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“The Poetry Revolution is Now”
July 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
“The Poetry Revolution is Now”
Those are words I heard spoken on NPR this morning as I was driving my daughter to preschool. And I agree, although I have no idea by what dark magic poetry manages to remain alive. So many people would love to see it dead on the curb, a victim of multiple hit and runs. Yet there it was, wiggling and whispering, screaming and looming, some very nice poetry being read on the radio, at commuting hour no less, by poets whose work is actually published on real paper inside books. One such poet is Rebecca Foust, author of “All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song and God, Seed” published by Many Mountains Moving. Thank you oh lords and lordesses of the written word for allowing to exist small poetry friendly presses such as Many Mountains Moving. Because of these brave and no doubt penniless entitites, poetry continues to cling to life like a stubborn barnacle.
Even though there are other avenues these days for spreading a poetry meme, such as the Direct Message with a link to a poem that I received this morning from a poet slinging her wares in the tweetscape (props to her for being tenacious), the printed page is where poems live well, like plump little goldfish in aerated tanks with nice clean glass. Feel free to disagree with me, comments welcome, but poetry looks and sounds its best when it’s on paper. This is why, when I write poetry on my laptop (which I do now because, well, I work on my laptop and poetry is a great procrastination tool), I tend to print poems out on paper in order to edit them via ink pen, and then to read them aloud to myself. To me, this particular type of word sculpture belongs in tangible space, constructed from molecules, not just photons, and then sometimes read aloud by voices at a good pace.
A poem of Foust’s from her website:
(Maybe you’ll print it out? It’s worth the sheet of paper, really, just to hold it in your hand as you read it…and maybe you will read it again a little later, when you find the paper has been left on the kitchen table, and you’ll find something new in it.)
Sorry that my boy birthed himself
too early, took up so much room
in your prenatal nursery
with his two pounds, two ounces
and did not oblige your nurses
with easy veins.
Sorry we were such pains in your ass
asking you to answer our night calls like that,
and that he did everything so backwards:
lost weight, gained fluid
blew up like a human balloon
then shriveled.
Sorry about how he defied your prognoses,
skyrocketed premiums, weighted the costs
in your cost-benefit analyses,
skewed bell-curve predictions
into one long, straight line;
sorry he took so much of your time
being so determined to live. He spent
today saving hopeless-case nymph moths
trapped in the porchlight, one matrix-dot
at a time, and now he’s asleep; blue wingbeat
pulse fluttering his left temple—there,
there again. Just like it did then.
by Rebecca Foust