Jack Wheatcroft
Poetry Reading: Saturday October 24
6:30 p.m. Bucknell Hall

Emeritus professor of English Jack Wheatcroft was the founding director of the Stadler Center for Poetry, founder of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and  teacher to more than a few Bucknellians who have gone on to distinguished careers in the literary arts, including Peter Balakian, Jim Zervanos, and the novelist Philip Roth. Wheatcroft is the author of nine books of fiction and eight volumes of poetry. His play Ofoti was produced for public television and later made into the film The Boy Who Loved Trolls. A 1949 graduate of Bucknell, Wheatcroft began teaching at the University in 1952. Wheatcroft's fiction and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Yankee, Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Ladies' Home Journal, and many literary journals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, England, and Scotland, as well as in a number of anthologies.

excerpt from Fugitive Self

ii

About a sighting wars ago, I have
no escape-route doubt.  Spotting, identifying
a plane in the twin-lensed circles of my binoculars,
tracking it as it approached, I duly
reported him as my enemy designate.

A salvo of tracer shells, blitzing like
a swarm of angry hornets from the hives
of our ack-ack guns, turned his plane to the hell
of a burning cross. Freeing himself somehow,
hanging in the harness of a parachute,
slowly he descended through an azure sky
toward the sea of peace.

His helplessness and hands-up posture
declared for him the war was over.

The barrage went on, shells tore into
his flowering youth, and scattered it all
to petals.  I then and there became him.
Two souls merged in the body that survived.

To think, I've never known the name
nor seen the face of the only other self
I'm certain of. Still searching.