Andrew oerke biography

  Boyhood in Bayfield by Andrew Oerke (PC Staff: Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Jamaica 1966-71) Poets’ Choice Publishing 72 pages $19.95 (paperback) – purchase from publisher Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93) • Poems by a Man of Many Talents Andrew Oerke has as diverse a biography as one could imagine. He was a Peace Corps country director in Tanzania and Jamaica. He was also a Golden Gloves boxing champion. He was the CEO of an environmental foundation. He was also the president of a microfinance organization. By one account, noted in his obituary published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oerke was instrumental in the creation of the Peace Corps. The newspaper reports: “At a campaign stop in Milwaukee during John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential bid, Oerke is credited with suggesting to then-U.S. Senator William Proxmire that a global volunteer organization should be developed that would allow young people to share . . .

Andrew Oerke

<-- Change the channel | BACK TO THE GUIDE|More of this channel -->

The Original Lettermaker

Then she dipped into the surly waters
and hauled out wigglies by their toothpick legs.
Collectively, they were baptized as the Alphabet
and they scampered faster than thought itself.
They scuttled around like crabs in the sand
and they zoomed out farther than telescope lenses could
though their footprints always left the same stamp
but in so many different combinations.
Thoughts trailed after them like tails on kites,
like tin cans clattering to gain on a puppy dog’s tail.

She made land with her squirmy boatload
and disembarked at Byblos like a fainting Phoenix
with the back of her hand to her forehead
Tallulah-Bankhead style, and then died but rose
again from the twenty-six egg casings she laid
while dreaming she was founding libraries
that gave birth to a lot more libraries
whose geometrics progressed amongst us
beyond the scratch pad of basic arithmetic.

But the First Lettermaker herself had died.
Twenty-six offspring had wor

•