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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 8th 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
as always JF gets the zeitgeitz she's a grande poet
Posted by: Patricia Spears Jones | March 19, 2023 at 09:55 AM
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.
Posted by: Elliott Wadsworth III | March 19, 2023 at 11:28 AM
Hilarious! True and profound. TO A NEW ERA is one hell of a book!
Posted by: Denise Duhameld | March 19, 2023 at 11:38 AM
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!
Posted by: Clarinda | March 19, 2023 at 11:42 AM
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.
Posted by: Martin Stannard | March 19, 2023 at 12:21 PM
bam!
Posted by: lally | March 19, 2023 at 12:44 PM
I think Joanna Fuhrman is one of our best contemporary poets.
Posted by: Gerald Fleming | March 19, 2023 at 01:51 PM
Loved it!!!! Go Joanna!!!!
Posted by: Maureen Owen | March 19, 2023 at 02:34 PM
Nails it with the last several lines. Ah the ever-drifting audience with our cell phones and stealthy inattention.
Posted by: Beth Joselow | March 19, 2023 at 04:47 PM
Pretty funny. Thanks, Joanna.
Posted by: Phyllis Rosenzweig | March 25, 2023 at 02:27 PM