Frank Osen’s
work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including Measure, Pivot, Blue Unicorn, POOL, and The Wallace Stevens Journal.
He was a finalist in the 2007 Howard Nemerov sonnet competition and won the Lord Byron award in the seventeenth World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets competition (WONFP) and the Richard Wilbur award in the eighteenth WONFP.
He is the winner of the 2008 Best American Poetry Series poem challenge (see the Best American Poetry Series website).
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The Plenum Contends
The plenum’s in, an end to doubt:
The world must be resolved;
As to all else, the plenum’s out:
The world must be resolved . . . .
This next, and thus the last, for time grew short
and their agenda ever more involved:
That walls be braced in case of further rounds,
was killed by motions for re-argument,
accompanied by roared and whistled sounds.
An ad hoc faction gained the floor: What’s meant
by “be resolved” precisely, on what grounds?
When from outside, an answer, eloquent
as the ex-chair’s most withering retort,
the under-secretary’s loudest shout
and the sub-subcommittee’s whole report,
resounded—and the lights went out.
[Originally published in Pivot]
Artist’s Statement
O
ne night seven years ago, I wrote some notes during a municipal commission meeting. Mock-heroic elements highlighted the inconsequence of whatever we were discussing, and the outside threat signified only our capacity to argue minutiae to the end.
Subsequent events have lent this poem an unintended dynamism that periodically seems to situate it in some new, grave place. Poems in which I thought I’d invested much more, remain artifacts of their moments. Whenever I revisit the plenum, however, it’s contending with something new and urgent. It’s a milestone because it keeps passing me, propelled like some Chauncey Gardiner/Frankenstein contraption.
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