What Light: This Week’s Poem: Todd Pederson
The new series begins! What Light presents a new poem every week by a Minnesota poet, chosen by a jury of writers, publishers, or editors, and sponsored by Magers and Quinn Booksellers. Look for us every Tuesday.
These Shorter Days of Science Fiction
For Eric Neeno-Eckwall
Their voices upright on the knifepoint
of autumn—students, up-at-noon residence halls,
crowd loud stands of lit trees, whose brushwood—
like candlesmoke—sketch back & forth skylines
across the quad.
Saturday’s ration of shadow bangs against the lawn,
its collapsing leaves the all-at-once vernacular I learn
to speak.
Pendulate, they turn like concluding
pages to my Zelazny science fiction paperbacks,
whose fantastic incident I know word-by-word, yet
even now
rehearse—the attractive spatter of seasonal unrest; a quick
declaration off this best-of-what-may-be-lef t weather;
& these spirited runabouts wearing the weekend’s expression,
hungry
for lunch—flyaway constellations, their popsongs
drifting through the long-armed circumference
of my plum and orange afternoon.
Poetics
For me, poetry is the response to what are often simple, yet commanding, occurrences—such as an affecting scene from a favorite movie. The most gratifying ideas are those that increase and reach, inexplicably, for one or more seemingly disparate elements of my life and draw them into the piece. In these moments, poetry surpasses a string of lines and stanzas written on a page; poetry becomes the medium through which I (perhaps, we) celebrate this life’s great joys, and overcome its disappointments.
Todd Pederson is a 2005 graduate of the Master of Business Communication program at St. Thomas University, and holds an undergraduate degree in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota. He works as a technical writer for a biomedical corporation in Chaska and resides in Eden Prairie with his wife and two children, whom he thanks for their patience and inspiration. Recent works appear in Summit Avenue Review.