George Bilgere opens his poem "Tar Pits" with the line "The last time I saw my father..."
He is not alone in using that phrase for a poem or perhaps as a prompt. It is a wide open line that could inspire a very sentimental poem like "The Last Time" by an author unknown, or the brutally powerful "The Last Time" by Rachel McKibbens.
Bilgere takes a day from a child's memory of a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits which is a still-active paleontological research site which is somewhat oddly located in urban Los Angeles. The tourist attraction surrounds a group of tar pits where natural asphalt has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years, and over many centuries, the bones of trapped animals have been preserved. He not only remembers this day with his divorced father, but in adulthood he connects the preserved remains with his father and wishes that his father "could rise from that black pit and emerge into light."
George Bilgere came to my attention via the then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins who chose his collection The Good Kiss for the University of Akron Poetry Prize, and via his appearances in Garrison Keillor's The Writer’s Almanac and on A Prairie Home Companion.
He has won the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Cheap Motels of My Youth which is the latest in his poetry books that now total nine.
In 2024, he launched a daily poem website, Poetry Town. He is Distinguished Professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his "lovely wife and two fine little boys." His website is georgebilgere.com
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