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Poem: Other Poets’ Clothes

In this week’s Poet’s Corner, Mike Ladd wears fellow poets’ clothes, literally and figuratively.

Aug 16, 2017, updated Aug 16, 2017

Other Poets’ Clothes

When the Brooklyn sun
was burning my scalp
David Cortes gave me his light tan Stetson –
UNITE! Union of Needle Trades
and Textile Employees the inside label said.
I wore it as we crossed the vaulted
harp-string bridge;
the water glittered below
and the Mexicans played soccer in the park
on the Brooklyn side.

One dusk August Kleinzahler
lent me a green plaid hunting jacket
as the fog came in on a fine San Francisco day,
chilling everything suddenly
like the door left open
on an ocean-sized freezer.
“Keep it”, he said as I left his house.
It fitted me well;
a bit ambiguous, a bit Village People,
some guys sizing me up
on the trolley home to Geary Street.

Now that I think of it, I have
a knapsack belonging to Basho,
a scarf from Robert Frost,
and a fine red umbrella of Nazim Hikmet’s.
Yeats left my grandfather
a pair of black leather brogues
which he handed me down,
but they pinched my feet
so I gave them to the Salvos.

Mike Ladd was the editor of ABC Radio National’s Poetica series for 18 years, and currently works for Radio National’s features and documentary unit. He is a poetry mentor, judge and reviewer, and along with his partner, artist Cathy Brooks, has run projects putting poems on street signs as public art. From age 17, he began reading his poems at Friendly Street, and seeing them appear in local and national publications. His first collection, The Crack in the Crib, published in 1984, has been followed by nine more collections of poetry and prose, the latest being Invisible Mending.

Regarding today’s poem, Ladd says that the contemporary American poets David Cortes and August Kleinzahler really did lend him their clothes while he was in America. As for the great Japanese 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho and the major 20th-century poets Robert Frost, Nazim Hikmet and William Butler Yeats, it has rather been a matter of wearing their influence.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.
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