Poet's Choice

into my life yet. There would have been therapy,

problems--I was fourteen and at a school with Christian enmity

between the fundamentalists, Catholics and Mormons.

The person to feel bad for in this poem is Jennifer.

I never saw her after the awkward moment I asked her

out. It was the last day of the eighth grade. She'd written

that she loved me in my yearbook. I thought I had to

ask her out. Jennifer, I'm sorry. It wasn't you.

This time, the personal "I" is in the first line, and the hinge comes before the last five lines, with the surprise of addressing us readers about "this poem" and then addressing "Jennifer." "It wasn't you" means both "it was not your fault" and "you weren't who I wanted." These poems follow the rhyme scheme of the sonnet, but the tradition this young poet most significantly keeps alive in them is the great poetic tradition of wit as serious means. In such writing, wit -- as the old expression has it -- cuts to the quick.