“I don’t know what’s been happening to me. Maybe I have adult onset ADD,” wrote Dr. Kevin O’Donnell in the opening stanza to his poem, “Tom Bosley Sells Life Insurance on Late Night Television.”
But a poem on paper doesn’t mean O’Donnell calls himself a poet. With only two years of “dabbling” and no published works, the self-described eclectic is anything but a self-proclaimed poet.
However, his randomly inspired works, purposely lacking in any strict form or meter, are O’Donnell’s tools of expression and performance. “I’m an advocate of pretty good poetry,” O’Donnell said. “It doesn’t all have to be great.”
Putting his words into action, O’Donnell has organized an “Open Mike” night for the second year to showcase the works of talented individuals on the ETSU campus whose works are rarely performed publicly.
“There are so many people around here who write and you don’t hear their poems,” said O’Donnell, an English professor at ETSU.
The event, geared toward the English Department community, is scheduled for March 30 at The Acoustic Coffeehouse on West Walnut Street in Johnson City. Anyone, however, can come perform or simply enjoy the show, O’Donnell said.
Last year’s gathering included students and teachers and a mixing of music, poetry and instrumental performances. O’Donnell said he hopes this year will bring another full two-hour program and draw a larger crowd.
While he was emcee at last year’s performance, O’Donnell plans to perform a piece or two of his own at this year’s event.
His poetry ranges, he said, from “expository” writing to nature poems about the wood thrush of East Tennessee, tracing the creature’s life through a season. “From May through August, you can hear its acrobatic, reedy trill that reminds you, at first, of a wooden flute,” O’Donnell wrote in the second stanza of “Wood Thrush.”
“To write a poem about a bird, who does that,” O’Donnell said, “I just thought it’d be a funny thing to do.”
Inspiration for his poetry comes from many places especially those obscure situations that strike him as different.
“Even traveling around the U.S. on road trips, you see things differently,” O’Donnell said. “It’s like ‘Oh, I have to write that down.’ ”
O’Donnell finds that his own journal can be the best source for poetry and inspiration.
“Sometimes you look back at a journal entry and say, ‘Hey, that looks like a poem,” O’Donnell said.
But O’Donnell’s inspiration is not limited to his life outside of work. Situations of interest and enjoyment for him are deeply rooted in the classroom, as well. “It’s fun to be able to read books and talk about them for a living, but I also like reading the stuff that students write,” O’Donnell said. “You get a lot of insight into peoples’ thinking where otherwise they’d just be strangers.”
In the classroom O’Donnell teaches that “almost anything can be a poem.” In his Environmental Literature class, a section devoted to studying environmental issues in famous literature, O’Donnell has his students examine passages from Thoreau and Emerson to reveal the poetic essence that can exist in environmental literary classics.
“One of the things about teaching poetry in the English department is sometimes students get all tense, like it’s got to be really good and brilliant,” O’Donnell said, who writes first drafts of his poems in 10 minutes.
“People approach poetry like that too . They approach a poem on page with a really serious attitude and almost that sense of obligation like ‘I have to read this.’ That kills the joy in it.

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