Jerry Wemple (00:00)
He was a joke to us. We were jerks to him. And so this book actually started out as an attempt to apologize, to create this life out of the character Artemis and try to explain that there's always something more. You see X, but there's a whole backstory that you probably don't know anything about.

David J. Bauman (00:17)
Mm-hmm.

In Three Poems (00:21)
Welcome to In Three Poems, where we get to know today's poets, three poems at a time. We read a couple of poems by our guests and hear a little bit about the poems and poets who inspire and resonate with them. Along the way, we often find that the poems talk among themselves and make connections we didn't anticipate. I'm David J. Bauman. Thank you for joining us.

David J. Bauman (00:46)
I'm here with Jerry Wemple welcome to the podcast, Jerry. Thanks for coming along.

Jerry Wemple (00:50)
Thanks for inviting me, it's great to join you.

David J. Bauman (00:53)
the way this works is there are three poems that we're going to read and talk about

I get to read the first one and that's part of the fun. The first two by you, the third one a poet other than you and you chose a favorite of mine by Frank O'Hara for today. So do you mind if I just start right off with a poem by you? It's from Artemis and Ark, the Ridge and Valley poems, not your most recent, but I think the one before your most recent.

Jerry Wemple (01:17)
Yes.

David J. Bauman (01:19)
And this one is called a flower rests.

Daisy rose later in the morning each day until she barely rose at all. Ark was left to get his own breakfast. Peanut butter smeared on doughy bread, a pale apple in a paper bag to take for school lunch. He would shuffle down the slate sidewalks parallel to the river street, doing his best to slow time and the inevitable. After school, the return trip home and

Sometimes they're deposited on the couch in front of a blurred television, his mother like a monument to a forgotten whatever. Sometimes she would cook supper and sometimes not. And sometimes the old neighbor woman would stop by and say, mind if I borrow you boy for a while and then sit him at her kitchen table and stuff him full of greasy hamburger and potatoes. And sometimes

Apple pie that was not too bad.

I love that piece.

that's coming from your book, Artemis and Ark, Tell me a little bit about where the idea for that book came from.

Jerry Wemple (02:34)
Wow. Well, it's a very specific story. Actually, was reading, sometimes I go online and read the local newspaper, the Sunbury Daily Item, because, you know, I graduated high school from Shikellamy and have long term ties to Sunbury. And I saw an obituary of a man who, like when we were high school kids, we used to mock. used to, he

David J. Bauman (02:35)
That's a big question. I know.

huh.

Mm.

Jerry Wemple (03:00)
obviously had some kind of mental affliction and he was one of these people who would wander around town and you could tell he wasn't quite right and kids would often tease him. I don't remember myself personally teasing him, but I remember tolerating it, like being in a car when other people did and never saying, that's not really what we should do. Right. But so sure. And so in that way I was joining in. But I saw this guy and then I saw or I saw this obituary and I'm like,

this guy had a whole life. He was a joke to us. We were jerks to him. And so this book actually started out as an attempt to apologize, to create this life out of the character Artemis and try to explain that there's always something more. You see X, but there's a whole backstory that you probably don't know anything about. And life is

David J. Bauman (03:49)
Mm-hmm.

Jerry Wemple (03:54)
Even for everybody, life is much more complex than we realize. You could talk to almost anybody and they would have a story. They would probably have many stories.

David J. Bauman (03:59)
Absolutely.

And

the people that think they know you, there's a whole lot about you they don't know. And maybe even things about yourself you don't know.

Jerry Wemple (04:10)
Yeah!

David J. Bauman (04:12)
it sets you up in a way. And I think it's the it's the voice that if this was done in somebody else's poem, it wouldn't work. But when you say like a monument to a forgotten whatever that that that just sets it up that we're talking about a young man here.

And the whole view of how he sees this, like, well, yeah, moms, this is the situation again. She's crashed out, but the neighbor lady will feed me. And of course, walking along the River Street parallel, sidewalks parallel to the River Street. And of course, that has me thinking of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, along the Susquehanna, which I am assuming is where this is set, but it could be anywhere.

Jerry Wemple (04:50)
There's a lot of river streets in central, along the river, but it's not unlike, let's say it's not unlike Sunbury, right? Cause there's this whole kind of things don't, you know, there's not a one-on-one correlation.

