Bless the bourgeoisie for inventing childhood, the burghers lifting pink slices of beef onto thin plates, the elaborately posed daguerreotypes of the little ones willy-nilly fevers carried off.
Praise the blandishments of American leisure for dirtying childhood’s face with the filth and sweet stuff of choice.
Let kids be kids, no lessons till play has done its work, no sessions in the adulthood gym till everything else ripens, equal rights for the crayon and the pencil, only finger paint and marzipan till at least the age of six.
I believe in the soul—not the Jell-O that sweetens the earnest stew of extended adolescence nor the anorectic marathoner extolled by the priestly class—the soul caressing Whitman in the Brooklyn meadow, the soul pouring its water over Armstrong’s cornet, the soul sopping up suffering, feasting near to death on it, a drop or two of honey in the gall.
I believe in the yo-yo and a manual typewriter on every ergonomic desk and the outlawing of balloon bread and “American cheese.”
What goes around comes around, and right away, karma the action mirrored and the inaction mirrored, karma a single lifted or unlifted finger.
Thy neighbor is thyself.
How could I have done what I did on April 12, 1973, February 2, 1976, and especially October 16, 1978? Somebody ended up on a gurney outside an examining room in Blanchard, Michigan for that one.
Everyone’s secret name is Job.
If you never saw Steve Nestler run, you never saw running.
If you never lay in a Boy Scout tent with water lapping the tip of your nose, you never knew wet.
If you never heard Michael Mingin sob for his mother that night, you never heard sobbing.
If the boulder gets rolled away from the tomb, I did it, we each do it, and if not, He rotted and rots in there.
ISBN 1-59661-032-8
20 pages/$9
In Time to Get Some Things Straight, John Repp delights in the exactitude of earthly pleasure, the precision of mystery. His odes are chock-full, bristling, glistening with vivid images. Concise, elegant, ecstatic, these poems travel far and wide, the strangeness of the journey emanating from within. John Repp indeed sets us straight: the most foreign, exotic places lie within ourselves.
—Denise Duhamel
author of Two and Two
A native of southern New Jersey who currently lives near the bluffs overlooking Presque Isle Bay, John Repp is the author of Thirst Like This (University of Missouri Press, 1990), The Fertile Crescent (Cherry Grove Collections, 2004), Gratitude (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005), and six limited-edition chapbooks, including The Meaning of Rock and Roll and The Old West (and Other Tales), both published by March Street Press. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and Residency Fellowships at Yaddo, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and Fundación Valparáiso, he teaches writing and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, works in the Arts-in-Education Program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, with his wife, the potter Katherine Knupp, and their son, Dylan.
From the Georgia Review:
In Time to Get Some Things Straight, John Repp stresses sound more than most contemporary poets. Sometimes he oopmahs like Dylan Thomas at his most stressed ("no fireflies, sphagnum moss,/caresses, tire swings, road-runners in Corpus Christi,/fish tacos in Temecula, sleepless lust in Bonnyrig--" but generally Repp's flamboyance holds the reader's interest with sonorous rhythms. He pumps the language hard and has an impressive working vocabulary, but his drifting intellect sometimes approaches the artificial. Still, it is a rare pleasure to bounce along through Repp's lines, fun to track his active brain to see if he can tap dance the whole poem off, as in "Ur." Kneading a dog's belly, he winds up with
Wind? Habbit? Effort? Microbe-spawnedAnyone who can bring Johnny Mize, Zeno, Flipper, Carole Lombard, and lunch hour together in lines to wind up a poem about ancient Babylon is at least having fun.
micro-weather? Johnny Mize. Zeno. Fun fun fun till her daddy
blows Flipper away. In sum: The pine-nut Ireland mind Carole Lombards,
Kikmets the tide, drinks the hot-pepper mudflats at low flak jacket.
Lunch is done. Work is work in Ur.