When I was back there at Kenyon College the most famous student poet of the day was a guy named Wade “Woody” Newman . To hear the teachers and tastemakers talk you’d think he was poised to take up the Kenyon poet baton from Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, there at the resting place of John Crowe Ransom. Woody was a nice, pleasant chap and all, but I never thought there was that much actual substance to his poetry, even his sonnet cycle on the life of Christ. Subsequently he hasn’t made that much noise on the literary scene, but in our debased world what poet does? He was a good buddy of my late friend Greg Shell and wrote a pretty good letter that was read at the funeral detailing an incredible prophetic dream he had right before Greg’s death. I usually have dreams like that after someone I’m close to dies, but I haven’t, and have had to console myself with the weird appearance on the roof of the car that I drove to Greg’s funeral of a very large preying mantis with an attitude that reminded me of Greg’s. Although his day job is as a corporate headhunter (and god knows what we would have made of THAT in college) Woody’s still rhyming away, and the whole thing inspired me to pick up a book of Woody’s called Poisoned Apples from Pivot Press of Brooklyn, New York. This following couplet caught my eye at once and I got to tell you, Woody, I salute you but this has to go under the category of TOO MUCH INFORMATION:

These are the nipples that shrink from my tongue,

This is the orgasm that will not come.