3.31.15

David Lehman is a poet from New York. His accolades are impressive, check them out. This tells me he is supposed to be good. I am rather inclined to agree. (Good != I like it. But I rather do, so there). An item of note, in his biography I note that many of his works are cited as "scribner", as in the digital publication platform. Good news for us regular ole poets, and for availability/accessibility of poetic works. 

Here are a few of his poems that I think are fairly wide-ranging. Most sourced from Poets.org, and the Poetry Foundation's website.



The Matador of Metaphor




The grapefruit in the Florida orchard
has ripened into a globe in Hartford
for him to look at, not to eat.
If he had a tin can he would beat
it as a drummer in a band beats
his drum and steadily with a swish
and sometimes a gong. It’s his wish
to escape from gray walls and sky
into a Denmark of the inner eye
or a bullring south of the border
or a sky espied from the trenches
of a battlefield in Flanders. Wenches
wander into his wonderland. Order
is disorder squared. We are nowhere
else but here, yet live we do in metaphor
like that elegant square-shouldered matador.

Poem in the Modernist Manner



They were cheap but they were real,
the old bistros. You could have a meal,
drink the devil’s own red wine, and contemplate
the sawdust on the floor, or fate,
as the full-fed beast kicked the empty pail.

The conspiracy of the second rate
continued to reverberate.
Everyone wanted to get his licks.
Everyone said it was a steal.

So the girl and I stayed out late.
We walked along the shore
and I campaigned some more.
And the city built with words not bricks
burned like a paper plate.

Postscript

He wrote the whole novel in his head, 

Sentence by sentence. It took him all day. 

Then he took out a wide-ruled yellow legal pad 

 With three pink vertical lines marking the left margin, 

 And from his breast pocket he extracted 

 A disposable plastic fountain pen, 

 And near the top of the page he wrote the word ODE

 In black ink, all caps. For a few minutes he did nothing. 

 Then he skipped three lines and wrote, 

“It was the greatest birthday present he had ever received: 

 The manual Smith-Corona typewriter 

 His parents gave him on the day he graduated from high school 

 After they took him to the Statler Hilton for lunch, 

 Where they had cold poached salmon, his father’s favorite.”

Which one do you like best?