Larry LaVerdure hails from Central Massachusetts on the outskirts of Worcester, where he attended Assumption Preparatory School and later Boston College. One of twelve children in a French Catholic family, he was first introduced to poetry by his father, who amused his children with outrageously hammed-up versions of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “Barbara Frietchie”. Larry is retired from his career in information processing.
Larry has been writing poetry since grade school, and discovered French poetry in high school and the Beat poets in college. He’s a veteran Poetry Rodeo participant at the Mercury Café in Denver, and has published on the Web and in the Green Party magazine of Kansas. His poetry highlights nature, politics, family, and social issues.
Larry LaVerdure hosts the Cannon Mine Poetry Reading Series for adults and older teens, held at the Lafayette Library, 5–7 p.m. on the third Thursday of the month. Each session features a poet whose reading is followed by an open mike call for participation by poets in attendance.
What is a perfect opening paragraph from a book (or article, or blog)?
Rebecca Solnit in her book, It’s Not Too Late. Here is the first paragraph of the first chapter titled ‘Difficult Is Not the Same as Impossibl
“It is late. We are deep in an emergency. But it is not too late, because the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now. The longer we wait to act, the more limited the options…there are good options and great urgency to embrace them while we can. An emergency is… when the house catches fire or the dam breaks or institutions implode… It’s when it becomes clear that the way things were is not how they’re going to be.”
What is a perfect opening paragraph that you’ve written?
Experience washes over me like the sea
Over a weathered beachcomber
With pieces of flotsam and jetsam in tow.
“Call me Ishmael…”
Perfectly polished white pebbles,
precious tenets of my private religion,
slide seaward beyond my grasp
caught in the rip tide of aging.
Let them go, let them go.
Do you really want someone to find them
like some stow-a-ways in your coffin, Queequeg
as you paddle to the stars?”
What is a work that made you think in a different way?
A Canticle for Lebowitz by Robert Heinlein
What is it that inspires you?
Nature’s complex beauty, science, the depth of time, the struggle to understand history, and
what motivates people to act how they do. All these things inspire me.
Do you have any words of advice for aspiring writers?
Write about what you know from experience…things that challenge you, that you’re conflicted
about, that have a high emotional value, whether it’s something you are proud or ashamed of.
These are the things that will crack you open and give you access to your truth.
We Will Not Have Names
by Lawrence Vernon Julepte dit LaVerdure
Experience washes over me like the sea
Over a weathered beachcomber
With pieces of flotsam and jetsam in tow.
“Call me Ishmael…”
Perfectly polished white pebbles,
precious tenets of my private religion,
slide seaward beyond my grasp
caught in the rip tide of aging.
Let them go, let them go.
Do you really want someone to find them
like some stow-a-ways in your coffin, Queequeg
as you paddle to the stars?”
My sometimes certainties seem silly now.
Now that the far off horizon is dramatically closer.
The drama is somehow deflated, like a toy discarded.
Like a dream that is hopelessly macabre, plotless and, as oft-times suspected, a child of chaos.
You stare at me pleadingly as if I had refused to give you something…
a meal, a tidbit of news or my undivided attention
and still, you’re lovelier than I recall when the light splashes on your hair
and the moment crystallizes in an image: a winsome smile, a carefree thought.
You are the starfish in the tidal pool, the fractured sky dancing blue all over it.
We found fireflies in the meadow below the milky way.
You chide my fashion sense even though you know
my clothes were from “Salvation Army counters”.
The fog horn blows, I find my jacket all wrapped around you.
How daring, foolish and wondering we are.
Butterflies in the tent; birthplace of hurricanes.
Music washes over me like a tide
The harps of heaven, the hounds of hell
You stand on the basement stage and kiss the words
“…All men shall be sailors then until the sea shall save them.”
I am a bug trapped in amber, a sigh lost in the surf.
In a war with forever and yet I’ve missed so many trains…
So many ships have slipped beneath the waves
and I never knew their names.
Will we not have names, forever?
Not fame but fondness for this person
and care for this child.
She shall pass over the horizon
on Queequeg’s coffin.
And I? Well,
I have this perfect polished pebble in my hand.
“Have you seen the White Whale?”
Oh, Yes and hapless Ahab beckoning.
But I have this perfect polished pebble in my hand.
It is all the salvation that I require.