While I bumped cluelessly through my teens in Savannah, I had a friend of a friend whose mother was a poet.

She was a policeman’s widow, and she lived on Windsor Road in a dusty pink house with her long-haired teenage son and, on most nights, his pixie-haired girlfriend.

Their house had 36-year-old, brown carpet and a faint smell of cinnamon and dust from particle board bookshelves.

I always thought being a poet was the coolest job to have.

But I had trouble, in my naive teens, recognizing how to live on a poet’s salary. Do poets even get a salary? Did this woman sell enough anthologies to make the house payment? At one time, I thought that her late husband’s life insurance policy had something to do with her capability of having a poet job. Then again, her car was always gone from 7 in the morning until around 5.

I never put it together that she may have actually had a “real” job until about two days ago. I met Dobby Gibson, a local poet and author of Polar (2004), Skirmish (2010), and It Becomes You (forthcoming January 2013). At the request of a colleague and dear friend Kari Beutz, Mr. Gibson spoke to several classes of secondary students, young scholars who appreciate a literary turn of phrase.

Thank you, Dobby Gibson, for illustrating to us found poetry as well as hope for literary careers.

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