Listen up. The daddy knows that some of you may have seen this post, but the daddy didn't want to close National Poetry Month without you considering adding to your list of master poets the name of Rita Dove, the first African American poet laureate of the
You didn't want us when we left
but we went.
You didn't want us coming back
but here we are.
In "Alfonzo Prepares To Go Over The Top," Dove puts us on the front lines, showing
us war in all of its horror ("moves ass and balls, over tearing twigs and crushed
faces") and a soldier's life ("hear the leaves? I am already memory") as pawn
in a bigger game and temporary at best:
Alfonzo Prepares To Go Over The Top
A soldier waits until he's called- then
moves ass and balls, over
tearing twigs and crushed faces,
swinging his bayonet like a pitchfork
and thinking anything's better
than a trench, ratshit
and the tender hairs of chickweed.
A soldier is smoke
waiting for wind: he's a long corridor
clanging to the back of a house
where a child sings
in its ruined nursery...
and beauty is the
gleam of my eye on this gunstock and my spit
drying on the blade of this knife
before it warms itself in the gut of a kraut.
Mother, forgive me. Hear the leaves? I am
already memory.
In Bill Moyer's The Language of Life, Dove said of poetry:
"By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us the opportunity to think about ourselves
on this planet and what we mean to each other...Equally important is the connection poetry
emphasizes of human being to human being: What are we doing to make everyone's lives
better, and not materially, but spiritually as well? I think that why poetry has often been
considered dangerous."
Drink from the cup of poetry. Go ahead. Have some Rita Dove, a poet you should know.
4 comments:
Now she's a good one.
Awesome imagery. I admire and envy her talent. I try my hand at poetry now and then, but give up frustrated in the knowledge that I am (as my old broadcast prof once put it) "a linear thinker". Good poetry requires a deft hand and a wide-open, highly creative mind.
If you love her work and live in the Twin Cities, Rita will be reading from her new book 'Sonata Mulattica' and interviewed live by MPR May 11 @ 7pm at the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul.
XO: Thanks for the info. And thank you for timely comments on this blog as well.
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