We wrote deep, semi-insightful soliloquies, content and confirmed in the knowledge that we understood a world we hadn't yet observed, let alone touched.
Most of us gave up poetry when we realized we weren't even Donovan, let alone Paul Simon.
And our generation spawned another great poet of the American idiom, sprung from the Jersey Shore and Highway 9: Bruce Springsteen.
The jury is still out on the poet laureate of the post-Boomers, but another Jersey boy has dusted the Warren County dirt from his shoes and tossed a sports jacket over his jeans and published his fourth book.
BJ Ward teaches in the AFA program in creative writing at Warren County Community College, in itself proof that this bastion of rural Jersey produces more than farmers. A founder of the AFA program, the only one of it's kind in New Jersey and one of only three in the country, Ward has amassed a fan base somewhat smaller than Jon Bon Jovi, but substantial for this tiny corner of the Garden State.
His collegue
at WCCC, Brian Bradford, calls Ward the love child of Springsteen and Emily Dickinson, but, of the New England poets, I hear Frost in his words:And I want to be as precise with my joy today
As allthe poets are with their suffering
I want to tell you how on August 13th, I was happy
even as the world surrounded my breakfast.
Yeah, that ain't Emily.
Perhaps a touch of Auden in My Mother's Last Cigarette, the poem he wrote for Pope John Paul II:
I said give me back my mother's eyes
when your priests, all of them, told her she was married
before God and God was watching
and she must pray harder. And we did.
We did.
I even hear a rhythm of Eliot on occasion, such as the title poem from Gravedigger's Birthday:
I did it all quietly with a sudden solemnity
not for the cat -- I barely knew it --
but for the motion, the first ancestral thing
I had done in years, aware this was traffic
with old gods.
I could be exaggerating, since BJ is a dear friend, but I don't think so.
Bradford says he will win a Pulitzer before too long.
If he doesn't, there is some flaw. Somewhere.
The new book is Jackleg Opera.
Buy it.
