Andrew Calhoun

Poetry Workshop:     

my mother paid me a nickel  
to memorize Yeats' "Song of Wandering Aengus,"  
it's well to learn poems  
before you can understand them,  
because that is how  
the good ones get written.  
you have to love the silence they come from;  
to love the silence more than the words.  
if that's confusing,  
there's this:  
if you were a poet, you wouldn't be here.  
anyone remembers that next week gets a nickel.

—Andrew Calhoun (from Twenty-Four Poems)