David J. Bauman (04:52)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, one of those

Exactly. Yeah. I wrote a Pennsylvania small town poem that was accepted in an Indiana small town literary magazine because the same it fit, you know, from that from that era and that time. And so there's something cool about that that people maybe can relate to.

Jerry Wemple (05:12)
Heh.

David J. Bauman (05:21)
Daisy in that title, a flower rests.

I think initially when I was reading it, I was starting to think of the old lady next door as Daisy. And I realized, no, no, that's not Daisy resting is the mom crashed out on the sofa, maybe like she does a lot of days in her life. And I think a lot of people can relate to that sort of growing up, whether it's a small town thing or not, but the Sunbury.

Small town, rough upbringing reminds me a lot of, I think it was your first book, You Can See It From Here, and I remember you talking about the title of that one time. What was the original phrase that's from?

Jerry Wemple (05:54)
Mm-hmm.

There's an old phrase that says, this may not be the end of the world, but you can see.

David J. Bauman (06:07)
but you can

see it from here. Yes.

but how would you say it changes from those early works to books like this one?

Jerry Wemple (06:15)
Well, this one was really about telling a story. I kind of give myself a different assignment for each book. It's not like I'm so prolific. only right now only have four full collections and a couple of chapbooks, but in Artemis and Ark, all the lines had to be 10 syllables because there was a pacing, both Artemis and Ark

walk all over town, right? That's their primary. And then later on, Art gets a motorcycle, but he still walks a lot. And so you can feel that rhythm, that pacing, a back and forth because they're always kind of just, yeah, just going back and forth and all over town. and again, I initially thought about this man who, you know, we, we made fun of as high school kids and probably a

couple of, a generation or two of young, mostly young, stupid men made fun of this guy. And then I'm like, this isn't the end. Like I, like I had him progress and things happen to him. And I'm like, this isn't the end of this story. And that's where Ark came from. And so then I told his story.

David J. Bauman (07:08)
Hahaha

Mm-hmm.

Jerry Wemple (07:25)
But again, I started off with this particular idea and then it kind of grew. Because I have a chapbook called The Artemis Poems. That's just those.

David J. Bauman (07:33)
Yeah, yeah. And that's, I forgot, I started to ask you this question and I dropped it somewhere because I got caught up in the poem. But I was thinking when I was looking up, what's the connection between Artemis and Ark? What was in the back of Jerry Wemple's mind? And, you know, if you try to Google it, you're going to find some card game somewhere and stuff that's nothing about these two. But.

But one of the things I got to thinking of, thought, what if Ark is short for Archimedes? And maybe then you've got, you know, the mathematician, the scientists, but then over here, you've got Artemis and you've got, you know, the mythological kind of thing going on. And I thought, I'm probably thinking way too much. But it's interesting where your brain goes when you start to read these poems. And I think it's because

Jerry Wemple (08:15)
Yeah.

David J. Bauman (08:18)
what we write as the poet is part of it, but then what you bring to it is another part of it that is beyond our control as the writers.

Jerry Wemple (08:26)
Yeah, Artemis is relating of the woods, right? And he kind of, you know, in early poems, he's just, he wakes up in the woods, right? And then his story unfolds. But Ark is just like, sort of like this biblical mythology of just a vessel. What was the Ark? A vessel that contained things, And so he becomes this kind of

David J. Bauman (08:30)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jerry Wemple (08:49)
vessel of trying, you know, of knowledge and then he's trying to figure out what should he do. He's seeking knowledge and when he finds it he's like, well, what do do with this knowledge?

David J. Bauman (08:54)
and a traveler.

Yeah. And so again there, you're kind of dealing with themes of the end of the world, if you've got the arc imagery in there, which fits with the poem, with him driving off to who knows where. Speaking of Pennsylvania stuff though, I should bring up the Keystone Anthology that you and Marjorie Maddox are the editors of, and you've been doing a marvelous job traveling around the state, and even outside of the state, I got to be...

Jerry Wemple (09:04)
it

David J. Bauman (09:24)
in Youngstown at let Youngstown Ohio and be part of a reading there. That was fun to explain to people like, yeah, I'm going to Ohio to read with a bunch of Pennsylvania poets about a book of Pennsylvania poems. And they said, what? It went really well, though. It beautiful.

