Get Out of Town

Thanks to Jim Barnes ~ poet, teacher & friend
for helping me track down
this long-lost poem
by National Treasure
David Russell Wagoner
(June 5, 1926 - December 18, 2021)

Advice from a poet:
"Get out of town."

Wagoner graduated from highschool in 1944. "Valedictory to Standard Oil" was written 22 years later (published in 1966), and "Letter to An Old Poet" an additional 47 years later (2013). In the early poem, he thinks of those long-ago classmates, and in the later one he recalls a helpful English teacher and a grammar lesson from those schooldays in Whiting, Indiana. Thanks to Miss Clippinger, he realizes that his life task without ceasing is to consider every possibiity and maximize his options:

Letter To An Old Poet

~Inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

Do you still believe, old man, you are a poet?
If so, what you must do is so obvious,
you shouldn’t need reminding. You should keep trying
to do whatever you haven’t done or start
doing again what you didn’t manage to do
right in the first place. You should stay alive
as often as possible and keep yourself open
to anything out of place and everything
with nowhere else to go, to carry what’s left
of your voice out and beyond, into, over,
and under, past, within, outside, between,
among, across, along, and up and around
and to be beside yourself when the spirit moves you
and to thank Miss Clippinger for your prepositions.

David Wagoner (1926 - 2021)

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more by David Wagoner