What Light: This Week’s Poem: Anna George Meek
"What Light" presents a new poem by a Minnesota poet every week. The work is chosen by a jury of writers, publishers, and editors, and sponsored by Magers and Quinn Booksellers.
TRIO FOR POETRY READING,
CELL PHONE CALL,
AND MUFFLED ROCK BAND
First, the dialectics of raspberries in a pewter bowl,
wild pheasants whose broken necks loll from the table
like TWEEDLE TWEEDLE TWEEDLE DEEDLE
DEE swinging prayer lanterns delivering incense
to the faithful at high church. The one, great truth
rising from the aroma, clarity through intoxication;
but also, we might consider how truth can arrive
mm tss mm tss mm tss mm tss!! through a conflict
of forces: say, a powerful president,
and the pretzel he is eating. Aboard the Empire Builder,
the luxury-train passengers doze, but their sleep
is interrupted by yet another dead-of-night stop.
They look out at the burned-out towns
they’re again pulling away from, and they reflect on
a Marxian interpretation of reality which says
WANDA? WANDA? CAN I CALL YOU BACK?
that the landscape from their windows may appear
timeless, but even the night sky
will buckle from inherent contradiction.
As Rilke lay dying, his tongue erupted with boils, and he wrote
WANDA, I REALLY CAN’T TALK RIGHT NOW
in French, not his native German, the distraction
of languages apparently able to carry him, one last time,
to heights of the sublime. Celestial music plays
—mm tss! mm tss! mm tss!—from the mountaintops
and the opium dens, where one could imagine being WANDA,
ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? at the center of ecstasy;
it plays an elegy for pure literary control and international policies
of divine right, until the muse calls out—mm tss mm tss!—calls out
FOR GOD SAKES, WANDA, HANG UP THE PHONE—calls out
to our consciences a sweet, sweet irrelevance.
Poetics
Currently, I am trying to write poems that have voracious appetites for material and vocabulary, disparate substances within a single poem. In this way, I want the poems to embody a wide-reaching, manifold sense of self, a self that is socially responsive and is made up of multiple sources. I hope also that these poems will engage without attempting to contain or explain. In a time when my father is dying, when my country is at war, how does one enact the gaps, write wordlessness, the failure of logic, silence? And yet somehow, even within these gaps, I hope—I want my poems to enact these, too—there are intensity, connection, compassion, devotion.
Biography
Anna George Meek’s first book, Acts of Contortion, won the 2002 Brittingham Prize from The University of Wisconsin Press. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, The Seneca Review, The Missouri Review (where she was awarded the Tom McAfee Discovery Prize), Water~Stone, and others. She is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and has also been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the National Poetry Series, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Currently, she also works as an instructor at the Loft Literary Center as well as a professional musician in Minneapolis.
