[New-Poetry] Dark Horses

[JforJames at aol.com]

It's that time of year when some of us like to post the titles of books  
we've enjoyed during the year.
(Consider that an invitation.)
 
A few weeks ago we were talking about Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn,  and her 
claim to have
sought out poems off the beaten track of traditional anthology's tables of  
contents. Well
here's a book that really does that: Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked  Poems. 
It's an eclectic
collection and the editors certainly tried to cover the aesthetic  waterfront 
(there is even a poem,
for Bob G, by Man Ray, that is certainly conceptual and can only be  
experienced visually). 
Unlike the aforementioned Paglia anthology, no one person picked the poems.  
75 contemporary 
American poets each got to pick a single poem. But like Paglia's anthology  
each poem is 'praised 
or defended' with a brief essay about the poem and why it's important or  
what makes 
it special to the person who selected it. For a taste, I'll post one that  C. 
K. Williams ecstatically 
praised....
 
 
 
The Ruiner of Lives
 

Who knows how things end up,
spliced together in the mind.
 
Last night the car was lugging
up the long hill toward home
when a  fox came sleepwalking 
 
out of the alders onto the road.
Something was wrong with it.
It  listed a little to one side
 
and moved without fox-quickness,
not sniffing, not scared,
but calm,  almost formal,
 
with a yellow opacity in its eyes
 
as if it had recently
been dreaming of being blind.
 
It stood staring down the double barrel
of the headlights till I stopped  the car.
 
Who knows why, but at that moment
five words came awake in my  mind:
 
God the ruiner of lives—
 
A line of graffiti I once saw
sprayed on a pink wall in the  tropics.
Now five sharp stars in a northern night,
shaken out of their  sleep.
 
I was only August, but already 
the uppermost leaves of the stricken  maples
were ragged and red,
 
and the small curled leaves 
of the barren apples
scuttled across the  road.
 
The fox and I—who was our ruiner?
 
I with the sin of despair
for the world my species has spoiled,
 
the fox for its hunger,
its rabies, its dirty coat
slung over a frail  skeleton.
 
A fox of the future
digging in the underbrush
for our remains will  find
 
more trash than bones.
 
I laid my hand over my heart
to put out the fire lit by this  idea,
and stroked and stroked as if it were
 
a terrorist I could cure of its rage
with kindness and animal  calm.
 
The yellow eyes went on dreaming 
the car, the road curved into the  dark.
 
Poor fox, poor mystic,
attracted to a light it can’t explain.
 
A light that drives away
and leaves us both,
here under the  cold,
 
crumbling trees of heaven.
 

—Chase Twichell, reprinted in the anthology Dark Horses: Poets on  Overlooked 
Poems,
edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007)  

**************Make your life easier with all your friends, email, and 
favorite sites in one place.  Try it now. 
(http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000010)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20081206/7b7d3f75/attachment.html