Jerry Wemple (09:40)
Yeah, I was sorry to miss that. was like just there was something else going on and I couldn't make that one.

David J. Bauman (09:44)
My son Micah and I full disclosure have have a poem in there as well. Yeah, for those who don't know about the Keystone anthology and its predecessor Commonwealth and tell us a little bit about that

Jerry Wemple (09:50)
We are.

Sure. So both of those books came out from Penn State Press. The most recent one, Keystone Poetry, is an anthology of contemporary poets who've written poems about Pennsylvania. Pretty plain, but they're all organized by a geographical region. So you could start off in South Philly and end up on the docks of Erie.

David J. Bauman (10:18)
Yeah.

That's one of the really cool things about the book. And it was fun being at some of those readings and hearing people from Pittsburgh, you know, reading their section, which is very different from, you know, maybe one of our central Pennsylvania abandoned places poems, you know, you're in the streets of downtown Pittsburgh in the next, the next second and how all that kind of blends together because sometimes Pennsylvania feels like many places, you know, you've been part of the Appalachian, an Appalachian writers group, at least one.

So I've explained to people that where we are particularly is basically Northern Appalachia. But that doesn't fit when you're looking at say Philadelphia

Jerry Wemple (10:57)
It's just the southeast corner of Pennsylvania that is not considered northern Appalachia. So 56 of the Pennsylvania's 67 counties are.

David J. Bauman (11:08)
okay.

So I guess what those ridges, yeah, they do go up into the Wilkes-Barre area, don't they? It feels like you're in Connecticut and sometimes up there, but yeah, those ridges are still going that direction.

Jerry Wemple (11:13)
yeah, so yeah.

So yeah, so it's, and then the lower, that southern tier of New York state is considered part of it as well. So when you get up towards, what are those towns? Elmira and out west. ⁓ Yeah. All those towns are part of it. So yeah, it's, Pennsylvania has varied, but there are certain things that kind of hold us together and certain things that sort of take us.

David J. Bauman (11:28)
Yeah. Corning and. Yeah.

Yeah, because I think

there's also a rust belt crossover there as well from whether it's the mining, you know, up in Northeast Pennsylvania to the steel mills down in Southwest Pennsylvania. There's that, gosh, paper mills and whatnot throughout the state. ⁓

My dad, we grew up, my dad worked for Piper Aircraft as a tool and die worker there, you know, so there's a lot of that that ties it all together as well.

Jerry Wemple (12:05)
yeah, we've been having great luck with, think we've done about 16 events. We just did an event last weekend, Marjorie and I and some other folks down in Harrisburg, Sunday night. have some more. We just got an email for somebody who said, hey, could you come up to Troy later on in the spring? So we still have several events scheduled. But this book has 181 poems by 182 poets.

David J. Bauman (12:15)
Yeah.

Awesome.

Jerry Wemple (12:34)
We have one father son duo. And it's just, it was just been a delight to get such great reception for the book and being able to travel around and do some in-person. And we've done a few virtual. And if anybody would like to check out either some of the local or virtual readings, if you go to the Penn State Press website and

David J. Bauman (12:35)
Yeah, I wonder who that is, yeah.

Jerry Wemple (12:57)
look at our book, there's a tab there where you can see all the upcoming readings. And I know that there's next week month, the next couple of months, there's a couple of virtual readings, so anybody could join those. But then there's also some some in person readings at different different parts of the state, like, I know we're to be in Troy, probably, but we're also going to be in Gettysburg. thank you.

David J. Bauman (12:59)
Mm-hmm.

I

Yeah. So I will put links to those. I'll put links to that down in the

show notes that people can look at too. Or if you're watching on YouTube, I'll have it in the YouTube description there too. Well, before we look at the next poem, which is from your more recent book, tell us a little bit about since we were just talking so much about rivers and ridges and such, you have a book, Pennsylvania book of essays as well. Ridges.

rivers, ridges and valleys.

Jerry Wemple (13:43)
Yes, I, ⁓ yeah, both of those books came out last May or last spring. I was editing both at the same time. So that was fun while I'm teaching full-time, right? So like, this weekend I'll proofread 180 pages and grade papers. So, ⁓ but it was a delight. And that originally, the idea for that book came about because I

David J. Bauman (13:45)
And that's relatively recent.

