[New-Poetry] Firing Tad/Monson

[David Graham]

Yup.  Volunteers can quit, but it's hard to fire us!

And on an entirely unrelated note, a "new" poet has just appeared on  
my radar screen, courtesy of a student:  Ander Monson.

Anyone familiar with his work?

He just won the Graywolf nonfiction prize with a book of essays  
called *Neck Deep*; and he's also published fiction.  His poetry  
collection is titled *Vacationland*, and is published by Tupelo.

I gather that there are multiple title poems for the book.  Here's one:

VACATIONLAND

This place, this bearer of the chilly winter burst,
the white-out everywhere and flurry,
the not-in-the-terms-of-Dairy-Queen,
this blizzard with a lowercase b,
far from commercial in its constancy,
its threat, impact, and our recovery:
always from it. We are always re-shoveling
out the driveways and panking down the snow
or breaking up the ice with handmade iron spears
or spokes wrested from bikes that have succumbed
at last to rust. This is my vacationland, my very own
Misery Bay, my dredge, my lighthouses, my vanishing
animal tracks in snow. Everyone who is not from here
is not from here, and that is all there is to say.
Everyone from here is still from here
regardless of where they are or where they end.
White light filtering through snow like dust.
There is always light coming down
like a donation from God--a little perk
to get us through the winter that is constantly upon us.

This light lights up our faces, lights up the faces
of the frozen dead as seen on TV from Canada.
This vacationland, this motel open year-round,
is now a Best Western and that is good, I guess.
This vacationland, this Michigan,
my Michigan, is no destination, no getaway
for us, those who are always from.
We have no destinations. We have no way
to get away from her, from here, to get away
from romantic winter getaways and those
who’ve come to get away from dull bombs of city lives.
We cannot get away from from and from the doldrum
winter silent burn. We might as well be stone--agates,
mottled trifles, appearing periodically on the beach
to be taken home, to be put with other pretty rocks
and bits of lake glass in jars. We are meant for your mantel
and for the light that will find us there.

We might as well be the kind of rock
that passes for rock on the radio up here,
meaning Foreigner and Journey and nothing
that could be ever meaningful again
because it has been subsumed by soft-rock
crap-rock, classic-rock, by radio, by frequency modulated
energy in air, by the tyranny
of awful playlists and shitty DJs
and no hope of getting a decent song
played for us to be indifferent to at prom.

We are what is left. We are drift.
I guess this is a sort of manifesto.

--Ander Monson


On Feb 14, 2007, at 4:13 AM, Anny Ballardini wrote:

> Never or evern then never and nor ever than never never never
> :-)
>
> right Jim?
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: opus40-01 at opus40.org
> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News & Views
> Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 2:09 AM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] NewPoetry List is 5 Years Old
>
> I was wondering if this was a subtle way of telling me I'd been fired.



========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
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