Vox Populi
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Dorianne Laux: Mugged by Poetry
—for Tony Hoagland who sent me a handmade chapbook made from old postcards called OMIGOD POETRY with a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey and seven of his favorite poems by various authors typed up, taped on, and tied together with a broken shoelace.
Reading a good one makes me love the one who wrote it,
as well as the animal or element or planet or person
the poet wrote the poem for. I end up like I always do,
flat on my back like a drunk in the grass, loving the world.
Like right now, I’m reading a poem called “Summer”
by John Ashbery whose poems I never much cared for,
and suddenly, in the dead of winter, “There is that sound
like the wind/Forgetting in the branches that means
something/Nobody can translate…” I fall in love
with that line, can actually hear it (not the line
but the wind) and it’s summer again and I forget
I don’t like John Ashbery poems. So I light a cigarette
and read another by Zbigniew Herbert, a poet
I’ve always admired but haven’t read enough of, called
“To Marcus Aurelius” that begins “Good night Marcus
put out the light/and shut the book For overhead/is raised
a gold alarm of stars…” First of all I suddenly love
anyone with the name Zbigniew. Second of all I love
anyone who speaks in all sincerity to the dead
and by doing so brings that personage back to life,
plunging a hand through the past to flip off the light.
The astral physics of it just floors me. Third of all
is that “gold alarm of stars…” By now I’m a goner,
and even though I have to get up tomorrow at 6 am
I forge ahead and read “God’s Justice” by Anne Carson,
another whose poems I’m not overly fond of
but don’t actively disdain. I keep reading one line
over and over, hovering above it like a bird on a wire
spying on the dragonfly with “turquoise dots all down its back
like Lauren Bacall”. Like Lauren Bacall!! Well hell,
I could do this all night. I could be in love like this
for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding
universe and whatever else might be beyond it
that we can’t grind a lens big enough to see. I light up
another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me,
and go outside to listen to the moon scalding the iced trees.
What, I ask you, will become of me?
~~~~
Copyright 2024 Dorianne Laux. From Life on Earth: Poems (Norton, 2024). First published in Live Journal. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
Dorianne Laux‘s many poetry collections include Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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Sometimes I read a poem and feel like I’m dancing with the poet inside my head. I read this for the second time after meditation and then we were doing a can can in perfect sync, collapsing on the cool grass staring at stars, my mind free of death and orange monsters until the music disappeared with the last swirl of smoke.
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May I join you all? What a poet she is — how I love HOW she loves!
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Life on Earth is my favorite Dorianne book, which is not an easy thing to say because all her books are great. And this poem makes me want to read all the poems she mentions. How well and with such honesty she communicates poetry’s affect on the body, mind, and soul.
I’m so lucky to have had in-person and virtual workshops with her in the last 10 or so years — I often hear her poetry wisdom in my head when I’m writing. Hearing her speak and read at AWP in LA in 2025 was another heartening experience.
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Yes, Dorianne is an inspiration to all of us. Michael Simms
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“Those delicious few words spread around like jam.” Yes, I am an Ashbery fan. We all have our favs that entice and hopefully inspire.
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entice and inspire. yes.
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Dorianne Laux is one of our great poets. I have her book “Life on Earth” and remember this poem. I love that Tony Hoagland sent her a handmade chapbook (I had the honor of working with him years ago at a poetry conference). I love that she invokes lines from poets she hasn’t read much of, or hasn’t been wild about. What a poem! What a treasure she is!
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She really is a treasure.
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I wish my parents would have named me Zbigniew. Instead, I was named after my father who was named after his father. I also like the name Mudcat. Like the pitcher. None of these names would have been good for a boy growing up in the Midwest. However, they all would have been conducive to poetry and smoking a cigarette, “maybe the one that will kill me…the moon scalding the iced trees.” Magically, a great line like a name opens us up, wakes us to the world.
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Thank you, Al. Your comment is a prose poem in itself.
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Wow… I’ve fallen in love with this poem, this poet (oh yet again), and the whole universe of poetry. Brava, Dorianne, Brava!
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Dorianne is great, isn’t she?
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