You

What are you doing on your time off, yeah?

Jerry Wemple (14:10)
went to a conference and I was chair of the conference and I solicited work, creative work about rural Pennsylvania. I wanted to, you know, just hear what people had to say. And then, you know, somebody contacted me and we started, I started working on this collection and that publisher didn't work out, but there's another publisher, oddly called Sunbury Press, but it's not based in Sunbury. And they have an imprint called Catamount, which is focused on

writing about Northern Appalachia. And so this book fit. And so I have 27 essays and again, a variety of voices, a variety of approaches. There's one of the best essays is by this, by a woman named Lilla Skignard who wrote about how she took up deer hunting to connect with her high school aged son who

David J. Bauman (14:40)
okay.

Wow.

Jerry Wemple (15:02)
you know, how boys like sometimes want to slip away from the family as they're, you know, feeling their oats, feeling like, you know, they want to become their own person. And she was trying to figure out how to connect with him. And so she took up deer hunting because he was interested in that. And that's like, I mean, she was an adult woman. She never went deer hunting before. And so this was, and it's a really great essay about, you know, basically about humanity, about connecting with your kids and how you stay connected with them.

There's a couple of essays by people from, who are not originally from Pennsylvania, but from the Philippines or China, but how they've grown to love rural Pennsylvania. And, you know, it's not all, you know, sometimes you feel like you're othered in small towns, but, but sometimes you also feel welcome and you love the landscape. So it's, there's all kinds of writing, interesting writing those essays. And that book.

David J. Bauman (15:39)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry Wemple (15:55)
has been nominated for the, it's one of three finalists for the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia Book of the Year. So we'll find out in early March how we fared, but I mean, just to get that far in the process is great.

David J. Bauman (16:10)
Fantastic.

Let's hear you read a poem from We Always Wondered What Became of You. And do you want to you want to set that up with telling us about the book first or do you want to just jump into the poem?

Jerry Wemple (16:20)
I'll tell you a little bit about the book. So that title comes from, well, it's kind of a convoluted story, but I was adopted, but I found out who my birth family was, least my birth mother growing up. essentially, my birth mother put me in an orphanage with the understanding that her sister would adopt me, but they wouldn't

revealed this to me, but secrets always, they don't work. But my birth mother would never tell me who my father was. And it was pretty clear if you, you know, for those of you who don't have a visual, but it would be pretty clear that I am at least partially of African-American descent, right? And everybody else in my family is kind of Pennsylvania German. So yeah.

David J. Bauman (16:42)
Yeah.

Right. They don't stay.

Mm.

Yeah.

So speaking of feeling othered, you know, in small town Pennsylvania.

Jerry Wemple (17:08)
there's something going on there. Yeah.

So, eventually through this thing called science, through DNA, I matched with this black woman and I'm like, aha, you know, and on the ancestry and I'm like, so I find out that, yeah, her uncle was most likely my father. And I go down to South Carolina to a family reunion.

David J. Bauman (17:17)
Mm.

Jerry Wemple (17:34)
and meet all my African American family. My birth father had already passed. I didn't meet him, but I met a lot of cousins and his brother and aunts. And one of the first things somebody told me on elderly aunt said, we always wondered what became of you. And so that's where that title comes from. So it was kind of interesting.

It was interesting to meet them and I still am in contact with some of them. That happened right before COVID, so then, you know, was sort of like not being able to visit people for a while. sometimes I connect with a few of them in person. But I'll read this poem that is a kind of a younger me. And it's called Colored. When you are five, you have two recordings that you like to play.

David J. Bauman (18:02)
Okay.

Right.

Jerry Wemple (18:25)
Your record player looks like a suitcase, the kind of case you might see unloaded from a train in a black and white movie. One record is a 45 by Ricky Nelson, the wonderkin of American television who became a real pop star. You still remember the song's refrain, stood up brokenhearted again. It had an upbeat tempo, a lilting rockabilly croon.

The other was a comedy LP by a black comedian. The comedian was popular, sometimes appeared on TV too, was known for his clean style. You remember a lot of his jokes, the needle forcing scratchy sounds into the air, remnants that still fade in and out of range, never quite dissipate. Of course, the comedian wasn't called black back then.

