Bard of Sherman Avenue takes bow for years of ‘little rhymes’
The pigeon’s works
are bold and bright,
his palette
limited to white.
(“Picasso of the Skies,” April 28, 2006)
For 14 years Wobker’s crisp verse, under the pen name The Bard of Sherman Avenue, has seasoned Huckleberries, The Spokesman-Review’s top blog.
More than 600 of his poems have appeared online and in blog creator Dave Oliveria’s weekly print column since 2002. But only Oliveria and a few of Wobker’s relatives and friends knew the Bard’s identity.
On Saturday afternoon, Wobker revealed himself at Blogfest, Oliveria’s annual celebration of the North Idaho blogosphere, at Fort Ground Grill in Coeur d’Alene.
“I have really been on him to do this, because I want him to take the bow he deserves,” Oliveria said. “I don’t think he knows how good he is. I really don’t.”
Wobker, 71, said he has grown comfortable writing under an assumed name.
“It almost turned into one of those situations where I was referring to the Bard in the third person. In fact I do,” he said at his Spokane home overlooking Latah Creek. “And I thought, well, maybe it’s getting a little too weird.”
Declining health also influenced the decision. Wobker has been fighting cancer for two and a half years. It’s in his liver now, and he’s beyond conventional treatments. He’s trying some alternative methods for comfort and meets with hospice caregivers.
“It won’t go away. And once you adjust to that fact, I found it not to be as frightening as I would have thought. It’s almost become matter-of-fact,” Wobker said.
He’s thinking about publishing a selection of his poems, with proceeds from sales to benefit a children’s cause.
Wobker wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in such a collection. He regarded his works as pieces of candy, “and you just had the one and that’s enough. And if you have too many you get sick.”
But others are encouraging him to pursue the book. Among them is his friend Tod Marshall, a Gonzaga University English professor and Washington’s new poet laureate. Marshall said he’d like to help make a chapbook of Bard poems and tap GU students to edit it.
“What he does is very important for reminding folks how poetry needs to have a broad appeal outside of academia,” he said. “His poems aren’t just witty and clever, they’re also well made. He has an obvious sense of rhythm.”
Marshall also admires Wobker’s gift for choosing topical, local material.
“I love the dynamic of the poet isn’t some isolate suffering, disconnected person up in their attic studio, but someone who’s tuned into the pulse of the community and can provide a voice for many of the same things we’re probably thinking – some of the same skepticisms, some of the same joys. And Tom nails it again and again,” he said.
Wobker grew up in blue-collar Allentown, Pennsylvania, and was exposed to poetry attending Catholic high school. A Kansas Jayhawk with degrees in journalism and law, he moved his family to North Idaho in 1980.
The financial life of this poet spanned 18 years with Pennaluna & Co., the small brokerage specializing in mining stocks.
I’ve heard it said by those who know
To watch the market winds that blow,
For when velocity gets high
Even turkeys start to fly.
(“Stock Market Rally,” Feb. 25, 2004)
Around 2002 Wobker sent Oliveria a few of his poems, suggesting they could be an op-ed feature, like an editorial cartoon. “I was planning to tweak the nose of some of the powerful, I thought,” he recalled.
Wobker lived in Post Falls but worked on Sherman Avenue in downtown Coeur d’Alene, hence the nom de plume. Anonymity appealed to him, to spare his co-workers backlash more than anything.
“There were a lot of younger guys working in our office, and I thought this is kind of unnecessary, to bring down the heat on everybody,” he said.
The biggest name in town was an obvious target. “I remember when Duane Hagadone had a helicopter that was landing on the resort, and people were getting outraged,” he said.
My shiny chopper’s very loud
As I ascend above the crowd,
For I am wealthy and it’s true
I don’t care if I noise on you.
(“Helicopter,” Sept. 15, 2003)
The Bard also enjoyed needling the Lake City’s zealous parking patrols.
We’re tourist friendly as can be
And let you park two hours for free.
But watch the clock while having fun,
Cause tickets come at two-o-one.
(“CDA Parking,” April 27, 2003)
Idaho politics provided a fertile field as well.
Behold in Boise the Legislature,
an odd creation of Mother Nature
awaving its arms and flapping its jaws
it mumbles and rants and passes strange laws.
(“A Peculiar Life Form,” March 28, 2007)
“As it went along, I greatly diminished the idea of antagonism,” Wobker said.
The submissions, mostly four-line rhymes, are ephemeral, sometimes sardonic.
“The Bard is middlebrow,” Wobker said. “Some people like it, and if it gives them a bit of a lift, or if it gives them a thought on occasion that’s maybe a little deeper, then I’m content with that.”
Occasionally his mood turns pensive.
Before another breath was drawn
A blast of flame and they were gone,
So very far from home to die,
They rest forever Semper Fi.
(“For Ten Marines Killed in Fallujah,” Dec. 12, 2005)
Wobker and his wife, Sharon, had a son in the Army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“He wasn’t kicking down doors; he was actually working on helicopters. But they were getting mortared,” he said.
In his youth, Wobker served four years in the Air Force.
“I was one of the guys in the Minuteman ICBM program. We were the guys on alert, underneath the ground, with the keys and the 10 nuclear missiles,” he said.
He was stationed in the Midwest, mostly. “We never let the Commies across the border in South Dakota.”
All that waiting for a launch order that never came gave him time to read and write. He penned a few “serious poems” and freelance articles. He also sold a couple of greeting card verses to Hallmark for $25 apiece.
“That’s 50 bucks in 1966, so I thought, well there’s my career. I worked these numbers and I’d only have to work four or five hours a week and I’d be making a lot of money,” he said. “And then I never sold another one.”
As the Bard, Wobker settled into a niche evocative of Ogden Nash, that master of light verse.
“He’s kind of my hero, his little four-line poems. Some of them are just fantastic,” he said.
Most of his attempts come easily. “A lot of times, it would just pop into my mind pretty much completed,” Wobker said.
Even after his cancer diagnosis and through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments, he has kept writing and sending his poems to Huckleberries.
“My people, they just can’t wait till the next one,” Oliveria said.
For Wobker, continuing has been therapeutic.
“They’ve kept my mind focused on something other than health conditions,” he said. “It keeps me going a little bit, and energized.”
Wobker retired two years ago, and he and his wife moved to a condominium they owned in the Browne’s Addition neighborhood. They spend time with their three children and three grandchildren, and watch the eagles, deer and occasional moose down the ravine.
He said he will keep sending Oliveria his poems “as long as he’ll post them, and as long as I can write them.”
My thanks to you who pause sometimes
to look upon these little rhymes,
for words just lie there cold and dead
until they are by others read,
and so it is that you’re my pard:
without you here, there’d be no Bard.
(“Giving Thanks for Readers,” Nov. 23, 2005)