Authors are often told to write about what they know, so it helps to have led an interesting life. Denver poet Robert Cooperman has. His last collection of poems was about his adventures driving a taxicab in New York City. His new one, "City Hall Frame Factory," is about the millinery business his family owned in New York.
Read the first poem from the new collection:
Jackie Kennedy’s Hats
Every time she and her dashing husband appeared outdoors on TV, JFK with his hair tousled by the wind; Jackie in an elegant chapeau, my father would bless her unsolicited endorsement for the millinery trade in general, his hat frame factory in particular.
But then her terrible betrayal: on the Evening News, her dark locks blew free, no hat to hold them in place, no inspiration for other women to follow her fashionable example.
“There goes the business,” Dad sighed.
Over the next few weeks, there she was again and again, chapeau-less, when once she’d stood so stylish, yet just the right amount of reserve, in a pillbox or summer hat.
The demise wasn’t quick; no customers called the next morning, shouting at Dad to cancel their orders; or him reading in the papers about fancy hat shop owners jumping from high windows, as stock brokers had done on Black Tuesday in 1929.
That might’ve been more merciful, but the business limped on like a wounded hare pursued by a fox. It took a few years for the collapse: some seasons better than others.
Through it all, Dad couldn’t help but love Kennedy’s beautiful wife, then widow, but never trusted her again.
