April 20, 2015

Remember The Secret? Maybe it’s 6°s of separation, or precognition, or something? But…

Go back a couple of Sunday’s to when Yevgeniy Yevtushenko was the Sunday Guest and then I’ll tell you about this past Sunday, yesterday.

When I introduced Yevtushenko I mentioned that I first experienced his poetry through a Saturday Evening Post article in a 1963 edition. When I wrote that my youngest son and I were going to go to a huge outdoor flea market called The Elephant’s Trunk in New Milford the following Sunday. But, the ground  was still too wet so that market, the opening one of the year, was postponed until yesterday. And our trip yesterday resulted in this.

We’d just started down the many rows of vendors and were looking at a young woman’s eclectic collection of tools, antiques, knick-knacks, and a box of magazines… Saturday Evening Post? The sign taped to the box said it contained 1960 editions. What were the odds? I squatted down and began to work through the copies. Half way, flip, flip, flip, flip back… Lift the upper ones. There it was! POST, The Saturday Evening Post August 10 – August 17, 1964 20c.

Banned in Russia:

A Soviet poet’s brilliant story
of his life and fight for freedom
under Stalin and Khrushchev

So maybe I’m making more of this than it just being a strange coincidence that right after I write about a poet who impacted my view of poetry and need to create poetry I’m reunited with the spark that ignited the fire.