The Poetry of Things

From Jörg Colberg’s Higher Education series.

I’m a person who gets excited about poetry. As revealed yesterday, I majored in creative writing with a poetry concentration in school, practical woman that I am. I’ve been nuts for Frank O’Hara for years. I carry Lunch Poems around with me more often than not, I organized a group exhibition based upon his poem Meditations in an Emergency and of course I named this here blog after his faux manifesto Personism.

Two bloggy poetry things of note: Alec’s weekly Friday Poems which I always look forward to. And then last night I discovered Coudal’s completely! freaking! awesome! Voice by Verse project. Who doesn’t want to hear the lilting husky voice of Zadie Smith as she reads O’Hara’s Animal? (If you don’t, you’re nuts. To me at least.)

I’ve already emailed Alec urging him to pick a poem to read for them, and emailed Coudal to ask, oh so sweetly, if they might consider allowing me to read this Roethke poem that’s a favorite of mine:

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,

All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,

Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

You don’t need to love poetry to love that poem - I think anyone who’s ever worked any kind of desk job surely knows what he’s getting at there.