Frank Bidart Reads My Poem

Frank Bidart spent several day at Butler University giving readings, and meeting with students to discuss poetry. He spent three hours with the students in Butler’s new MFA program a week ago and even workshopped some poems written by the MFA students. My poem happened to be one of them. I was floored by the way he read my poem aloud. I had practiced reading the poem all afternoon, thinking that I would have to read it during class. But I didn’t read it. He did. And he put my own reading of the poem to shame. I heard things in the way he read my poem that I didn’t know were even there. Then, he led a classroom discussion of my poem, and again, I learned things about the poem that I did not know.

When I got home that night, I was looking through the copies of my poem returned to me with the comments from my classmates and professor in the workshop, and there was an extra poem with comments on it. It was the copy that Frank Bidart had read. How cool is that?

Later in the week, I was telling my father-in-law about the experience, and I tried to explain to him what it feels like to have Frank Bidart read your poem and give you suggestions on how to improve it. As a retired engineer and VP of sales, this is a world that he is not familiar with. The best metaphor I could come up with is that it’s like having Tiger Woods come out to the driving range and help you with your golf swing, but even that seems to fall short.