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Know Your Place

__“Know your place!”

In grammar school, that stung like mace.
“To the corner!”—my timeout place.

__“Know your place.”

On my first date, with pimpled face,
I never even reached first base.

__“Know your place.”

Now I craft poems, surely first rate!
An editor wrote, “Do erase:
Your poems plod like a sack race
When they should soar through outer space.”
But I key on—in case, in case—
In hopes that mine aren’t commonplace.

__Is this my place?

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Peter Venable has been writing poetry for 50 years. He has been published in Windhover, Third Wednesday, Time of Singing, The Merton Seasonal, American Vendantist, The Anglican Theological Review, and others. He is a member of the Winston Salem Writers. On the whimsical side, he has been published in Bluepepper, Parody, Laughing Dog, The Asses of Parnassus, and Lighten Up Online (e. g. # 48).

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7 Responses

  1. Frank Rable

    Peter, yours was the first poem I read today, and a good one to ponder as the day begins. The philosophy “Shoot for the stars but crawl through the mud if you must” is the path many of us did well to take.

    Some poems soar through space and our hearts, and they are rare and beautiful. But many, particularly of a humorous bent, guide us through our everyday lives as we slog through that mud.

    I truly enjoyed your poem!

    Reply
  2. Joseph S. Salemi

    About poetry editors — take it from me, who has been dealing with them for decades. For most of them, their secret agenda is to prevent the publication of poems that deviate from their accepted aesthetic criteria, or from their categorical imperatives.

    Reply
    • Frank Rable

      Not here, thank God. Quite the opposite. But boy o boy are you right about that. For them, free verse (ugh) is okay as long as it strictly avoids the conservative point of view. Even a doctorate or MFA won’t matter if you profess beliefs they cannot abide.

      So as you say, I guess they are not so much promoting the beauty of poetry as their agenda. And indeed, some of the poems they do like are just butt ugly stream of conscious word diarrhée.

      Don’t get used to me agreeing with you though, Joe. This is uncharted territory for me. 🙂

      Reply
  4. Paul A. Freeman

    Nicely done, Frank.

    I particularly liked how the inference to a ‘sack race’ took us back to schooldays and having to stand in the corner – even prior to grammar school.

    Editors are all different in my experience. I have an effort being held for publication partly because it’s rhyming and metrical and the publication doesn’t get many of those.

    Thanks for the read, Peter.

    Reply
  5. C.B. Anderson

    Yow! Even at my age, the pangs of adolescent angst still ring a bell. Sometimes the commonplace rings truest, but poetic truth is not all that common. I shall think of the author as the Venerable Venable.

    Reply
  6. Margaret Coats

    Peter, it’s fun that the last line (“Is this my place?”) implies that the speaker does not know his place. You have a place here!

    Reply

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