The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Mon 1/1/2007)

[RetroLounge]

The Grocer Is Singing Songs of Love

Listen: he has given up
counting his change, his potatoes.
He offers me a pot full of flowers,
throws his doors open
to the sunlight, the rain.
And I am thinking —
why not us too?

With us, the always same
fixed round of worries,
stations of the cross done
on our knees. You, the blind man
with the tin cup,
Me, the fish wife, whose fingers
scrape, scrape that old bone.
What a pity.

For twenty years, this is me,
this is you. Why?
Where the grocer walks,
let us walk too.
Walk from your parked car
to the heat of my heart,
leave the ice, the chapped hands,
of the old life behind us.

Let us go somewhere
so warm we never
need woolens or mittens,
where there is nothing
that cannot be done naked.
Open your door, listen,
I’m singing to you.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

***************



Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in Fontainbleau, France, and was raised in Florida. In 1983, she received a B.A. in History from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, where she studied writing with Janet Burroway, David Kirby, and Jerome Stern among others.

In 1986, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a teaching-writing fellow. After teaching a year as an assistant professor at DePauw University, in 1987 she joined the writing faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is currently the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She was also the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Wisconsin.

Kercheval is the author of seven books and two chapbooks. Her story collection, Alice in Dairyland, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and will be published in Fall 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her first story collection The Dogeater (University of Missouri Press, 1987) won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction. Space (Alonquin Books, 1998), her memoir about growing up near Cape Kennedy during the moon race, won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. Her novel The Museum of Happiness, set in Paris in 1929, has been reissued with a new afterword by the author by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of the Library of American Fiction. Her popular writing text Building Fiction has also been reissued in trade paperback by the UW Press. Her poetry collections are World as Dictionary (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999): and Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Chartreuse (Hollyridge Press, 2005) and Film History as Train Wreck (Center for Book Arts, 2006) which won the 2006 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize. Her individual stories and poems appear regularly in magazines in the U.S, the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Research and Study Center at Harvard, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Corporation of Yaddo, and James A. Michener and the Copernicus Society.

She lives in Madison with her husband, the photographer and silent film maker Dan Fuller, and two children Magdalena and Max. Her current projects include a third collection of poems, Cinema Muto, about silent film, and a novel, Mosjoukine’s Eyes, about the great Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine.

***************


RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Happy New Year, my dear Retro..........

This poem is all about new beginnings, isn't it?

It's just beautiful, sweetie.........

The desire to walk away and start over afresh is often felt, esp. as we get older!

But the fear of the unknown often holds us back.......

This piece of it really says it for me......and to me.........

Walk from your parked car
to the heat of my heart...

Choices are so damn hard, aren't they? Sometimes they can tear you in pieces......

But that's a poem for another day.....

Thank you.........:hug:

[BarenakedLady]

2. Peggy?

WTH are you doing in my head?

:hug:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. .....

:hug: