It took me a long time to figure out why I like this poem. The title alone kills me. I’ve made up a story about how it relates to the actual poem, but I’m less than 50% confident on it. I also love that it captures how much goes on in one’s mind mid-sentence. We have to wait for an inner dialog or narration to find out what must must be awful. When we finally find out, it’s unexpected, sweet, and mean, all at the same time.
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As so many of his poems so clever and well-done. I hope whoever is reading this has found the person they want to get “Russian” with.
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They were aesthetes, which means
I was forced to eat a hard peach,
commissioned to paint a twelve-foot abstraction
based on watching host cells collaborate
in bacterial infection, and at night
chewed the soles of their mukluks
till they were soft again.
If I ventured outside the igloo
and saw a celebrity,
I felt so inferior
I wanted to die.
To conceal my envy
I was given dark glasses.
If, on ther other hand, I encountered
someone to whom I was vastly superior,
one of those ill-clad, raving, wandering hags,
I felt ashamed and wanted to die.
To appease my guilt
they were given by the Elders a little of my grub.
If I met with an Ordinary,
someone not dissimilar to myself,
with dissatisfactions roughtly the same,
I felt the world was senseless
supporting so many look-alikes
and again I asked to die:
life reached a maddening peak
out there on the ice when
we were hunting and could move only our eyes.
Still, like a seal reaching his blowhole
in the dark, every seventy-two hours
I came to my senses for thirteen minutes
and continued to live with the knowledge
that deep in the oyster bed of blood
layered spheres continued to build round
my name, cold, calciferous, and forgotten.
When The Giant Orphan At The Bottom Of The Sea
appeared in my dreams,
demanding I write the story
of three generations of Ox women
resulting in the birth of a performance artist,
I knew I would need a knife, gun, needles,
kettle, scissors, and soap,
and gave up, at last, my finest skins.
I made my escape across the shrouded inlet
away from those who believe that outside
our minds there is only mist,
and with my skills at flensing
never feared for the future.
I get a little lost in Mary Ruefle’s poem toward the end. But the middle is so good I don’t even care.
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I have a weakness for poems like this that permute the same words over and over again. See Seed Poem by Charles Stein I posted earlier. This hits that same craving. I heard the recording first. I’m not sure if that helped me read this one better than I would have otherwise. Either way, check out the recording linked to by the poem’s name on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Kearney kills the reading.
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I have to be honest this poem wasn’t love at first site. I’m not sure what it was. I think it had something to do with the the language not really projecting the authority to make the kind of declarations it makes. But it’s famous enough so that you hear run into it a lot, and slowly it got its hooks in me. Check it out here at the Poetry Foundation’s website.
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I read this poem at Sixfold magazine. The journal has a really interesting submission process. Essentially the people who have submitted poems vote for the best submissions and the top 30 make the magazine. Anyway, this is by far my favorite poem of all the different submissions I read. The user was anonymous, but if he/she ever finds this post. Let me know your name please. …and send me more poems. I love this one!
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I have no idea where I found this poem. If anyone knows the poet, let me know. I would love to read more of this poet’s work.
Eric with the Light Brown Hair
I have no horse! I have no horse!Â
cries Eric sitting on the porchÂ
of the Twin Maples Retirement Home
and it’s a fine spring day,Â
I am walking to the playground
when I stop to hear this,
the most profound moment our town
has seen since the ice-cream truck
adopted a rendition of Stephen Foster’s
Oh! Susanna
the profundity of which should be apparentÂ
to all those who linger in blissful repose
over the sad lives of great forgotten men
I have no horse! I have no horse!Â
Eric behaves as one doesÂ
after a beheadment
and I love the ology of itÂ
and the ism of his cry
I love the ology of cloudsÂ
and the ism of rain tooÂ
but not as specifically asÂ
I love Eric, who seeks his red rose
in the fume of the moment
his mouth oily and explosive,Â
wide open, waiting for someone
to throw a few peanuts in
God has made some pretty weird commentsÂ
in his time, about the nature of human
life and all of that, naturally
they are profound
but somehow they seem like a morbid imitationÂ
compared to Eric’s
and even if he goes back centuriesÂ
every time he gets stewed
like the wildflowers who wither on the shoreÂ
far from our native glen
I sigh for Eric, who I unanswered,Â
I sigh for Eric who once had light brown hair.
as I swingÂ
floating like a vapor
on the soft-spoken air
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I’ve spent the last hour trying to figure out who wrote this piece of run-on goodness. I thought it was by Dean Young, but if it is, I can’t locate it. I’d apprecitate any help if you know where this is from.
