What poems are they reading in Lake Wobegon?
GARRISON KEILLOR: There is a little verse in the Lake Wobegon Herald Star every week, or most weeks, by Margaret Haskins Durber: How lightly falls the evening snow Through the yellow streetlamp glow And quietly the cars go by, The sound of tires like a sigh. And now and then poetry may be quoted from the pulpit. At funerals, the card for the deceased has a short poem on it, usually one chosen by the undertaker’s wife from a small selection of memorial verse. There is humorous verse on plaques, of course: The wise old owl sat in the tree. The more he talked, the less he’d see. The less he talked, the more he heard. Why can’t we be like that wise old bird? But in general adults don’t read poetry, not in Lake Wobegon or anywhere else. In the schools, children are being taught a smattering of the English classics, from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans through Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and some poets, such as Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo, within
