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Now I make footnotes on old dirty jokes

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My later poems
WD Snodgrass Poet
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There are a bunch of different things. Only one poem about the political situation and… and Bush and the war and all of that. I would like to do more of those, and I think as soon as I get to Mexico and… and am not doing things like this, that's one of the things that I… I want to be working on. Otherwise, a… a lot of... has gone into the stuff about aging. The first was a poem called Post-TURP. You know what a TURP is? No. Trans-Urethral Resectioning of the Prostate. If your prostate is swollen, of course, you can't urinate. So they drill a new hole in it — through it — that's the trans… all right? My doctor, when this was done, didn't tell me that you would no longer ejaculate. The son of a bitch. He was… he was angry at me because I… I… he wanted me to come over and talk… talk to him, to be prepared for the operation. And… and I said, 'I don't have time to drive over there. We're getting packed to go to Mexico. Can't you please tell me over the telephone?' Well, so he told me a thing or two, and he never mentioned this. What happens is that the semen now goes into a little sac, and then you pass it during urination. But all of a sudden, I was finding that there was no… that nothing was being ejected. And this rather surprised me, and I had to call up the doctor and ask him about it. No, that's perfectly normal after this operation. So I have a poem about that. I have a poem about getting a pacemaker. Wait a minute; there's one other poem about something that happens to you as you get old. I can't remember what it is because one of the things that happens to you as you get old is that you can't remember.

American poet WD Snodgrass, entered the world of poetry with a bang winning several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for his first collection of poetry, Heart's Needle. A backlash followed his controversial fifth anthology “The Fuehrer Bunker”, but in recent years these poems have been reassessed and their importance recognised.

Listeners: William B. Patrick

William B. Patrick is a writer and poet who lives in Troy, New York. Among his work are the poetry volumes "We Didn't Come Here for This" and "These Upraised Hands", the novel "Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family" and the plays "Rescue" and "Rachel's Dinner". His most recent work is the non-fiction book "Saving Troy", based on the year he spent following the Troy Fire Department.

Mr. Patrick has been Writer-in-Residence at the New York State Writers Institute and has taught at Old Dominion University, Onondaga Community College, and Salem State College, and workshops in Screenwriting and Playwriting at the Blue Ridge Writers Conference in Roanoke, Virginia. He has received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

Tags: Mexico, Post-TURP, Iraq War, George W Bush

Duration: 2 minutes, 17 seconds

Date story recorded: August 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008