Most folks even around you said colored, as in the reason I don't like King is because he stirs them colored up too much. You never saw many black folks in those days. Still, you had enough sense to know that you did not know nearly enough. On summer Saturday evenings, your godparents, the Joneses, took you to the Selinsgrove dirt track car races. You ate french fries sprinkled with salt and vinegar.

like the shiny sprint cars that often slid into the hay bales on the corners, sometimes flipping a time or two before coming to rest. The driver's team would rush over, grab the roll bars, right the car, watch it zip off again. When you had to use the restroom, Mr. Jones always gave you a nickel to tip the attendants, old black men who chewed unlit cigars.

swung a stringy mop across the dank chipped cement floor, used a long-handled brush on the urinals and toilets. You dropped the coin in the dull tin box set up on a wooden stool. Often you'd catch one of the attendants staring and you think he was trying to look into you to decipher your story. You were ashamed to look back because you did not yet have a story to share. Your tawny skin and black

curled hair was a bafflement in this river and woods wilderness. It was the same a year or two later when you'd see black folks get off a bus. Migrant workers who picked tomatoes for the cannery across the river come to town for a weekly shopping trip. They might catch a glimpse of you half a block down the street, walking with your blonde haired cousin. A woman would give you a pondering glance

but the kids would have to be herded away into the grocery or the drugst. The Saturday morning after King was killed, your uncles were in the kitchen of your grandmother's house playing cards. There were always comings and goings there, relatives stopping in for coffee and pie, old friends who'd sit for a while with cigarettes and gossip. You, who lived the next block over, had just come inside for a glass of water.

when you overheard one of the uncles say King got what he deserved. Coloreds will ride all summer now, I guess. That's what they do. When school ends that year, you are passed into the third grade. A couple of weeks later, your mother and stepfather and you are on a car trip vacation. The trip is to be a circuit heading out from central Pennsylvania to DC, then Ocean City, Maryland, then the Lews Ferry,

to New Jersey, Atlantic City, and home. Your stepfather who sports a crew cut 15 years out of style is leery of Washington, thinks maybe the coloreds or war-pressed protesters will cause trouble there. Your mother wins out saying she wants you to see the Smithsonian museums. Near Baltimore, low on gas,

Your stepfather gets off the highway and pulls into a station on the edge of the West Side ghetto. The black attendant, perhaps hoping for a tip, toms in with yassers and rightaways, then eyeballs you in the backseat like you are a piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit no matter where it's tried. That evening, you stay at a Holiday Inn, a top tier place when the chains were just coming on. The motel has an outdoor pool,

You ask your mother if you can go for a swim. She says, OK, says maybe she'll come down in a bit. You change, walk down two flights of outdoor stairs. At the pool, you don't see any colored people at all. You put your towel on the chair, your Woolworth foam flip flops beside it. You enter the water by the stairs, grasping the shiny metal railing that is still warm from the sun.

You wade in waist high, then to your chest. You know you are not a good swimmer, but you keep moving toward the deep end.

David J. Bauman (23:46)
Hmm. You have a way with endings, Jerry.

always some sort of traveling there off to the deep end or into the dark. Gosh, and that poem makes me think too of, I think your piece from the Keystone Anthology was called Wilkes-Barre. Yeah, and it could be.

Jerry Wemple (24:04)
Yes.

Which is also

in this book. So. Yeah.

David J. Bauman (24:10)
okay, yes it is. Yeah, it's in that

book. And that one, I guess the same young man years later, who's being othered in, I guess the third largest populated area of the state and not realizing it, know, first the difficulty of finding an apartment.

I guess I don't want to turn it into in four poems. All have you read it? I am thinking though of doing a feature of doing a feature where we could call it the fourth poem. So maybe sometime we can do a little, you read that separately and something to look forward to.

that's

difficult.

difficult look into,

where things have maybe changed a bit over time, but not enough as well.

Jerry Wemple (24:48)
Yeah, well, I won't even go into the contemporary scene in America.

David J. Bauman (24:54)
⁓

well, feel free to. I've I've I've made no bones about my feelings on these things as well, you know, and whether it's discrimination, you know, over the color of your skin or who you're in, who you who you live with, who you love. It's a scary place this America.

Jerry Wemple (24:59)
Yeah.

