William Trowbridge
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO …?
We read it in magazines, see it on TV:
former child star A was stabbed
to death in a crack deal, while B,
who used to play the sweet old nanny
on TV for 15 seasons, got nailed
for running call girls, and C, cleavaged
knockout in that surfer flick, turned
fifty-three and lives in a Tampax carton
underneath the Harbor Freeway,
not to mention D, the dude groupies
camped out in the snow to see,
who plans a sex change when they let him
out of Folsom. Now there’s E,
who murdered F and G when he found
them in a lovers’ knot at H’s Azores
getaway, which later burned
when H caught fire in a free-base fling
with I through Z. It cheers us up
to think the price tag on that Lear
was way too much for them, too,
that the ones still living have to dine
on crow sautéed in gall, that another
vacant seat at Plenty’s gala now awaits.
It could be ours, if we could dig up
the address and get there first.
—from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
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William Trowbridge: “One day while studying for my PhD comps, I came across a group of Howard Nemerov poems in the old Brinnin and Read anthology. I was bitten, seriously bitten, couldn’t stop going back to them—their music, their intelligence, their electrical charge. And then I wrote a poem. That afternoon, I was, to use a John Crowe Ransom word, ‘transmogrified’ from a budding scholar into a seedling poet. But I had neither the time nor the money to go through an MFA program. So, after graduation and in my ‘spare time’ from teaching, I continued my poetry-writing education in the college of monkey-see-monkey-do, happily learning from the poems of great, hand-picked tutors. I still attend.” (website)