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Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream gave what may be the quintessential definition of a poet:

“The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

A poet takes the invisible and makes it visible, connecting the seen with the unseen. He takes heaven down to earth, earth to heaven. We all readily recognize as poetry and art the one who does these things with words, music, and marble.

My father has always been fascinated with such poetry in music and what he deemed “good art” but had none of it in himself. At least that’s what he thought. He never had the opportunity when young to take lessons of any kind which quietly grieved him so he ensured his kids would have the chance to learn the various forms of art. Responding well to that opportunity, I learned to sing and play the piano, and many times he would listen to me and remark how he was amazed at my creativity. He could not understand from where the notes and words came and how from thin air such things could happen. “The only thing I can play is the radio.” he would remark with a chuckle.

If you would have asked me when a youngster, I would have agreed with him thinking he had no creative bone whatsoever but as I grew, I began to see the magic in the man. I discovered in him what Shakespeare would have described as someone who takes “a local habitation” and gives it a name, who puts his hands in the dirt and makes something from nothing. Let me explain.

One day when I was a young boy playing out in our yard, my Dad was laying underneath the back end of his Volkswagen beetle working on the car. He realized he needed to drop the engine (amazingly it only has four bolts) but being a young man and relatively poor he did not have a jack or stand to rest it on. He stood up, glanced around, and spied my little kid’s wagon in the corner. Glancing up at the front door a bit nervously, he then walked over and pulled it to his VW, and carefully let the motor down onto the wagon. The engine weighed about 200 pounds and the little axle bent but fortunately didn't break. Pleased, he was finishing up, and just before completion, out from the front door walked my mother.

Ever the defender of her children (and their things), she gave what my Dad called the “double hipper”. With both hands on each hip, she proceeded to scold him for breaking the wagon. He argued it was not broken but she just pointed at the bent little thing and walked back in. My Dad then took out his hammer and tools and managed to get it bent back enough in place so it would still roll.

The picture below is from the recent Christmas and shows Dad working on his furnace. You can see a piece of cardboard keeping the pipes separated. I am not sure of the problem but he was talking about using a hair dryer to fix something.

The intervening years held countless times I would be working with him and we would come to some impasse where I could not figure out how to fix something. Seemingly from nowhere he would pause and say something akin to “Hmm...well maybe if…” and would amaze me with a solution. He would often use odd things from the house to cleverly make it all work.

Looking back now as a man, I realize my father’s rhymes were in the wrenches, his artisan's chisel buried deep in his mechanical mind. His poetry resonates now in my soul as an adult and echoes in my brain every time I stand looking under the hood.

How would my inventive Dad solve this?

I have known good artists of different walks throughout my life but none greater than the poet that is my father. He routinely enchanted me with his ingeniousness all the while denying any claim to it.

This year take a few moments and give due credit to the poets in your life—including the ones who take the common and mysteriously create the magical.