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This Brendan Galvin poem is filled with such beautiful masculine creepery.
Dear Blank. That’s how I think of you.
Nameless as your eyes would disclose you
if I got that close.
You may have noticed me, though,
in my window above the street
where I pretend to be switching channels.
I suspect your mother suspects
I have been watching you,
and maybe she is correct to guard
her clothesline, the seven flavors
of your nighties, your pantyhose having a fling
with the breeze. If you think I am humorless
you are wrong. I see the comedy
of those popsicle-colored convertibles
you and your friends jazz around in.
I see your father’s pride
when he waters the flowers and you
practice handstands or pump your arms
and work over the grunts
of a high-school cheer.
I’m not going to slide out of shadow
with a voice full of peanuts, Hey, Girlie,
a crank who stuffs pigeons
into a sack. Oh, no. Secure in my creephood,
it’s enough to watch, knowing that one day
perfect teeth enter the pizza
that breaks the cartwheel’s back.
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Right in the middle of Parade by Tony Hoagland, I ran into this.
Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
–never objecting, never making an apology.
I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
dissappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.
I felt so called out on my shit, like Hoagland came to my house, punched me in the balls and left.
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This Mary Ruefle poem is one of my favorites of hers. I haven’t heard her read it unfortunately, but I found this in her Trances of the Blast collection.
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This is one of my favorites. I’ve heard Shapiro read this one. It’s great spoken or on the page. Here is the page-version from Slate.
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I first heard Le Petit Vie on the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the day podcast. I love Edwin Butt’s poem written too.
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In every life, there’s a moment or two.
In every life, a room somewhere, by the sea or in the mountains.
On the table, a dish of apricots. Pits in a white ashtray.
Like all images, these were the conditions of a pact:
on your cheek, tremor of sunlight,
my finger pressing your lips.
The walls blue-white; paint from the low bureau flaking a little.
That room must still exist, on the fourth floor,
with a small balcony overlooking the ocean.
A square white room, the top sheet pulled back over the edge of the bed.
It hasn’t dissolved back into nothing, into reality.
Through the open window, sea air, smelling of iodine.
Early morning: a man calling a small boy back from the water.
That small boy–he would be twenty now.
Around your face, rushes of damp hair, streaked with auburn.
Muslin, flicker of silver. Heavy jar filled with white peonies.
Every time I read this it takes me to my room somewhere. I first experienced this poem on the page. I wish I could find a recording of Gluck reading it.
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This is a great example of how lightning can strike anywhere. I photo copied this page from a book of poems in the library. I didn’t like any of the other poems. I don’t even like this poem, but the second stanza by itself is probably the best thing I’ve read all year. It kills me every time I read it. I tried to track down who wrote it, but wasn’t able to. If anyone reads and recognizes it, please let me know.
Robert Saunders was a good friend. He passed away 10 years ago and I still miss him. It is hard to know if I’d like this poem as much if I didn’t know him personally. It definitely reminds me about what I loved so much being around him. I guess it doesn’t really matter though, if you love a poem, you love a poem.
Birdseed
This Nikky Finney poem is too long for my usual taste, but just took me in. I heard it first and was enchanted by the multitude of conflicting emotions that one event could elicit. Having since read it, I still really enjoy the text version. Here is a link to both versions on the Poetry Foundation’s site.
This is an old favorite. I only know it from a audio compilation of poems from Giorno Poetry Systems. It’s read by Charles Stein. I can’t find the text of it anywhere. If you have the poem or can find it online, let me know. This poem is as smart, playful, and funny as any I know. Here is a link to the album I found it on. It’s called Seed Poem.
Pyramid is the best poem I’ve read in a long time. Here it is on the Poetry Foundation website. You can also hear Hera Lindsay Bird read it. I heard it first and fell in love with it. Sometimes I have the strange experience of then not enjoying the text as much, but I love this poem in either form.
