Getting To Know You; Getting To Know All About You Poem by Frank Avon

Bios
help us know
people
as people:

so they should consist
of more than just lists
of degrees received,
college teaching positions,
works published,
awards won,
public recognitions,
and all that boredom.

To know is more
than merely connaitre,
when it’s people,
it’s mostly savoir.

And poets are people
(most of them)
(I suppose) .
Their bios
like their clothes
are more than masks;
they disclose
who they are,
unless they’re nudes,
simply posing,
disguising their personalities
in mere dimensions,
lines and curves,
and physical extensions.

So here they are -
all 75 of them
from this year’s
Best American Poetry,
in the words they wear
and the lines they share,

that is,
until I run out of
breath,
ink,
patience,
and the impulse.

I’m using
the book’s bio-notes -
what we know
of the poets from them -
excluding lists
of degrees received,
college teaching positions,
works published,
awards won,
public recognitions,
and all that boredom -
though for some
there’s not much left.

(NB: included are
their names - pure poetry themselves -,
where and when they were born,
their lives,
where they are now,
with the title of their poems
to lead you on) :

Sarah Arvio
(New York,1954)
thirty years in the Village
translation of Frederico Garcia Lorca
translator for UN in NY and Switzerland
(Maryland by the Chesapeake Bay)
“Bodhisattava”

Derrick Austin
(Homestead, Florida,1989)
“Cedars of Lebanon”

Desiree Bailey
(Trinidad and Tobago,1989)
“Retrograde”

Melissa Barrett
(Cleveland, Ohio,1983)
national teaching award from Building Excellent Schools
teaches writing in an urban middle school
lives in a century-old home
(Columbus, Ohio)
“WFM: Allergic to Pine-sol, Am I the Only One”

Mark Bibbins
(Albany, New York,1958)
cofounded LIT magazine
(NYC)
“Swallowed”

Jessamyn Birrer
(Falls Church, Virginia,1975)
an autism advocate
stay-at-home parent
technical writing instructor
(Klamath Falls, Oregon)
“A Scatology”

Chana Bloch
(NYC,1940)
www.persimmons.org, online journal of arts by women over sixty
“The Joins”

Emma Bolden
(Birmingham, Alabama,1980)
nonfiction chapbook, Geography V
“House Is an Enigma”

Dexter L. Booth
(Richmond, Virginia,1986)
(University of Southern California)
“Prayer at 3 a.m.”

Catherine Bowman
(El Paso, Texas, November 26,1957)
lives on a farm
(Bloomington, Indiana)
“Makeshift”

Rachel Briggs
(Syracuse, New York,1984)
associate professor philosophy
(University of Queensland, Australia)
“in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler”

Jericho Brown
(Emory University, Atlanta)
“Homeland”

Rafael Campo
(Dover, New Jersey,1964)
teaches/practices internal medicine
outstanding humanism in medicine
subject of stories on PBS Newshour and CBC Sunday Edition
(Harvard Medical School, Boston)
“DOCTORS LIE / MAY HIDE MISTAKES”

Julie Carr
(Cambridge, Massachusetts,1966)
contranslator of Apollinaire
collaborates with dance artist K.J. Holmes
Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery
(Denver)
“A fourteen-line poem on sex”

Chen Chen
(b. Xiamen, China,1989)
“for I will do/undo what was done/undone to me”

Susanna Childress
(La Mirada, California,1978)
grew up in the near Appalachia of southern Indiana
short fiction and creative nonfiction
music group Ordinary Neighbors
(Hope College, Holland, Michigan)
“Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair”

Yi-Fen Chou
aka Michael Derrick Hudson
(Wabash, Indiana,1963)
nom de plume has been helpful in placing poems
works in genealogy center of a public library
(Fort Wayne, Indiana)
“The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Angry Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve”

OK, OK,
seventeen’s enough,
all the A - B - C ‘s.

You get the point, don’t you?
More poetry in the titles than
in the poems,
in the poets’ names than
in the titles:
alliteration, assonance, consonance,
more trochaic than iambic,
even a couple of amphibrachs
(Melissa, Susanna) ,

not much life in the bios
(one autism advocate,
one in internal medicine,
some music and dance,
farming and philosophy,
eighth-grade English) .

The poet’s life is not a poem,
but it ought to be
revealing prose,
at least as interesting
as a t-shirt,
sneakers,
a purple scarf,
a navy blazer,
a baseball cap,
or woolen cape.

The poem is what the poet says,
not who the poet is;
what the poem says
springs from who the poet is.

Choose:
anonymity
a mask
a birthday suit
or clothes
of bio-prose.