Michael Hartford

April is National Poetry Month. It’s also, if we’re to believe T. S. Eliot, the cruelest month. And what better way to combine the two than with bad poetry?

One of my unemployment projects is to clean out the basement; we have a typical Minneapolis bungalow basement, with a concrete floor, pipes and wires in the rafters, and a coal room (where I develop film). My wife wants to make it more usable, which means I have to clear out a lot of the junk that I’ve accumulated. In one of the basement boxes I found my undergraduate poetry folders, a little wrinkly and yellowed but, alas, still legible.

A lot of it is typical undergraduate dreck; some of it is decent undergraduate dreck. All of it is, pretty much, dreck. Poetry is hard to write, especially for 18-21 year old kids who think pretty highly of themselves.

To encourage people to write good poetry, and to demonstrate why undergraduate notebooks should be left in the basement, I’ll present here a poem a day in April.

This first one was written about my best friend in college, Anne Porter, who had an insatiable and voracious appetite for books. From her I learned to look at a person’s book shelves whenever I’m invited to someone’s house; that’s the surest clue of whether you’ll want to talk to them. I don’t get invited over to people’s houses very often.

Watching Anne Study

While Eve was willing to give up Paradise
for one good, crisp apple,
you sit down at the table with a full plate
to try to win it back.
It’s a balanced plate that you stack,
full of peas and poultry,
gnosis and eros,
chased down by sweet wine
and cold, fresh water.
No power in this world or any other
could keep your spoon out of the potatoes
or your ladle from the gravy,
and even if we took away your fork
you’d scoop up the rice and zucchini in your fingers.
Decorum is not a concern here–
you are convinced that time is on the short end
and the meal is on the long, and
so stuff yourself accordingly.
Not content with a taste,
you want the whole bowl–
if you’d been Eve, you’d have swallowed the seeds.
The pace is too quick, though,
and your mouth too small,
and though the table is still full
(you haven’t even touched the figs)
your fork starts to droop.
Finally you tumble off your chair
and curl up with your arms
wrapped over a full belly
and your knees under your chin,
sleeping under the weight of your meal
while your tongue darts at the butter
on a smiling lip.