The other night, after five hours of painting at our new offices at Champlain Mill, I headed to my car and saw a young man waiting for a bus. It was cold and, given the hour, I figured it would be a while before the bus arrived. John Canning, our board chair was with me, we said our goodbyes and then I walked over to the young man.
"Where you headed?"
"Downtown, Burlington."
"Want a ride?"
Turns out the young man was returning from his job at a Thai restaurant and was a senior at Champlain College in its Professional Writing Program. Turns out he's quite a poet -- was named the college's student poet and edits the school's wonderful anthology "Willard and Maple." I've asked him to mentor and he's interested in interning.... All from an offer of a ride. Here, by the way, is part of a note he sent me:
" I've spent some wandering around youngwritersproject.org, the Young Writers Project website. I have to say, you guys are running an impressive program. I agree that schools do not do enough to encourage students to develop good writing skills, and I think it's great that your program focuses on building a better generation of writers. It's not right that 75% of high school graduates cannot write proficiently. I am very interested in getting myself involved, doing whatever I can to help."
His name, by the way, is Pat Willwerth. A recent poem:
Binary to a Girl I Knew
By Patrick Willwerth
Past midnight
analogue voices still resonate
While the only way to reach you
is digital transmission
0’s and 1’s
ain’t that a bitch...
Baby,
I’d gladly become a zero,
fly over
radio signals
tower to tower
crash through your window
collapse on your floor
but what I’d say
wouldn’t amount to more
than 0’s and 1’s
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Submitted by ggevalt on Thu, 02/19/2009 - 09:53
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