Companion to immediately prior post on this site, “Words of Will the Woodworker”

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Recorded Reading (2:54): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/93co8rtfnuf4wzbnijmqi/The-Writing-of-Words-of-Will-the-Woodworker.mp3?rlkey=zotkxf2hnpj1ctwnu74h2bn3u&dl=0

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The Writing of ‘Words of Will the Woodworker’

For only about a week, this poet lived at a house in a tiny neighborhood sequestered amid the downtown of a city in Mississippi, described in her poem (available by search bar at page bottom), “A Summer Night in Jackson.”

Although her fellow residents at this house ~ native Southerners all ~ could not be said to be of mystical bent, everyone did notice a new shadow which appeared on the living room wall the first night of that week — looking uncannily like the head of a man wearing an old fashioned country cap.

This poet has been channeling all her life, and knew an entity which wanted to speak when she saw one.

“Would you like me to find out who he is, and whether he has a story to tell?” she asked.

“Well, I suppose…” came the answer in a slow Southern drawl, “If he’s going to be here, we should get to know him a little…”

So that evening the poet got out her pen, sat comfortably, and opened herself up in just the same way she does to receive the sonnets she typically composes in well under fifteen minutes’ time.

And wrote.

Until dawn, without stopping at all.

That’s how we’ve come to have the words of Will the Woodworker.

When next she visited the little house in Jackson, the shadow was gone.

Afternotes:

During her travels in the years following that writing, the poet did something one should never do with any original manuscript: lent it out, where it became lost (as later did another 1500 unpublished pages, this time to homelessnese in the days before mobile filing apps).

Twenty five years later came back, in much the same fashion, this poetic version ~ complete, now, with its final verses.

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This poet presently lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.

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