Poetry From the Heart
I AM NOT a poet, but I took English 40 (Advanced Creative Writing) from Richard Eberhart '26.1 was scared, but I got tips from Gemma Lockhart '79 (who became, among other things, a documentary filmmaker) and Paula Sharp '79 (novelist and public defender). I also went to Eberhart himself. He said, "Write poetry from your heart.' And he told me how he once wrote a poem after he saw a squirrel run in front of his car. He said he wondered what the squirrel was thinking, and then he wrote "a little poem. See, it was something that small.
I plugged away that term. One.poem I wrote (about McDonald's and Good News razors it went something like "Good News! Plastic decadence! 25 cents!") was read by one of the few countercultural intellectuals at a Tabard poetry reading. I was pretty proud of that. And it led me to write lots of parody poems in the Jacko. One of them, a takeoff on Paula's fabulous poetry, included the line, "Tennis balls: suns of frosty innocence."
I wrote some OK things in that class. The funny thing is, I've never written a poem—parody or otherwise—worth a damn thing since. Eberhart was an incredible writing teacher. He was so kind and soothing and gentle. And, oh yes, I did eventually find out that his "little" squirrel poem, "On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, is one of the acknowledged classics of modern American poetry.
Eberbart: What did the squirrel think?
