photograph by Abra Staffin Wiebe, 2009

It is mid-October, I’m late again with my poem releases, but you should forgive me, if only long enough to phone Ring Ring Poetry and hear Ed Bok Lee’s poem, “The Schooner”. Ed’s poem is sad and funny and desperate and hopeful. It is the poem of a dive bar in Minneapolis, of its people who came together and came apart in its desperation. On the surface, it is just the story of a man and the things he saw at a bar, but every moment that threatens to be dark ends in a joke, and every joke’s set up ends feeling sick to one’s stomach. There are allusions to things we heard about in the news, and things that would never have made the news, and one sublime moment where in all the grit and desperation, nature has a way of reminding one how very small the world is, relatively. Don’t take my word for it. Phone (612) 223-POEM, and listen to Ed’s poem a couple of times.