Poetry / Mark Neely
:: re: Poet Laureate::
I am afraid I have to refuse the laureate after all must envision edifying projects stroll through schoolrooms dropping verse into children’s beaks or force it down their pretty teenage throats to fatten up their hearts a laureate should have the gravity of a minor planet a gaseous atmosphere that can easily liquify a soul and my mornings are rough already I choke down coffee by the thermos trying to see in the ink something other than self- loathing zipped in my space suit even simple chores become difficult there are days I cannot stand to look at my shoes lined up by the door once I saw a moose swim across a bay the miraculous driftwood of its antlers hovered above the water a laureate would have to get that in a poem somehow I want to build a monstrous ship that eats ten thousand tons of plastic every second that squeezes through each canal suturing the planet’s scars I steer it towards my father as his hospital bed sinks in the waves and the sun closes its furious eye I taste salt on my lips he can barely lift his arm to wave goodbye
From the writer
:: Account ::
There was a time when I didn’t like “poems about poetry.” As soon as I caught a whiff of that kind of thing, I tuned out. Now I see how narrow minded I was in those days. Poetry is personality. Poetry is politics. Poetry is how we love and grieve. The best ars poeticas are, like all good poems, about a bunch of things all at once. These days I find myself working away on a manuscript about teaching, poetry, and art—a fact that would certainly horrify my younger self, who wanted to be Gary Snyder and write poems about chopping wood and other such manly things.
In one of the poems from the manuscript, “re: Poet Laureate,” I wanted to have a bit of fun—both with the idea that anyone would ever ask me to be poet laureate of anything (ha!), and with the whole concept of the laureate, which is the awkward marriage of poetry (perhaps the most thoughtful form of language) and government (where language is typically mangled and manipulated in an attempt to convince people to vote against their own best interests).
Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill, and Dirty Bomb, (Oberlin College Press). His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for an Indiana Author Award. His other awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist Grant, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award for Four of a Kind. He is a professor of English at Ball State University, and a senior editor at River Teeth: a Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.