I so impressed with Karen Neurohr in how she conducted the interview with Bob. She came replete with state-of-the-art video & mike & whatnots. Her line of questions to Bob brought out the vintage performer he once was. She would request him to read some of the daughter of a dust bowl sharecropper poems. Karen did her homework. She found so much stuff on Bob’s relationship with this daughter Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Karen would ask Bob to interpet the poems he would read in the mike. Lo and behold! Right off the cuff, Bob, in a professorial and folksy vein, would extrapolate the poems with zest and insightfulness. He topped off this inteview reading his own poem to Wilma:
“Wilma, We Might Have Been
Sweeties.
In overalls and straw hat,
chewing timothy, I’d amble
over. You’d fetch a jar of
frosty artesian well water
and draw me to the parlor
to hear new poems from your
five cent tablet, poems about
lovable (and not so lovable)
kith and kin. You were setting
up shooting gallery ducks–No,
that’s too facile: you embedded
folks in amber. Did you know
back then that poems were so
durable? Or that I loved you?”
After the interview ends, Karen begins to pack up her stuff and I offer her a slice of carrot cake. Bob gets up from his seat, the warm blanket with two prideful lions printed on it that I covered his legs before the interview falls on the floor, exposing his large catheter bag as he picks it up to go to the bathroom. It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s dog Toto knocks down the Wizard’s facade and his warts and all were revealed. Karen never batted an eye. This morning inteview was an utter delight for me to witness the finesse between poet and journalist. This conducted oral history will be integrated on Wilma’s Web.