Joanna Fuhrman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Poetry Reading

 

The mustached cowboy-hatted thrice-divorced

old-man poet famous for sleeping with flaxen-haired

(or was it flax-seed eating) quote-unquote

nubile graduate students is at the podium

reading his poem personifying a wedding dress—

how sad it is, all alone in a dusty closet, how

it longs to be laid on a funeral pyre or set ablaze

next to the replica of Plath and Hughes’ robin’s-

egg-blue Terra Cruiser gas range, or was it     

the neglected moonlit member of the old man

poet “breaking into blossom” or recoiling

from the memory of time passing faster than

the dust can settle on his brand-new Honda

Civic LX or ranch-style remodeled sunroom?

The audience is trying to remember what

ingredients they need to pick up for tomorrow’s

paella, what that email said about the time

of that meeting with Suzanne about assessment.

They are alternately trying to remember

if they remembered to order that Minecraft book

for a nephew’s 8^th birthday party and worrying

if their Facebook-level “friends” notice that

their purple cat socks clash with their scuffed

burgundy clogs, and at a certain point, the poem

has gone on for so long no one can tell if

the old-man poet is still personifying that

wedding dress or if a headless wedding dress

has taken his place at the podium. We look up

from the cell phones we are hiding in our laps,

and there it stands—smoky and lacy

in front of the glowing microphone

in the corner of the basement bookstore,

104 miles from the nearest artist colony,

the flaming dress is burning like a 12-hour

candle, or like the lost poetry of an elderly

Rimbaud written on the slats of sunken ships,

and the dress itself has grown a mouth

and in the middle of its flames its lips

belt out a new poem, about fake

cowboy poets, how sad they are, how alone.

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Joanna Fuhrman is an assistant teaching professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era. Her next book, Data Mind, a collection of surreal, darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. After publishing with them since she was a teen, she recently became editor at Hanging Loose Press.

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                                          Lorette C. Luzajic, The Blood Jet Is Poetry---Sylvia Plath, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2022

Comments

[Patricia Spears Jones]

as always JF gets the zeitgeitz she's a grande poet

[Elliott Wadsworth III]

This made me want to find out who the cowboy poet subject of this poem was. I think I figured it out. To be honest, I liked his poem as well as this one. Poetry contains many undercurrents.

[Denise Duhameld]

Hilarious! True and profound. TO A NEW ERA is one hell of a book!

[Clarinda]

Like many another reader of a certain age, I feel
Sure I know which old man poet is being justly lampooned. Or which of two. Or maybe three. No, at least 4. I love the poem and feel immense empathy!

[Martin Stannard]

Nice one. I've been trying to think of what (or who) our British equivalent of this old cowboy-hatted poet is . . . I'm sure we have one. In fact I'm sure we have several.

[lally]

bam!

[Gerald Fleming]

I think Joanna Fuhrman is one of our best contemporary poets.

[Maureen Owen]

Loved it!!!! Go Joanna!!!!

[Beth Joselow]

Nails it with the last several lines. Ah the ever-drifting audience with our cell phones and stealthy inattention.

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

Pretty funny. Thanks, Joanna.