The Day Beth Met Garrison Keillor at LaGuardia International
At first, she thought, leave him be – but that’s
not her style, GK was just standing there,
perplexed grin, eyes marching up and down
the rows in baggage check. The man would read
my poem a few days later on NPR. “Pardon
me, aren’t you Garrison Keillor?” I would
have passed. Interviewed years ago on radio
he had left the mellow persona behind, seemed tense,
unamused. The Lake, in fact, is not Wobegon.
He was (probably using the word incorrectly)
plain; more fairly, distinct, she said. He was
affable, modest even, and cordial. Mid-westerner,
he couldn’t pronounce my name.
James Wright despised Minneapolis. St.Paul
was layered with dirty snow. But it was not
the Twin Cities. It was a young professor
with ambition and love of language, divorced, depressed
and drinking too much.
How is it, plains people
need New York so much, why not Boston,
Montreal? Why are they so friendly,
so fluent, feeding the world off that rich
damp soil? Why don’t they notice the smell of hogs,
why do they love it, really, the cold grim sky,
the lakes full of pike, muskellunge, and bass;
the bush alive with game birds, elegant,
exquisite;
why so impervious to failure?
Parker Towle has published three poetry chapbooks and
has edited an anthology of unpublished poems titled Exquisite Reaction. As
an Associate Editor of The Worcester Review, he has edited special
features on Frank O’Hara and Stanley Kunitz. For twenty-five years he was
on the board of The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and taught at its
summer festival. A member of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, he teaches and
practices neurology in the north country of New Hampshire and Vermont.
Parker’s first full length collection of poems, This Weather Is No
Womb, came out in November, 2007 from Antrim House Books after 40 years
'wrastling'(sic) with the craft.