my favourite hank poem (1 Viewer)

evening class, 20 years later

perhaps it's because i've turned 50.

it's a difficult age -- trust me.

but Hank nails it.

love to all.

Ju.

x
 
It's a good one. Though I'd like to see the Epos version, to read the original language he used. Assuming it was changed, which we kind of have to assume, all things considered.

And if I may pick a nit (that's why we're here, after all), he was 36 when he attended that class (which he didn't necessarily want to be in - it was his wife's idea), and about 40 when he wrote the poem about it.

I don't know how much his age, at the time of the class or at the time he wrote the poem, had to do with the tone of it though. It's pretty typical of his outsider/look-at-the-young-people poems. I get the feeling he could have written the same thing in 1945 or 1985. Or 2015, had he lived to be 100.

And 50 is the new 30, by the way, so don't feel too bad.
 
Seeing this, I pulled down my copy of EPOS, A Quarterly of Poetry from 1962, but it's not in there. I looked in the database and the Epos Issue/Volume numbers don't match those on my EPOS, A Quarterly of Poetry (which you have in the timeline and DB as Poems and Drawings, which makes some sense since that also appears on the cover). How does Epos relate to EPOS, A Quarterly of Poetry, if at all?
 
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How does Epos relate to EPOS, A Quarterly of Poetry, if at all?
They are one in the same. He was in 12 issues from 1959 to 1970.

It's listed as Poems and Drawings and not EPOS Poems and Drawings for the same reason something like Legs, Hips and Behind isn't listed as Wormwood Review Legs, Hips and Behind. Even though that's what it really is.

They give the "special issues" of these magazines that are devoted to a single author titles as if they were books, and that's just the way it goes I guess. I don't personally think an issue of a magazine devoted to a single author qualifies as a book, but bibliographers seem to disagree.
 
And if I may pick a nit (that's why we're here, after all), he was 46 when he attended that class (which he didn't necessarily want to be in - it was his wife's idea), but yes, he was probably 50 when he wrote the poem about it.

You mean he was 36 :wb:

Does anybody have the unmutilated manuscript of this poem? I vaguely recall reading it in The People Look Like Flowers At Last but don't recall the poem itself.
 
You mean he was 36 :wb:
The greatest thing that ever happened to me is when I got to high school I discovered that once you got past the 10th grade you didn't have to take mathematics anymore. It was sweet saying goodbye to those math classes, I'll tell you...

I realize that addition and subtraction aren't exactly advanced mathematics, but when you know as little as I do about the subject, it's all the same.

Does anybody have the unmutilated manuscript of this poem?
Seeing as he probably wrote it in 1960 (or earlier) it's unlikely we'll ever see the manuscript. Unless it pops up in an auction one day.
 

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