The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Tue 1/15/2008)

[RetroLounge]

I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese

Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine,
its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue,
a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth.
I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot.
Said Cézanne: Le monde—c’est terrible!
Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie.
People sound smarter in French.
The Japanese prefer the crescent moon to the full,
prefer the rose before it blooms.
Oh, I have been to the temples of Kyoto,
I have stood on the Pont Neuf, and my eyes,
they drank it in, but my taste buds
shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field.
It was the day they gave out foam fingers.
I hereby pledge to wear more gray, less yellow
of the beaks of baby mockingbirds,
that huge yellow yawping open on wobbly necks,
trusting something yummy will be dropped inside,
soon. I hereby pledge to be reserved.
When the French designer learned
I didn’t like her mockups for my book cover,
she sniffed, They’re not for everyone. They’re
subtle. What area code is 662 anyway? I said,
Mississippi, sweetheart. Bet you couldn’t find it
with a map. Okay: I didn’t really. But so what
if I’m subtle as May in Mississippi, my nose
in the wine-bowl of this magnolia bloom, so what
if I’m mellow as the punch-drunk bee.
If I were Japanese I’d write about magnolias
in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,
sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster
of glossy leaves. I’d end the poem before anything
bloomed, end with rain swelling the buds
and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass
like a fairy’s castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,
like spent firecrackers. Yes, my poem
would end there, spent firecrackers.
If I were French, I’d capture post-peak, in July,
the petals floppy, creased brown with age,
the stamens naked, stripped of yellow filaments.
The bees lazy now, bungling the ballet, thinking
for the first time about October. If I were French,
I’d prefer this, end with the red-tipped filaments
scattered on the scorched brown grass,
and my poem would incite the sophisticated,
the French and the Japanese readers—
because the filaments look like matchsticks,
and it’s matchsticks, we all know, that start the fire.

Beth Ann Fennelly

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Beth Ann Fennelly was a United States Artist Fellow in 2006. She has been included three times in The Best American Poetry series and is a Pushcart Prize winner (2001). W.W. Norton is scheduled to publish her third book of poems, Unmentionables, in April 2008. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin, Fennelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford

********************************

[lizziegrace]

1. She teaches at my alma mater

:)

Favorite phrase is "because the filaments look like matchsticks,
and it’s matchsticks, we all know, that start the fire.

Thanks RL. :hug:

[BlueIris]

2. Nice. I often feel like that.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

3. love it.

and you know she WANTED to say it:

"...When the French designer learned
I didn’t like her mockups for my book cover,
she sniffed, They’re not for everyone. They’re
subtle. What area code is 662 anyway? I said,
Mississippi, sweetheart. Bet you couldn’t find it
with a map..."

YOU know she did;)

:rofl:

[Gonzo Gardener]

4. ...

:thumbsup:

:hi:

[xchrom]

5. why howdy! -- care for a whopper to go with that

chateneuf du pape?

actually -- do you remember Blue Nun?

[RetroLounge]

6. Blue Nun?

Was that a wine?

RL

[xchrom]

7. oh yes -- in a blue bottle.

bad, bad french wine -- we used to get drunk on it when i was very young.

it had a picture of a nun on a bike and everything.

it was pretty popular all over -- but somehow not where you were? i don't know.

[RetroLounge]

8. Drank Mad Dog 20/20

otherwise haard stuff...

:hi:

RL

[xchrom]

10. oh yeah that too.

and old english 800.

[RetroLounge]

11. Oh, we shoulda partied together

back in the day...

:hi:

RL

[xchrom]

12. i was wild fun.

:hi:

[RetroLounge]

13. Oh, you still are...

...I can tell.

:hi:

RL

[xchrom]

14. i've said it before -- i'll say it again

takes one to know one.

:yourock:

[RetroLounge]

15. So very true...

and back at you: :yourock:

RL

[Chan790]

9. I love this poem.

I'm going to have to read more of Beth Ann Fennelly. I love when I discover a new poet to read/devour.