David J. Bauman (25:10)
it's a democracy, there are things that we do not approve of and we're doing our best to stop it, but wow, that's a scary place. So.

from these places here in Pennsylvania, your choice of the third poem by another poet makes a leap into a different time in a whole different place, but not maybe that far. We mentioned earlier when we talk about going to the city.

Actually, in Lock Haven, growing up in the little tiny town of Lock Haven, when my mom talked about going to the city, she meant we're driving to Williamsport 30 miles away. That's how rural we were. But most people, when they say going to the city, they're talking about New York. And so you chose a poem from one of the New York poets, museum curator and poet.

Jerry Wemple (25:59)
Yeah, yeah, this is a poem that I came upon in high school. I was born in Pennsylvania, but from when I was nine to 16, I lived in southwest Florida, much, different than central Pennsylvania. And I often mention that the whole time I lived in Florida, I felt like I was in exile. It's like I need to be back in Pennsylvania. ⁓

David J. Bauman (26:20)
Mm.

Jerry Wemple (26:21)
I only recently, like in the past 10 years, found out that, some of my relatives have been in Pennsylvania since like the 1730s. And, you know, that, like my great grandparents, I remember them when I was really little and they spoke German to one another. So I thought that they were more recent immigrants, but it turns out my great grandfather's family

David J. Bauman (26:28)
Wow. Longer than mine. Longer than mine.

Jerry Wemple (26:43)
No, they've been here since 1730. And talking to other people, found out, no, the Germans often kept their language, especially the ones who were been here for a long time, just always spoke German in their community.

David J. Bauman (26:55)
So let's jump to New York City.

Jerry Wemple (26:57)
Yeah, yeah, I just, this poem, like I knew that Frank O'Hara was gay, right? I somehow I discovered or came upon a copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, back in the day, because that book's been around forever, I think. And I found this poem and I really liked it. And, you know, and I'm like, well,

Yeah, this guy, this poem, the narrator seems kind of disconnected to the world. You know? Even the, you know, he's shopping for gifts for friends and it just bores him.

David J. Bauman (27:33)
It's

one of those, it's one of his, as he called them, his I do this, I do that poems.

Jerry Wemple (27:39)
Yeah, but

at the same time, the construction of it is so great because it's like you're just wandering through a lunch hour in New York, right? Perhaps. And it's like it's one utterance. I was doing this, like you said. then, but then there's bam, something at the end gets him and he connects with humanity, right? With others.

Because even at the beginning he's like, I'm gonna get on the train. I don't know the people who will feed me like whatever right is

David J. Bauman (28:09)
And he

takes a moment in one of the shops to see what the poets in Ghana are doing, I think is the line.

Jerry Wemple (28:14)
Yeah,

so yeah.

David J. Bauman (28:17)
And this was from,

Jerry Wemple (28:18)
it was, I think originally printed in the lunch poems. The Ferlinghetti print that, you know, it a little square book. Yeah, a little orange book about four by four or something like that with these small poems that supposedly O'Hara would stop by on his lunch hour. And there were typewriters, those ancient relics that you could try out. So he would like type a draft.

David J. Bauman (28:21)
Yeah, that's what it is.

Little Orange Book, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nice. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Jerry Wemple (28:47)
on his lunch break, right? Yeah, that's

what he was supposedly doing is like he, they would have a sheet of paper in and you could try out the new electric typewriter or something. So he would just type a little draft and then continue on with this little, but he would do that every day all summer long. That's why they're called the lunch poems.

David J. Bauman (28:57)
That's fantastic.

Yeah, wow, let's see, I learned something there.

Jerry Wemple (29:06)
All right. So this is the day Lady died by Frank O'Hara. It is 1220 in New York, a Friday, three days after Bastille Day. Yes, it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 419 in East Hampton at 715 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me. I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun.

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly New World writing to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days. I go on to the bank and miss Stillwagon, first name Linda I once heard, doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life. And in the Golden Griffith, I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bernard. Although I didn't think of Hesiod translated by Richard Latimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon

or Les Nègres of Genet but I don't. I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness And for Mike, I stroll into the Park Lane Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega. And then I go back from where I came to Sixth Avenue and the Tobacconist at the Ziegfeld Theater and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes and a New York Post with her face on it.

