☀ Today's Poem: "I Ride an Old Paint" Frederick Seidel

August 4, 2019

My silly body fell down a set of stairs.
My big body doesn't always know who I am.
Doesn't recognize who it's with or how or why.
My silly body isn't always my buddy.
It doesn't always know where it is.
It fell down a flight of stairs.

It doesn't always know who's the boss.
It's like having your horse shot out from under you
While you're on your way to compete at the rodeo.
Are you the boss or the horse?
Life is always on the way to the rodeo
And suddenly your horse, Old Paint, ain't
Under you no more, cowboy, and you're on a gurney
At Greenport Hospital on your way to being X-rayed,
A hospital famous for its incompetence
But also for how pleasant the Emergency Room staff is.

Your body is a bag of love you walk around in.
My body turned the wrong way and stepped into thin air.
It could have died, with me on top of it in the crew compartment.
I'm in the cockpit on top of the rocket.
I can see a smudge of darkness in the distance
Which is a thunderstorm out over Long Island Sound.

I am alone with myself in my helmet of bone,
Checking for messages on my iPhone.
Now I will go back to going from here to there.
Wish me a safe journey with a nodule on one lung
Discovered in the X-ray after my body fell down.

Reader, I am the words that you are reading.
Reader, when I have long since ceased to exist,
I will be looking at you while you read this.

I am the enormous, extreme
Smile of summer rain.

from the book PEACHES GOES IT ALONE / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Forward

"Marilyn Hacker: Rebel Traditionalist"

"Despite the recognition that Hacker received, she received less critical attention than the poets half a generation ahead of her: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur. That lack of attention continues even though there is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker. Indeed, I view Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2018 as a brief for that case."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

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What Sparks Poetry:
Kaveh Akbar on francine j. harris's
"katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet."

"When I found harris's poem, I saw myself, I saw the midwest I knew, I saw my own disregard for the interiority of others, I saw my own sloppiness. It’s a poem that performs its own searching, too—you hear the speaker reworking their language, endlessly reprocessing their positions and complicities."

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Apply to the 9th Annual Bread Loaf in Sicily Conference
September 22 to 28, 2019

Offering small, intensive workshops in Erice, a mountaintop town overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Work with poetry faculty Geoffrey Brock and Patrick Phillips to receive feedback on your original poetry or poetry translated into English. Only two spots left - Apply Now!

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