Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

Tom Sexton

About Poet Laureate Tom Sexton

photo credit: Daily Bulldog

Tom Sexton was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and lived in the city through his high school years. He earned degrees at Northern Essex Community College and now-Salem State University, and then pursued graduate studies at the University of Alaska, where he stayed and founded the creative writing program at the Anchorage campus. He taught there for decades and co-founded the highly respected Alaska Quarterly Review.

The author of many volumes of poetry, his most recent collections are Li Bai Rides a Dolphin Home (2018), A Ladder of Cranes (2015), and For the Sake of the Light: New and Selected Poems (2009), all from the University of Alaska Press. His Lowell books are A Clock with No Hands and Bridge Street at Dusk. Among his honors are being appointed Poet Laureate of Alaska (1995-2000) and being named a Distinguished Alumnus of Lowell High School. Tom and his wife Sharyn have lived in Alaska since 1970. Recently, they have lived part-time on the coast of Maine.

(This short bio is from Loom Press )

On the Death of Seamus Heaney

He is crossing those four green fields now.
On the horizon, blossoms falling like snow.
A chorus calls his name. He does not break stride
toward a small house. He can hear his mother’s sigh
Now he eyes his father holding a tall ladder
and at the top of the ladder stands his brother
skimming the gable, shaping the letters S.H.
in wet plaster. It covers his hands and knees
as blood did on the day he died. They turn
to go inside where his mother is churning butter.

 

From Tom Sexton’s collection, A Ladder of Cranes, ©2015. Reprinted with permission from University of Alaska Press.

After His Long Day

–for Peter Sears (1937-2017), after Tom Sexton

He does not fly over these hills or fields. Instead
he crosses the quad of every campus he inspired.
Surrounding him, a susurration of aspen and maple,
his loneliness calling his name. But he doesn’t stop–
his students wait for him. He climbs the steep ramp
to the library’s entrance without a breath to spare
though he finds another quick enough for the cat, any cat,
who might appear where dew lies thick on the high grasses.
His cronies who have paid the ferryman lean into his ear.
Ask me, William begins, and he tells them,
what if the river is an animal throwing the ice
right off its back! This leap of the mind on the page
is what he lives for, then and now. He has no need
to drink from the river.

–Rachel Barton

 

I was inspired by the dream quality in Tom Sexton’s poem, imagining the afterlife of the poet. The italicized lines and title are drawn from Peter’s last book, Long Day (Lynx House Press, 2019): “Driving Around,” “The Dew Lies Thick on the High Grasses,” and “The Ferryman at the River Lethe.” “Ask Me”, a poem by William Stafford, is the prompt Peter used at every workshop during his tenure as Oregon Poet Laureate and is referenced in his poem, “When the River Thaws.”