And I am sweating a lot by now thinking of leaning on the john door at the Five Spot while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.

David J. Bauman (30:44)
Hmm.

You talk about bringing you up short there into humanity at the end. Yeah. Frank's.

Jerry Wemple (30:53)
Yeah,

remember reading that poem. You're just kind of really getting into it at age 16, 17. And I'm like, it's just that moment in time and then it just sort of smacks you. Because he's just doing ordinary things. it's such a time stamp because he even tells you it's 1959. I think he published it in like 1963, 1964 or somewhere around there.

You know, like, who goes to get a shoeshine? Do you know anybody who would wear that? Right? Yeah, and so there's that ordinariness of the time and place.

David J. Bauman (31:22)
It definitely places it at a time and place.

Yeah. So that could be, I mean, I guess that could be part of the beginning influences of Jerry Wemple centering on a lot of place poems and

Jerry Wemple (31:41)
Yeah, I think I

was attracted to those and I'm, you know, in the same way that this poem I think is creating a mythology of New York. You know, I've worked on trying to create a mythology of small town Pennsylvania.

David J. Bauman (31:54)
Absolutely. I keep thinking of it's one of the poems that I had thought about reading,

was about a funeral in Pennsylvania. That's what it was and there's a line there in that poem that these men here wear suits on two occasions and no one nobody. Yeah, and nobody is getting married here today or no one's getting married here today forgive me for butchering the lines from memory. But that tells you so much about the place and the people.

Jerry Wemple (32:02)
⁓ April Funeral in Pennsylvania, yeah.

Yeah, and here only wear suits on two occasions.

David J. Bauman (32:25)
in the poem in so few words, which I think good poetry does.

Jerry Wemple (32:31)
Yeah, hopefully.

David J. Bauman (32:32)
So what else do you want to tell us about before we have to say goodbye as far as what you're working on now and what's coming up next?

Jerry Wemple (32:41)
Well, right now, literally right before you and I connected here electronically a little bit ago, I am working on a sort of selected, uncollected poems. So from my four full length collections, I culled some poems and sort of put those together. But I also have all these, what I call orphan poems, right? The poems that

David J. Bauman (32:52)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Jerry Wemple (33:05)
ever made it into a collection because they just didn't fit. I think some of them have been published in journals, but some of them haven't. And so I'm like, I'm going to put those in also

so I, well, the poems that are divided by which book that they've been in, but what's been fun is going back and editing the poems and going, you know, not wholesale, but like tweaking a couple of words here and there. One poem, I changed the title. I'm like, this is a stupid title. And I changed the title.

David J. Bauman (33:33)
That's a great reason to do it right there.

Jerry Wemple (33:35)
Yeah,

I can do better. Because that's when you're publishing. That's what you always think. It's like, ⁓ as soon as it gets published, should have done it. So this is my like, yeah, now I'm going to do this.

David J. Bauman (33:46)
Right.

Yeah, there are definitely published poems like that that I wish I could change. And I guess I'll have to do that in the future.

You write beautiful poetry, man. And I really appreciate you being here. And I love this little trip through from Pennsylvania to New York hearing about you being.

a young man and reading this New York City poem and how those poems connect to these place poems in Pennsylvania. And the mythology you said of New York as well as some of the mythologies you've created. I think in each one of your collections, there's a similar voice, but each one is like a new creation, a new thing going on. And it's always fun to see what you have out next.

Jerry Wemple (34:24)
Thanks, good to join you.

David J. Bauman (34:25)
Well, thanks for being here, Jerry. I really appreciate your time and ⁓ we'll see you again soon.

Jerry Wemple (34:31)
Okay, bye bye.

In Three Poems (34:33)
The Day Lady Died by Frank O'Hara was published in Lunch Poems by City Lights Books in 1964 and it was read here by permission thanks to Frederick T. Courtright. The works of Jerry Wemple, his collections and the anthologies we talked about will all be linked to in the show notes including how to get your own copies. And in upcoming episodes we'll talk with Jean de Brau, Philip F. Clark, Monica Prince,

Katie Manning, and many more poets. If you do enjoy these episodes, please share them with other poetry lovers in your life. And thank you for the kind and encouraging words you've been sending along on Facebook, BlueSky and Instagram. I'm David J. Bauman, and this has been In Three Poems.