Erika Meitner: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Austerity

 

Go off the fiscal cliff with me, baby. I’m ready.

We can hold hands while we blow through

 

West Virginia quickly, since we’re halfway down

77 past Charleston already and I’m cranked on

 

Cherry Coke from Burger King, feet on the dash,

wondering aloud if they’ll cart sad Dick Clark out

 

again for TV New Year’s Eve while the car radio

plays Blue Öyster Cult (I’m burnin’ for you), then

 

world news: Putin says no Russian adoptions

to the US and you say Dick Clark’s a year gone

 

(heart attack) and the radio says a victim of

gang rape died in India, and that frenzied buyers,

 

fearful of a ban, are swarming gun stores after

Newtown to stock up on rounds of .223 bullets.

 

Home in the darkness. Home on the highway. Assault rifles

are sold out across the country. Across the country

 

we pass trailer parks along the river, empty parking lots

of long-shuttered store fronts, trees hobbled with ice,

 

and signs left over from Christmas: Happy Birthday

Jesus, and Mary Wrapped the Greatest Gift of All.

 

Congressional leaders are hopeful about a deal, but

I am not confident that anything will change this stretch

 

of desolate road, this altitudinous mountain we climb

in our four-wheeldrive vehicle. Most days it seems

 

we all might steer directly, without detours, into the white

and constant border. If you ask me if I’m anticipative,

 

I might say yes. West Virginia, you were Wild and

Wonderful, then Open for Business, but now you’re

 

Wild and Wonderful again because everything comes back,

even Dick Clark, with impaired speech, Beech-Nut gum

 

sponsorship long gone, to wish us a Happy New Year,

though now it’s followed by “Seacrest—out!”

 

With his perfect teeth and hair, Ryan ushers in

the year of austerity, the year when there was only

 

evening and morning, the bare trees,

their dark bodies, their bent limbs.

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Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have been published most recently in Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, The Believer, The Southern Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her sixth book, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2022.  (For more on Erika Meitner, click here.)      ["Austerity" is from Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018).]

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Comments

[lally]

wow

[Don Berger]

Erika Meitner's precision plus her great ear for the line make this road trip a beautiful, hellish ride to heaven and back, delivering all of the wide life readers and the speaker share on our ways up and down the different roads. As said, the bounty of the detail here is supreme, and unforced, arriving in waves (with punch), subtly, the song packed with a stance toward what's worth having without ever holding us hostage to any solicitous urging. Through this poem Meitner manages to get us to fully sense all that her speaker thinks, feels, relishes, minds--all the while her readers are sitting there, reading this poem off the screen, she lets us ride along, helping let new strong things happen to us.

[Eileen]

Sad and beautiful.

[clarinda harriss]

Thank you, both of you, for taking me along on this sad, frightening, beautiful trip. I love driving through West Virginia--but in all my decades I never realized till now how frightening and seductive those sharp curves are. Never drove there in winter; only in the summer, in the passenger seat, with my feet hanging out the window to be tickled by vines.

[George J. Searles]

SOLID!

[Maureen Owen]

Always powerful to hear truth spoken and when it comes in a poem, even better.

[Peter Kearney]

I think the band Blue Oyster Cult is based in Fredericksburg, VA, my former happy home. Their song, "I'm burnin' for you," quietly pervades the poem, as with its lyrics "Home in the darkness Home on the highway"; the poem's year of austerity, "when there was only evening and morning" seems a variation on the lyrics of the same song "Burn out the day, burn out the night." No happy home here.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

If you’re wondering how eclectic and discerning Terence Winch’s taste in contemporary poetry is, his September 12 BAP blog selection of Erika Meitner’s impressively heady and headlong poem “Austerity” offers a reliable gauge. As a longtime admirer of Erika Meitner’s verse, I encourage everyone to read her equally stirring poem “To Gather Together.” It appears in the October 4 issue of THE NEW YORKER, described by David Lehman as “the premier periodical in which to place a poem" (quoted from David's foreword for THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2021, guest-edited by Tracy K. Smith). To my mind and taste, the BAP blog of Terence Winch also remains a coveted site for poems to appear. And if I made you blanch or blush, TW, it’s your own fault for being faultless in your choices.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle, for those laudatory & encouraging words.