d also find former carpenters who are moderately well-read.

However, in spite of my past as a student of English literature, (or maybe because of it) I’ve never been a big fan of poetry. A few poets yes, but mostly no. It could be that I’m just a knucklehead. And anyone who tries to describe the world of carpentry in verse has my sympathy, too. Carpentry itself can be a type of poetry in the hands of certain carpenters, so it’s a tough job to try and describe something that does a pretty good job all on its own. It’s active versus passive, the real beating up on the ideal. I could go on digging this hole, but I’ll cut it short to say that I was reading a post on a forum tangentially related to home building and found a poem that surprised the hell out of me.

To prevent any copyright issues or cross-platform dust-ups, I won’t post it on this site, but you can go here if you want to read it. http://www.robert-morgan.com/poems/sigodlin/

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Comments (3)

gatno writes: not poetry, but just great prose---an essay, "The House Painters of Southern California", by Jack Paris, in The Sun mag., June, 2008. (excellent literary monthly--no ads!!)
Posted: 8:51 pm on May 2nd

Kevini writes: Hey, Chuck, you just need to read the right poets. Check out these poems by a guy named Mark Turpin. They're from a book called Hammer. http://markturpin.net/poems.html
Posted: 6:43 pm on May 1st

rdesigns writes: Nice thoughts, but I'm bound to say, if that's what we today call poetry, then carpenters I know by the dozen are poets. And not just carpenters. Farmers, ranchers, concrete finishers, etc., many of whom seem to be people who work with their hands.

They're people who, while their hands are busy with chores they no longer need to think about, have time to think. When they put their thoughts into words, the words are few and cut, dig or smash to the heart of the matter. That's poetry.

One construction supervisor I knew once said: "I like to hire those country boys because they're so godd****d stupid.
You can give them a job you know is impossible to do, and they're so stupid they'll go out and do it." That's poetry.
Posted: 9:47 am on April 28th

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