Two Poems

Poetry / Dear Anselm

:: Dear Anselm ::

Dear Anselm PDF

 

 

 

:: As in Leaving the Pyroclastic Volcano ::

As in Leav­ing PDF

 

 

 

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

 

“Dear Anselm”

I took some emails I had writ­ten to my friend and decid­ed to turn some of them into a poem. I still feel guilty for not return­ing his MoMA mem­ber­ship card.

“As in Leav­ing the Pyro­clas­tic Volcano”

The first pan­el was inspired by the stark land­scape of North­ern Ice­land. I imag­ined a broth­er and sis­ter hold­ing hands and wit­ness­ing a vio­lent tra­di­tion (a whale heli­coptered above the caldera of a vol­cano and dropped in). I guess it’s a metaphor for how adults treat the envi­ron­ment and what we pass to our chil­dren. The sec­ond pan­el is a kind of light Frue­di­an dra­ma between two gey­sers in Ice­land. This was inspired by a geyser that went dor­mant (the father) and the younger geyser (the son) who keeps blow­ing steam into the world. The third pan­el was writ­ten on the flight leav­ing Ice­land. I turned on the TV and clicked on the flight path and we were fly­ing above a place called “Hap­py Val­ley Goose Bay” and I loved the name so much, I had to put it into a poem. 

 

San­dra Simonds is a poet and crit­ic. Her eighth book of poems, a col­lec­tion of trip­tychs, will be pub­lished by Wave Books in 2022. Her forth­com­ing nov­el, Assia (Noe­mi Press, 2023) is based on the life of Assia Wevill.