IT’S A POETRY THING: Reports from the front lines of the life of the weekend poet.

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by DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO | westvirginiaville.substack.com | august 1, 2025

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For those of us who tend towards loquacious prose and who routinely lose control of our runaway, run-on sentences, poetry can be cathartic. Kate Long, my first serious writing coach back in the glory days of The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia’s capital city, fundamentally changed my writing when she kept red-lining the appearance of what she dubbed ‘The Professor’ in my raw copy. This is the guy who won’t shut up and has to make another extended, convoluted point, instead of getting right to the point that I am fumbling about trying to make.

This is exactly why poetry is so curative for me and my Inner Professor. Ezra Pound once defined superior literature in a way that gets to the heart and soul of the best of poetry:

‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’ ~ EZRA POUND

Another way of putting this, as this writer does, is that poetry “is the most concentrated form of verbal expression.” Poetry is such a welcome, utterly necessary thing to me because it also serves as an antidote to the abuses and misuses of language. We all wrestle daily with the endless distractions and confusions of this Information Avalanche Age, when our email in-box feels like a burst sewer pipe gushing torrents of words we can hardly parse or manage.

Then, there are those sewer pipe politicians who spew an endless barrage of verbiage and misinformation, a deluge specifically intended to confuse and muddy the body politic while they chew through the Constitution like termites. (It helps to think of Donald Trump as a perverse performance artist whose obsessive belchings are also distractingly strategic, not just pathological.)

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All that is to say that sometimes for me it comes down to this. On some days in this byzantine modern life, poetry is the only thing that seems to make sense. To that end, please allow me to share some of my own poetic work as a weekend poet. I define weekend poetry as a thing we weekend poets do intermittently—it is hardly our main or even a secondary gig.

And yet writing poetry for weekend versifiers remains a regular, essential, and lifelong endeavor and will continue to be unto the end of our days. And sometimes your work blessedly escapes out into the broader world beyond just you and a floofy cat, snoozing half-on and half-off your keyboard. The following work goes out to that small, but dauntless audience for whom reading poetry—written by full-time poets and weekend poets, alike—is something they will do, too, unto the end of their days.

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POETRY THING No. 1

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Below is a poem that took first place in the Ohio Poetry Association 2025 Ides of March poetry contest and will be printed in the OPA’s 2025 Common Threads anthology. For us weekend poets, it is very weird—and delightful, too, of course—to earn money for writing poems. Yet I feel I must split the hundred-dollar prize with my son, Lucas, who offered the occasion for the poem as I watched him frolic as a boy of about age 7, more than a quarter century ago. This was one early evening at Capon Springs & Farms deep in the West Virginia backcountry, after a meal on a high Appalachian hill at the family resort. (NOTE: The illustration above is an AI-generated image of Saturn, which I toyed further with and colorized.)

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MEAL ON THE HILL

My six-year-old should
have his jacket on by now.
The sun a golden nugget, dropping
in a notch of the Appalachian ridge
to the West.

He breathes with the grass,
sod fills his ears,
the tongue of sunlight
laps him like a cat.
He smells like sand.

That crabapple tree over there
is his older brother.
He chews on moonlight,
deer see him and do not bolt.
The Earth pulses,

his small pink heart rises
with the beat and falls, in time.
He could, if he wanted,
reach out into space
pull off Saturn’s ring

and wear it for a hat.

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POETRY THING No. 2

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One of my favorite sites to which I send my occasional poetry (submitters, pay heed) is spillwords.com, a handsome, well-designed journal that sets up poems attractively with an illustration or photograph. (You can also send along a suggested image when you submit). I’ve had several poems published there, including this latest one below.

I don’t normally feel a poem needs a set up or should be pre-explained—the poem is the point, after all. But this one was inspired by a fascinating 2025 New York Review of Books article titled: ‘CAN THE CHURCH EVOLVE: The big question for Pope Leo XIV is whether he will complete Pope Francis’s mission to make the Catholic Church less tyrannical.’ The church and papacy have always sought—and then wrestled with—the massive earthly power they have long accrued, routinely vying with kings, empires, and feudal lords for control of the world. The NYRB article cites the 2009 book ‘A History of Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, who notes what happened after the fall of the Western Roman Empire:

Frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed. One suspects that capable and energetic men who would previously have entered imperial service, or who had indeed started out as officials in it, now entered the Church as the main career option available to them.

The article goes on to note: “This tension between the Church’s origins as a community of outsiders and its evolution as the inheritor of the Roman Empire’s bureaucratic systems of command and control remains radically unresolved.”

And, so, to paraphrase the Native American mythos depicting the world being borne upon the backs of great turtles all the way down, it’s all white men all the way down when it comes to power in this world. And they often just don a new costume and new trappings in exchange for the old, while going about their same old business. (More power to Pope Leo to alter the paradigm. And, yes, we’re both pale white guys, too)

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SO MANY HELLS

there are so many
hells on earth, we need
no fantastical lake of fire

churned into mind by the ire
of the latest white man to
don ornate red silk and

proclaim you have crossed
his version of ‘God’ and, thus,
are doomed to his version of

doom. But wait, now he has
doffed his white scapular,
for his religion has crashed &

burned again, it no longer
pays the bills as it once did
when he held the keys to its

kingdom. Now, he wears a
suit, a tie, maybe a jaunty red
beret, in his run for earthly power

of a less heavenly sort, but
power all the same and likewise
offering him dominion over all,

the keys, again—to the vault, the
Inner Sanctum, the best view, the
side trip to Paris for the latest

clothes. The balcony from which to
—just like he used to—gaze down at
the masses with a bulky silver icon

on a chain round his reddening,
fattening neck. Now, he signs off
his executions and diktats with a

pen instead of an encyclical,
a different sort of holy writ, but
bloody good just the same.

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POETRY THING No. 3

I have a poet laureate friend whose work I adore. (Oh, okay, it’s West Virginia’s long-time poet laureate Marc Harshman). We weekend poets look on in admiration as world-class poets like Marc and other poetry avatars produce lovely book and chapbook after book and chapbook. (Looking at you, too, John Burroughs, another poet laureate veteran and pal.) So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and design and print a small-run chapbook of my own, courtesy of the fine folks at Dunbar Printing and Graphics in Dunbar, W.Va. (Thanks to multi-disciplinary creative human Colleen Anderson for pointing me their way.)

I will be the first to admit that ‘EPIGRAMMAR’ is an offbeat collection, featuring a series of epigrams and hyper-short poems, a form and discipline that I find liberating and instructive. The concision required to make a decent point in less than 25 or so words is an illuminating writerly challenge. Below is the cover (from one of my marathon doodle-thons), plus a few samples from the 32-page chapbook. There are currently only 50 of them in the world. If interested in one, they are $15 via Venmo; Paypal; check; cash under the table or via three coffeecups at my new Buy Me A Cup of Coffee page.

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HIGHER EDUCATION

My teachers have
begun to die.
No matter.
They live on in
rented rooms
behind my
inner eye.

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TOO MUCH

There is too much to say,
and too much said. In the
monastery stillness, I hear
deeply how much I have
not said. When I have
tried to say it.

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MUSICIAN’S EPIPHANY

I must go soon
and face the music —

Oh, wait.
I am the music.

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LESSON PLAN

Sow the seeds of grief,
they will blossom in their time,
sow seeds of equilibrium
& you will harvest rhyme.

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RIDE WITH WESTVIRGINIAVILLE

If you like what you see here in WestVirginiaVille support this work via my Buy Me a Cup of Coffee page. Use the QR code below or click to: coff.ee/douglasjohnimbrogno

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