☀ Today's Poem: "Dear Listener" Julie Carr

April 8, 2025

Dear Listener

I didn't know what I was doing or why I was doing it.
Perhaps you guided me as if a path through deep grass, as if the color blue

episodic flare—

and there were bags, baggage unclaimed
and other women watching me, they seemed hurt—I had, I knew it,

hurt them in some way. I was ill, I would have slept
longer still, but that I was on the highway,

the highway had a place for me to fill,
so that when I came then to find you, I was late.

Listener, no striving, in a sense, no choosing. I arrived,
tiny weeds in my fingers, dirt in the skin of my hands.

A monarch appeared behind me—a girl in the spray of the hose.

These things are real, I'm telling them to you
though I've wanted to diminish them, to turn myself

harder. I am light,
she said, I am stretchy, I feel like nothing and it feels so good.

I feel like nothing, like I am nothing. I could play for 49 hours,

for 49 hours and 59 minutes, and I would even play
for 50 hours if you asked me to, if I had to, she said.

Listener, you are forbidden, far, and unreal until
I make you up by telling you

what she said.

from the book UNDERSCORE / Omnidawn Publishing

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

This poem is in part my response to Wallace Stevens's "The Snowman," a snow-girl for summer. The listener is the reader, the writer, and also the infinite, the nothing, the unnamable us-not-us to whom we present ourselves. I was interested in the dynamic between the "real" and the "imagined." Writing, we make the real imaginary and the imaginary, real. Writing, we invent and address our listener, we open ourselves to the nothing that is.

Julie Carr on "Dear Listener"

Cover of the book Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master

What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back

"A jolt of recognition hit me as I read Bert Meyers’ 'Rainy Day' one sunny morning two Junes ago. Twenty years before, I’d heard another Meyers poem ('Daybreak') read aloud and loved it, but for the life of me couldn’t remember the poet’s name—just that his work was unjustly obscure and out of print. Yet Meyers’s voice is so distinctive ('the iron rain, with its little keys / is closing all the doors …”) that I knew immediately this was the poet I’d been looking for. I bought the book—itself a revelation of what the humble lyric poem is capable of—and now teach his work to my high school students. They love it, too."

Brendan Berls

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Maggie Millner

National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35"

Maggie Millner was nominated for the National Book Awards' 5 Under 35 for her book Couplets: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan). She was nominated alongside Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, Megan Howell, Alexander Sammartino, and Jemimah Wei.

viaNATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com.
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency