From her pen to God's ear

[chalcedony]

My good friend deliabarry has Joe Haldeman friended. Yesterday he posted the following entry:


Last night we had the pleasure of going to a poetry reading and discussion by Linda Gregerson. Very good stuff. Most of her poetry would be hard to reproduce here, since (like me) she usually lays her stanzas all over the page, and the computer wants to round them up and herd them into rectangular corrals.

I bought her fifth book, The Selvage, whose title poem does have normal stanza appearance. It's in three parts, and this is the first one:

1.

So door to door among the shotgun

shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in

our cleanest shirts and ma'am

and excuse me were all but second



nature now and this one woman comes

to the door she must have weighed

three hundred pounds Would you be

willing to tell us who you plan to vote



for we say and she turns around with

Everett who're we voting for? The

black guy says Everett. The black guy

she says except that wasn't the language



they used they used the word

we've all agreed to banish from even our

innermost thoughts, which is when

I knew he was going to win.



Copyright © 2011 by Linda Gregerson.