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The A  Poems:
Bernard McCabe and Wayne Allen Jones
64 pp., 5 3/8" x 8 1/2",
perfect bound paperback
ISBN: 0-9722553-1-1

Every woman is important to the lives she touches –
ever a force, positive or negative, full of grace or venom,
Gaia or Medusa.

These twenty-five poems are about important women
in McCabe’s life. Aesthetic policy more than concern
for privacy prevents exposing links of poems to subjects.
The sequential work on these texts – first draft from McCabe,
finished revision from Jones – added detail, recast perspective,
or explored other thematic potential. The results have altered
the link between poem and subject. This is rare and does not
undermine the overall process of generalization at work here:
careful attention to specific detail is a quick and sure method
for helping readers see themselves and their lives in the particular
circumstances of these poems.

At the outset, you may think it odd and presumptuous for two men
to write about women at all – nevermind, these two men – one
a strong safety at Illinois and a union president, the other an analytic
academic and computer-industry business manager. Read these poems,
and you will not be the first to wonder if they were stolen from a coin
laundromat while the real author put her damp sheets and towels
in a commercial-sized dryer.
 

Authors - Who are these guys?

Bernard McCabe and Wayne Allen Jones met in Lehman Hall
at Harvard in Fall,1969. McCabe was President of the Harvard
hourly workers’ union, finishing his AB in a special Extension
School program he had negotiated for workers to take day classes.
Jones thought McCabe was the most passionate and intense person
he had ever met. The University administration had no idea what
the former steel worker and college teammate of Dick Butkus could
manage by the sheer dint of his will and determination.

Jones had returned to Harvard to vindicate the academic worth
he recovered with an MA in English from the University of Michigan.
On his sine laude track at Harvard College, he had chosen a short
route to an BA in Biology, spending his last two years in lit. courses
and poetry seminars. Jones finished his PhD course work and got
a job as a Hawthorne scholar in McCabe’s home town at the University
of Illinois, Chicago.

McCabe came to Chicago during the steel union elections in 1972.
The conversations surfaced later in Jones’ poem “Steel,” but more
profoundly in McCabe’s play, The Shift, which deals with a family
of men on the eve of a union strike vote. Jones returned to this play
in 1997 and got the two writers back on a cooperative track after
a fifteen year hiatus. This book of poems about women in McCabe’s
life is their first published collaboration.

Contents - Click the Part to see titles

• Part I
  • Touched
  • Repose
  • Cleansing the Temple
  • The Blue Roads
  • Self Study
  • Lost Time
  • Spring
• Part II
  • Ancient Promise
  • Prayer in Black
  • The Neatness of Her Hair
  • Spirit in the Song
  • The Touch
  • Taking Control
  • Rolling
• Part III
  • Spinning Grey
  • Time's Up
  • The Prairie Flower
  • Soundscape
  • Been There, Done That
• Part IV
  • Beauty Day and Night
  • Among the Tribe
  • Heart of Grace
  • Nun
  • Wind

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Last modified: 09/30/07