As a young man the poet Goethe, inspired by a trip to Rome, wrote his Roman Elegies. He described holding his lover and tapping out the beats to poems he was composing on her back as she slept.
If that were David Clewell, the newly appointed poet laureate of Missouri, the rhythms of his unique and unforgettable poems on topics as diverse as spontaneous human combustion, Houdini, topless dancers, and small-town heroes, would sprawl across a dozen backs at the least.
Clewell, 55, is a professor of literature at Webster University. He received the two-year appointment as poet laureate back in March. He's the second Missouri poet laureate, following Walter Bargen in the position. He's been working with First Lady Georganne Nixon to shape the position.
"It's still sort of a work in progress and I won't be doing it exactly the way Walter did it. He's Neil Armstrong. I'm Buzz Aldrin here," Clewell joked. "There is a minimum of six appearances a year I need to make. I'm planning on going out across the state and talk about poetry. This position is pretty much what I want to make of this and what I can mold out of this."
Clewell said he wants to do appearances at places where poetry doesn't always get a voice.
"I'd like to go to a women's correctional center," he said. "I'd like to do something on a factory floor, visit some schools in the K through 12 range."
Clewell said he also wants to read the works of other poets, not just his own.
"All writers are readers first. I want to talk about the art and read some examples of it," Clewell said. "All these appearances are venues to put out a poem or two by someone else. It's not David Clewell and his barnstorming show."
Clewell also said he's enjoyed working with the State's First Lady.
"She's sharp and funny and has some good ideas about this. She even suggested a whistle-stop tour like Harry Truman did."
And the responsibilities of office have caused one change in Clewell, who still composes his poetry on pads of paper and uses a typewriter instead of a computer.
"I bought a planner. Now I write in little boxes and it's scaring me. I'm actually finding myself writing things down instead of putting scraps of paper in my pocket, which has always been my rolodex of choice," he said.
Clewell, who with his wife, Patricia, and 14-year-old son, Ben, live in Webster Groves, has been a fixture in the St. Louis poetry scene for many years. He's taught at Webster University for the past 25 years, receiving several teaching awards, such as the Emerson Electric award for excellence in teaching, and in its inaugural year he received the Kemper award for teaching.
Clewell has published seven volumes of poetry and had work in dozens of anthologies and magazines. He's well-known for his dynamic readings that are often a revelation to those unfamiliar with poetry as he's unfailingly un-stuffy. He's not writing about marbled saints, but instead his poetry tells stories about the things closest to him, the love we can bear for others and the faith we fashion to help us move forward. He does so in a downpour of everyday speech he manages to turn inside-out and stand on its ear to make it uniquely his own.
"In the spectrum of stuff I write about, the number one passion I'm still interested in is love poems, my kid and my wife, and connected with that it's a notion of beliefs and faiths and what it takes for people to make it from one day to the next, and what they need and are able to believe," he said.
"That takes me out on the edges to the conspiracy theorists, the UFO and paranormal stuff, but it's about people who believe these things with sincerity. It's about people needing to steer themselves with something bigger than their own lives," he continued.
Clewell's poems are often several pages in length, as if his passions and ideas are simply too big to halt at the bottom of the page. He likes to joke at readings that "Clewell don't do haiku."
Clewell was excited by the possiblities of poetry while in high school in New Jersey where he grew up.
"I was always a reader - books, soup can labels, anything. But high school turned it around for me. I had a teacher who told me to just listen to this stuff, how it sounds," he said. "In this setting it became palpable. Now when I write I ask, what sounds can I make this time? Either a clatter or a smooth racket. I'm attracted to writing poetry by the idea of working in lines and sentences, two things at once. My poems go through a tremendous amount of revision, a lot of re-seeing it, and of bringing it down to the level of the line itself and even a word."
Clewell is glad to be able to promote poetry in Missouri.
"I want to seek out people not immediately among the poetry savvy, show them that poetry can be down-to-earth and about their own human heart and feelings," he said. "I want to be a sort of ambassador with a small 'a,' talking about the art with a small 'a' with no pretensions about it."
Above all, though, Clewell loves to write poetry. He has a new book coming out next spring, "Taken Somehow by Surprise."
"I may be one of the last poets in the country interested in just making poems. I don't want to write novels. I don't want to write memoirs. I just want to write poems."
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Vegetarian Physics
The tofu that's shown up overnight in this house is frightening
proof of the Law of Conservation: matter that simply cannot be
created or destroyed. Matter older than Newton,
who knew better than to taste it. Older than Lao-tzu,
who thought about it but finally chose harmonious non-interference.
I'd like to be philosophical too, see it as some kind of pale
inscrutable wisdom among the hot dogs, the cold chicken,
the leftover deviled eggs, but I'm talking curdled
soybean milk. And I don't have that kind of energy.
I'd rather not be part of the precariously metaphorical
wedding of modern physics and the ancient Eastern mysteries.
But still: whoever stashed the tofu in my Frigidaire
had better come back for it soon. I'm not Einstein
but I'm smart enough to know a bad idea when I see it
taking up space, biding its time.
Like so much that demands our imperfect attention
amid the particle roar of the world; going nowhere fast.
-- David Clewell