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POET LAUREATE?
For Fred Walker, in celebration
of his 33 years at Lincoln-Sudbury
If you can write a poem about
Fred Walker, I told myself, you
can write a poem about anyone,
because this man was efficiency
personified, a spirit inimical to the
very time it takes to write a poem
or the nonlinear flight path of the
poem itself, with its metaphors that
refuse to come to the point and
similes that dance around it, until
I considered the economy of verse,
the concision, the taboo on wasted
words, which led me to ponder if
this man wasn't the bard himself,
thirty years of rearranging the
Dyad Office to find the perfect
form-Excess verbiage out! Wasted
movements be gone!-working
on that room's layout the way poets
tweak their meter or pursue the
perfect rhyme, the way we all should
sleeplessly revise and edit, always
working on a first draft of what could
be, then uploading it all through a tech-
nology with hard, clean edges, the nib
of Shakespeare's quill or the latest G5.
Then add dedication.
February 2, 2007