What Light: This Week’s Poem: Anna George Meek
"What Light," sponsored by Magers and Quinn Booksellers, brings you a poem every week by a Minnesota poet, selected by a panel of writers and publishers. Look for the first years anthology, What Light, at independent booksellers in March!
The Difficult Ordinary
I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem, I just can’t.
Sylvia Plath
Of course you can, Sylvia; my father is already
forgetting how to clean himself. The words
that are left him he places in rows like beautiful teeth.
Dear child, sound it out: tooth, brush, tooth, brush.
Then dress yourself, raise the oatmeal spoon
to your teeth. Try again. Begin the stairs with the left
foot. Try again. Brilliant man fierce for every—
but you, quitter, your teeth unwashed and rotting:
for him, the day lasts. Mute, he wanders his empty hours.
He gentles a book of shipyard photographs. The day
lasts. He delivers a stone to his only child, who loves him.
Tooth—and when the afternoon is beyond abandoning,
she sits down with him and strokes his great, quiet hand—
brush; brush; brush; brush.
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—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.
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