Joe Whitten’s love of words has paid off for the Odenville native through the years.Whitten’s most recent accomplishment was winning second and first place in the spring 2008 competition of the Alabama State Poetry Society contest.
His “Lunch at the Tea Room” won second place and his “Spring Snapshot” won first place.
In the recent past, Whitten has also held the honorable position of Alabama Senior Poet Laureate in 2004 by winning first place in the Senior Poets Laureate Poetry Competition for American Poets age 50 and older.
That annual competition is sponsored by the Amy Kitchener’s Angels Without Wings Foundation.
Whitten was also named the Alabama State Poet of the Year in 2002.
“I wrote my first poem in the ninth grade and it was not well received by my teachers,” Whitten said. “I wrote a verse about each one. Luckily, my mother never found out about that. But I have always said there are words, therefore I write.”
Whitten did not, however, become serious about writing poetry until adulthood.
He minored in English in college, but did not take poetry classes.
Whitten said he enjoyed writing term papers and doing the research required to write a good paper.
He said that got him interested in researching St. Clair County history.
Whitten was invited to attend a meeting of the William J. Hug Writer’s Club, a critiquing group at Jacksonville State University, in about 1990.
Whitten read a poem he had written for his wife and was accepted into the group.
He said he enjoys the group because he can learn a great deal by listening to the suggestions.
Whitten said he will always try what someone has suggested, even if he doesn’t think it will improve his writing.
He taught school for 39 years, spending more than 35 of those years teaching in Odenville.
The last 18 years before he retired, Whitten was the librarian in the elementary school in Odenville, spending his days with kindergarten and first-grade students.
“I loved it,” he said. “I had a ball with those students 30 minutes at a time. They named the library after me so it is now the Joseph L. Whitten Library.”
Whitten’s wife, Gail, is also a teacher who worked for 35 years before retiring.
The couple met in a Bible study class at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., in 1955 and became friends before eventually marrying.
Besides teaching, the two also share a love of words.
“There are times I have gotten up from the table at a restaurant to get the dictionary from the car because we are discussing a word,” Whitten said.
Gail said not only must there be a dictionary in the car for just such occasions, sometimes there is more than one dictionary in the car. This has caused problems on the road that warrant a chuckle when they reflect on them now.
“Once, we were driving and we decided to count how many dictionaries were in the car,” Gail said. “And we ended up having an accident.”
Whitten said it was just a slight bump and now that it has mellowed in his memory, he can see the humor in the situation.
Whitten said his poetry comes from his enjoyment of taking ordinary events and adding a twist to them.
“I talked about quiche being foreign to my grandfather in ‘Lunch at the Tea Room,’ but I took poetic license on that,” Whitten said. “It was actually a mandarin chicken salad. But I used that to show how his struggles through the Depression contrasted with the event.”
Whitten has had poems published in “Lyric,” “Harp-Strings Poetry Journal,” “Noccalula,” “ByLine Magazine,” “Birmingham Arts Journal” and “Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Poetry” edited by Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama.
He has published one collection of poems titled “Mulled Memories,” and two chapbooks titled “Evensong” and Rejoice and Bah Humbug!”
To find out more about the contest or enter a submission for the next contest in the fall, go to www.alabamapoets.org.
