But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether
and dwindle into a little star.
—Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996
Joseph, how is your sense of irony
holding up in Heaven?
Did you know, by chance, that the United States
released in 2011
a postage stamp in which your youthful visage
is price-tagged at Forever?
When did you think they’d do that for you in Russia?
How about Never?
Yet here you are, their little star, depicted
in the city you called Peter;
your troubles have been weighed at seventeen rubles
on the poetry meter.
Pressed like a headstrong schoolboy to the corner
of the envelope,
your image puts me in mind of your doting mother,
who never lost hope
she’d see you again (although of course she didn’t)
as she stood in line in
the post office, holding a letter to be franked
with the face of Lenin.
from The Surveyors by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2017). Reprinted with permission.
Mary Jo Salter (pictured above with the late Mark Strand) is the author of A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems from her longtime publisher, the house of Alfred A. Knopf.Her work has appeared in seven volumes in the Best American Poetry series. (The selectors were Richard Howard, Paul Muldoon, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Mark Doty, and Dana Gioia.) She writes with a respect for form and meter, for the shape of a poem and its music, that is most unusual these days, and most precious when the poet has as good an ear as Mary Jo Salter. She sees or hears the poetry in a misprint or mishearing; and when the insight sparks a poem, the writing sparkles. "We'll Always Have Parents," is the title of her poem in the 2018 Best American Poetry.
As befits a student of Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Jo balances the exigencies of sincerity and wit, candor and tact. In her recent poems she has written wonderfully about the condition of growing old -- something that none of us thought he or she was doing to do. She is also a skillful parodist and satirist, as "No Second Try" and "Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.", two of the poems we have highlighted this week, demonstrate. Thank you, Mary Jo, for giving us this opportunity to showcase your poetry. -- DL
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