Michael Yarbrough

I first wanted to write at age 14 when I saw the film, Doctor Zhivago. I had fallen in love at first sight and wished that I too could write a love poem. I couldn't.

I thought myself fit only for prose but would find the will for that only at the age of 24. Not until the age of 43(once again falling in love) would I be able to write poetry, my first bound poem a year later.I reproduce it here:

Below Kongsansong

Beneath the cherried paths of Kongsansong

Immortal with the footfalls of the dead,

Beneath the pavilioned walls a mountain long,

For a kingdom and an age a final bed,

A workman happy in his Kongju's rise,

Recalls the rupture of those gates and sighs.

A child caresses brick and Grandpa's beard,

And weeps, shaking, knowing what Grandpa feared.

[Well over a thousand years ago, the Korean peninsula

was divided principally into three kingdoms. Kongju, then

called Unjin, was the penultimate capital of one of them, Paekche.]

My former poetry professor, Daniel J. Langton, himself a distinguished poet, in a letter called it “splendid.” [You can find him in an old picture of figures from “The San Francisco Renaissance” entitled, “The Last Gathering” taken in 1965 in front of City Lights bookstore.]

I write as an outsider – when about politics, usually as an outsider even among other outsiders. As one much older comrade told me,”You're into it, Mike, but you're not really into it. You're an observer.” My two novels, THE STALINIST BECOMES BOGOMIL self-published, and another existing only on pc files are stark outliers. Even a published poem, “Inge,” available at forpoetry.com under “Michael Yarbrough” in the “Archives.” is one.

But outlierdom can be fun. With the stories in THE TALES OF RON-SAN, OR AN AMERICAN IN NAGOYA, self-published, I believe I prove it.

But outlierdom can be a problem. For example, I thought I might be able to write a verse play grounded in a scrupulous rendering of history that would be performable before an educated, if still general audience. I'm afraid the result is a lese-drame – a drama to be read – unless it should sometime be possible to pack the audience with American history professors.

At present, I'm expanding a 22 page epic poem about Byzantium into a screenplay mixing verse and prose and adding Persians and Arabs.