Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jack Anderson

This poem by Jack Anderson appeared in Hanging Loose 88 and was the title poem of his 2009 collection from HL.

GETTING LOST IN A CITY LIKE THIS

Getting lost is the first thing you find yourself doing here
You stand getting lost right in front of your front door
You wander another way and wonder of wonder
You bump into yourself getting lost there once more

You discover no street parallels anything else here
restaurants sink lost into stews of addresses
Facades circle squares and disappear lost
While strollers walk lost through rainstorms of architecture

Tram cars get lost but slither past carefree
You ask “Is this Prague?  Or Paris?  I’m lost.”
If you found your way yesterday you didn’t you’re still lost
For though you stare at the map the map stares back lost

From now on you can never abandon being lost
So wherever you find yourself you must love yourself lost

-- Jack Anderson

The hangingloosepress.com website includes a complete index to the 95 issues of the magazine we’ve published so far (#96 will be out in April, grab your checkbook!) and I frequently find myself wandering around in it, usually to check the spelling of a name or the accuracy of a title, but often just roaming aimlessly.

Hmmm, did we really publish her? Did we publish him that early? I’m always intrigued by people we published in one issue who we never heard from again. (When I find editors who like my poems, I build a hut on their front step and stay there until they burn me out.)

In contrast to those who come our way but once, there are the HL lifers, the people whose work we have printed year after year, sometimes decade after decade, whose writings are inextricably bound up with our history and the perception of who we are.  Of these, no one has had a longer HL life than Jack Anderson.

Jack had three poems in the first issue, which came rolling out of the mimeograph machine in 1966, and four poems in #93, with frequent visits along the way. He is very civilized company, a witty and sharp-eyed New Yorker and a knowledgeable world-traveler. At the same time, his work often touches on his memories of church suppers and the like in the Milwaukee of his boyhood. (Oddly, his poems almost never reflect his other long career, as a dance critic, for The New York Times and other publications.) I love this poem, Getting Lost, because it combines bad-dream menace with playful language and an ultimate sweetness. It evokes my favorite travel moment: Arrive in a new city, stick a map in your pocket and start walking, getting lost, getting found, getting lost again, until the city begins to yield its essential shape. What’s better than that!

-- Robert Hershon

Comments

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Bob---it's good to be reminded of Jack Anderson & what a great poet he is. I still have my 1969 copy of The Invention of New Jersey ($2.25 list!), which is filled with terrific poems.