POETRY FRIDAY: Summer Job

I found the following poem, Summer Job, at Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Kooser talks about “mentoring" in the blurb he includes along with the poem. Would you have liked to have had a mentor like Manny when you were a teenager working a summer job?


Summer Job
By Richard Hoffman

"The trouble with intellectuals," Manny, my boss,

once told me, "is that they don't know nothing

till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,"

he said, "he gets to middle age—and by the way,

he gets there late; he's trying to be a boy until

he's forty, forty-five, and then you give him five

more years until that craziness peters out, and now

he's almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains

to himself that life is made of time, that time

is what it's all about.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

********************

At Wild Rose Reader, I have a review of J. Patrick Lewis’s newest poetry book for children The World’s Greatest: Poems.

The Poetry Friday Roundup is at A Year of Reading.

********************