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 Francis Poole, coordinator of media services in the University of Delaware Library, has won a 2002 Individual Artist Fellowship for $5,000 in the professional poetry category from the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Poole’s poetry has been published since his high school days in Tarpon Springs, Fla., when he won a competition and also had his poetry published in a national high school poetry anthology.
Majoring in English literature at Florida Atlantic University, he took creative writing classes where he met and mixed with other writers. Although he read the required English poets, he was more interested in contemporary poets, such as Gary Snyder, James Wright and Ann Sexton. His poems were published in Epos, Poem, Southern Poetry Review and Southern Humanities Review.
After college and a few years of working in a library and for a weekly newspaper in the Florida Panhandle, Poole had his wanderlust or “on the road” years, living in California, Morocco, Denmark and Portugal, teaching English at schools and universities.
When he returned to the United States, he attended graduate school and received his master’s degree in library science at the University of South Florida. He joined the staff of the University of Delaware Library in 1990.
Poole’s other strong interest is films, and he said he enjoys working with the film and video collection as media librarian in Morris Library’s Media Services Department.
Poole continues to write and publish poetry, in Poetry East, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Pearl and Lost and Found Times.
He also publishes a small, handmade journal, Blades, a compendium of art, poetry, writing and an occasional unusual newspaper clipping. The New York Public Library and libraries at the universities of Buffalo, North Carolina and Wisconsin are subscribers, and Poole donates issues to UD.
Poole’s other awards include a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and an Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry in 1990 from the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Following is an example of his work, a poem titled “His Own Two Feet” that was written while in Tetuan, Morocco.
HIS OWN TWO FEET
At dusk the streets are nearly empty
The walls of the buildings glow flamingo.
A young boy walks up the hill pushing
a wheelbarrow filled with the hooves of cattle.
The smell is rich.
He smiles at the tourists who are
sickened at the sight of his burden.
They are headed down to the market place
to buy shiny leather jackets, belts and slippers.
As they pass
the boy’s own two feet
become hooves, flint hard and deadly.
He hears them click against the rough stones
of the street, growing sharper
as he pushes on.
April 10, 2002
Photo by Kathy Flickinger
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