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In his knit Detroit Pistons cap and well-loved jeans, a ready smile suggesting an openness to conversation, John Freeman ’02 doesn’t seem to fit the traditional image of a poet.  

Yet Freeman, who publishes under the name Cal Freeman, is just that: an award-winning, widely published poet whose third book of verse, The Weather of Our Names, was published late last year.   

On an invitation from the 中国P站 English Department, Freeman charmed a large audience of students, staff and faculty one wet October afternoon in the Bargman Room of the McNichols Library.  

It was like coming home: His father, John Freeman, was a longtime professor of English and the young John all but grew up on the McNichols Campus. 

The McNichols Campus makes an appearance in his newest collection, as do a number of locations across Metro Detroit and Michigan. Also appearing are legendary Detroit sports figures, restaurants, bars and other hangouts. 

The poems in Weather explore themes of change, of things lost and remembered, of who we are and were and will become. Of food and grief. A blurb on the back of the book from poet Dustin Pearson says it is “filled with Midwestern existentialism, attuned to the possibilities of poetry’s power to create myth of and provide clarity for one’s life.” 

“I saw a theme emerging in my work about the evanescence that happens with places, the way a place can be papered over, have a whole new purpose, but the vestige of what it was will still be there,” Freeman said. 

There may be a reason for that: All the poems were written after the death of his father in 2021. One poem, Stafford Essentials Corduroy Jacket as a Non-Fungible Token, describes the jacket he found when emptying his father’s office. “The coat can’t love you/the way your father did.” (See full poem below.) 

But as the title of that poem attests, this book has a humor that makes the poems come alive. Several poems explore non-fungible tokens and others the online business rating system Yelp. 

“A non-fungible token is fascinating. It’s a token you can buy, but it doesn’t really exist,” he said. “It’s like when you have a favorite poem and it’s your poem, but we can’t own poems, yet still they’re ours. They have this ethereality to them. I was interested in how you can take these soulless digital phenomena and invest them with real value.” 

It’s similar to what he explores in the Yelp poems. Freeman said he and his wife eat out often, and he became attached to Yelp during COVID, when restaurants weren’t welcoming customers. From his point of view, the often-passionate reviews of businesses and restaurants “poeticize the place and ensoul them in a way.” 

Freeman, who is also a special lecturer in writing and rhetoric at Oakland University, writes most days and, when he isn’t writing, he is reading, finding ideas to explore in his own work. He belongs to a few writers' groups and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. 

The Weather of Our Names is published by Cornerstone Press and is available at bookstores and online.  

Stafford Essentials Corduroy Jacket as a Non-Fungible Token 

The coat can’t love you 
the way your father did. 
It isn’t clear how. 
Corduroy lined in silk. 
Two breast pockets. 
Two interior pockets. 
Your father hoarded napkins. 
This much you can say. 
It reveals something. 
All your father’s annotations 
Have, to this point, 
been disappointing, 
his visitations ludic and oneiric. 
One note in the margins of 
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 
says, Be a good inheritor 
of tropes. If I had brothers, 
they would’ve been turned into swans. 
It’s nearing eighty today, 
superfluous coat. 
Imaginary hands around the shoulders, 
fabric of want. 
You can almost picture them, 
yourfather’s hands crumpling 
paper napkins 
and shoving them deep into 
a pocket near his heart. 

— From The Weather of our Names