W.D. Ehrhart

by W.D. Ehrhart Anyone who was alive and sentient back in 1966—the year I graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Marines—will surely remember that perhaps the least popular man in America (white America at least) was loudmouthed full-of-himself Cassius Clay, who had defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world only to announce that he was henceforth to be known as Muhammad Ali, proud member of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. He further alienated himself from mainstream America—even many Black Americans, including former heavyweight champ Floyd Paterson—when he refused to be drafted into the U.S. Army at the height of …

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have been writing poetry ever since I was 15 years old. My first published work appeared in 1971 when I was 22 years old. Since then, I’ve published over 400 poems. Along the way, I’ve probably received as many as 4,000 rejection slips, and it’s probably safe to say that every rejection notice I have ever received has come from an editor who didn’t think the poems I’d sent were very good. Recently, however, I have run into a rejection unlike any other I’ve ever received in 59 years. I recently submitted this poem to an online publication that purports to …

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by W.D. Ehrhart I had a particularly weird dream last night in which I was giving the commencement address at a school where I’d taught for many years. For reasons known only in dreams, I ended up talking about post-traumatic stress disorder and how PTSD is the inevitable result of subjecting a healthy human brain to traumatic stress. The consequences are unavoidable. If you are subjected to traumatic stress and it doesn’t screw you up, you were screwed up before you encountered the traumatic stress. You will not make the scarring go away with counselling or group solidarity (in the case of soldiers) or anything …

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by W.D. Ehrhart The writer and philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Mark Twain gets credit for saying, “History never repeats itself, but it often does rhyme.” Pearl Buck said, “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” Howard Zinn wrote, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.” I found myself thinking about that quote of Zinn’s soon after September 11th, 2001, when President George W. Bush explained that terrible day by declaring, …

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by W.D. Ehrhart I’ve been writing poetry since I was 15 years old. I’ve written hundreds of poems over more than a half century. That’s a lot of poems and a long time. But no poem of mine has ever troubled me more or caused me more difficulty than this one: Old Men Eating Lunch for Paige Once a month my pals and I eat lunch at the Amish Market in Mullica Hill. We chose that place because the food is cheap. And good. But we keep coming back to see the waitress. She’s always there, month after month, and such a lovely girl, always …

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by W.D. Ehrhart In China, Malaysia, and Taiwan, teachers are held in the same high regard as doctors. Teaching in Finland is so prestigious and sought-after a profession that only one in five applicants is admitted to primary teacher education programs in Finnish universities. When I visited a high school in Japan a few years ago, the students all stood up when their teacher walked into the classroom. Was the profession of teaching ever even remotely so respected in this country? Certainly not in my lifetime, and over the course of my forty-five years of contact with teaching, I have watched the esteem commanded by …

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