Friday, July 25, 2008

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.

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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.
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2 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

HAH! Especially when he says, "Moron," I know we're not dealing with an intellectual.

There's a trouble with them, after all.

I never quite worked for a Manny, but there were Minnies...

Mary Lee said...

The voice in this poem comes through crystal clear! Love that!