Jim Bertolino, re-nouned poet, and Anita Boyle emerging

Jim Bertolino is a re-nouned poet. That is, Bertolino began life as a noun, but took the pose of an adjective as young man. Finding this adjectival status to be somewhat derivative, Bertolino underwent the difficult and not always successful procedure of re-nouning.

I am happy to report that Bertolino is quite happy these days, living as a re-nouned poet, no longer the object of scorn or controversy.

"I am much more myself than I have ever been," he said, last August, whilst sipping a beer in a lawn chair. He was in deep settlement with his living partner, Anita Boyle, both seated in lawn chairs, next to the Frog Pond, which adorns her property, a horse-riven farm on the Mount Baker Road outside of Bellingham. One can't see the big highway from the little frog pond. One can only see, or more often, hear the frogs.

Anita, an emerging poet, parsed that status for me. "You see, Frog Freddy, I had been for many years a merged poet, even, at times, a sub-merged poet. I did not know my own strength. Yet I threw off the shackles that bound me."

I was so glad to hear this about Anita. I too was sipping a beer by the frog-riven pond. She continued, "In Latin, the word emerge comes from the Latin verb ex-mergere, which means to become unjoined, or even to mean becoming unglued. Therefore, and upon researching this, I, like a mayfly on a trout stream, emerged."

With all three lawn chairs established that summer evening, we drank more beer until it became too dark to hear the frogs.