Critic says Lehman’s erotic anthology sucks.

And now, a gift:

Each week, in my e-zine Hyperbole, I publish former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s column American Life In Poetry. I’d like to print this week’s column in today’s blog post.

American Life in Poetry: Column 155

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places–both familiar and
foreign–looked, how they seemed. Here Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her
poem in this way, too, in a space familiar to us all but made new–made
strange–by close observation.

Hospital

It seems so–
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk–
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop–ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be–
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation
(www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported
by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem
copyright (c) 2006 by Marianne Boruch, whose most recent book of poetry is
“Grace, Fallen from,” Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from
“TriQuarterly,” Issue 126, by permission of Marianne Boruch. Introduction
copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted
Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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