Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Pepple
Here's one that some here might have seen in a past Best American Poetry --
A Good List by Brad Leithauser
(Homage to Lorenz Hart)
Some nights, can’t sleep, I draw up a list,
Of everything I’ve never done wrong.
To look at me now, you might insist
My list could hardly be long,
But I’ve stolen no gnomes from my neighbor’s yard,
Nor struck his dog, backing out my car.
Never ate my way up and down the Loire
On a stranger’s credit card...
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I love this poem, Alex. It reminds me of a poem by Simon Armitage, entitled "The Back Man". It begins with a Walter-Mitty-like fantasy dream of strange jungle-adventures but then retreats into the “ordinary”. The second part of the poem consists of a long passage in which the speaker declares himself repeatedly not to be the type of person involved in outlandish exploits but rather an average inhabitant of suburban England. Here's a section:
Quote:
I sense it mostly in the day-to-day:
not handling some rare gem or art object
but flicking hot fat over a bubbling egg,
test-flying a stunt-kite from Blackstone Edge,
not swearing to tell the whole truth on oath
but bending to read the meter with a torch,
tonguing the seamless flux of a gold tooth,
not shaking the hands of serial killers
but dead-heading dogwood with secateurs,
not crossing the great ocean by pedalo
but moseying forward in the middle lane,
hanging wallpaper flush to the plumb-line…
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It goes on for another 40 lines or so. The overall effect is not just one of anticlimactic comedy, as in Walter Mitty; it somehow ends up making the ordinary sound extraordinary.