eleven
by John Yamrus
i probably told this story a million times already…about how i lied my way into a “career” as a writer. it was back around 1970 or so. i guess i was 19 at the time, and i had always wanted to be a writer. there was me and my friend Rick, he wanted to be a writer, too. we used to get together at one of our houses on weekends and drink vodka…cheap vodka…Popov vodka. do you remember Popov vodka? i don’t know if they still make it, but it must have cost under 5 bucks for a fifth. and we’d get a bottle and talk all night about how we wanted to be writers…but we couldn’t get published anywhere, because…you know the old story…the editors would always reject our stuff, writing back, asking where have we been published and what awards have we won?
of course, the answer was always nowhere and nothing…so, we drank.
and one night, it must have been two in the morning…i was walking him back to his house, and we had stopped (i remember it clear as day) at the corner of Oliver and Wakefield streets…and we took the last swigs from the bottle and Rick looks up at the street sign and looks over at me and hands me the bottle and says (or slurs) grandly: “i hereby award you The Wakefield Prize!”…and he hands me the bottle.
i swear to god, this is a true story…
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the next morning i wake up and send a batch of poems off to a magazine in Chicago…a rather big time magazine, too…a poetry magazine. in my cover letter i said: “i’d like to submit some poems for your consideration. i’ve recently been awarded the prestigious Wakefield Prize for poetry. i hope there’s something here that works for you.”
i sent the stuff off and forgot about it.
a couple of weeks later, i go out and get the mail, and there’s a letter from that magazine, and i ripped it open…this time there was no form letter of rejection…there’s an actual letter from the editor, and he says: “Dear Mr. Yamrus: I got your poems in the mail…I heard about you recently winning The Wakefield Prize. Congratulations! We’d very much like to publish your poems. It would be an honor. Please accept the enclosed check.”
that’s a true story.
it really happened…and i never looked back since.
In a career spanning more than 50 years as a working writer, John Yamrus has published 35 books (29 volumes of poetry, 2 novels, 3 volumes of non-fiction and a children’s book). He has also had nearly 3,000 poems published in magazines and anthologies around the world. A book of his SELECTED POEMS was just released in Albania, translated into that language by Fadil Bajraj, who is best known for his translations of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski, Ginsberg, Pound and others.
A number of Yamrus’s books and poems are taught in college and university courses. His most recent book is SELECTED POEMS: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT (Concrete Mist Press, 542pp).
