Spooks and Odd Folks: Poems

By Rose Wolf

Ever since my mother pushed me in our backyard swing to the rhythm of Stevenson’s
“How Do You Like to Go Up in a Swing?” I sensed that traditional poetry--with rhyme, meter, imagery, and storytelling--was the heartbeat of life itself. From that time, I’ve loved hearing, reading, and writing such verse. When I encountered “free” verse, I knew it was not the voice for me. The characters and creatures whose stories I wanted to tell were those outside the pale of normality—“weird and wild,” in Poe’s phrase—and I felt that their depiction was best served (and versed) by a structured framework. We can’t fight chaos with chaos, but we can “put it into fourteen lines and make it good,” as Millay said about the sonnet. In this ballet
for metrical “feet ,”I let these beings speak for themselves, disappearing behind each one like a ballerina interpreting a chosen role. Your dancer may wear a pirate’s boot, a dinosaur’s claw, or an angel’s weightless foot, but the toe slippers of discipline and dedication, dipped
in the rosin of Reason, lie behind them all. The role is created by the soles—and her soul. “Come join the dance!”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369417638

Rose Wolf

Spoiled for a career in reality by her mother, who made her witch hats out of grocery bags and took her on supernatural walks to look for fairies under toadstools, Rose Wolf decided to become a writer of fantasy prose and poetry. After taking a Ph.D. in that field from Binghamton University, she worked for a Fantasy Grand Master, married a wizard, and lived in Scotland. She now makes her home in Salem, Massachusetts, where she sells magic wands, teaches imaginative literature, and draws inspiration for her writing from her Manx cat familiar, Golden Moon Bear.

Book preview

SPOOKS

AND

ODD

FOLKS

POEMS

ROSE WOLF

Copyright © 2024 by Rose Wolf.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/15/2024

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

825361

ABOUT THE TITLE, THE COVER, AND

THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK

Some years ago, I discovered the work of folk painter Charles Wysocki at an art fair in my home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Individual pages from that artist’s Americana calendars had been framed and were on display, and I was immediately attracted to the bright colors, homespun scenes, and meticulously-realistic rendering of every detail that characterized Wysocki’s pictures. My attention was quickly captured by the panel for October 1981. Titled Hellraisers Passing the House of the Seven Gables on Halloween Night, it depicted the iconic Hawthorne home in Salem, Massachusetts as the background for a black stagecoach bearing six costumed revelers on its roof. A seventh passenger occupied the interior–alone—a skeleton, yet no costumed man but Death himself. This macabre vehicle is shown tearing past the stern and stolid Gables, mad manic energy in every line, and the prim upright smokes from Puritan chimneys bend longingly in the direction of its travel. But is it spellbound or hell-bound? The question occurred to me then and continued to haunt me—literally—until I finally wrote my poem A Ghost-Mas Carol to find the answer.

I have long held a belief in the salvific power of Halloween—in the gift of that season to serve as a boo broom to sweep out the dark corners of the human soul, preparing us for the sleep of winter and the renewal of life in spring as autumn nor’easters cleanse the earth. In my Carol, the revelers voice this same philosophy, inviting the reader to experience the redemption of All Hallows by accompanying them on their innocently-unhallowed journey.

I was so pleased with this piece that I was emboldened to send it to Mr. Wysocki. Enclosing a letter expressing enthusiasm for his work as well as an explanation of the genesis of my own word-painting, I forwarded the packet to AMCAL, hoping that he would at least see and appreciate the tribute. To my astonishment, within a week I received a delightful note, handwritten on one of his own artcards and signed with his signature fat heart. He wrote:

I enjoyed those words that formed pictures in my mind that I did not have when I composed the painting. I really had no motives—just an idea I had when looking through my old postcard files. The House of the Seven Gables came up, and its mysterious architecture provoked Halloweenian thoughts of spooks and odd folks. . . Fascinating and a bit scary.

When the opportunity came to make a lifetime compilation of my verse, Wysocki’s quaint phrase seemed the perfect choice for a title. I have always had a haunted head—mostly happily so, because I serve—and verse!—as a literary ghostess. Medium with myriad messages, I tell the tales of creatures and characters out of classic and popular fiction. In this function, I feel a keen sympathy with Timothy, the only human in the ultimate