Homer’s second point wounds us
with illusion of self-determination.
We limp away alive to make trouble
tomorrow. The first arrow immortalized
honor. Whether the sun’s rays or hard
rain, underscored by lightning, day fell
with men and stitched sky to the earth
with javelins. Rosy fingered dawn
sat in puddles. From the dark night
of the soul, a human of culture was born,
though blind wrath hails from all parts
of the world no matter which way
a poem is woven. However, as we journey
inland to our fates, the tricks in the design
identify who was behind the clothing
and shroud: the struggle in social fabric.
Credits include the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award for my book-length manuscript Voyeur, a National Book Award nominee and an honorable mention at the 2009 London and at the New England Book Festivals; The Apple in the
Monkey Tree a book of poems by Codhill Press; chapbooks, Great Grandfather (Pudding House Publications), Family
Secret (Finishing Line Press), Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Press) and Phoems for Mobile Vices (BlazeVox); works in
Rolling Stone, Poetry, Grand Street, Trespass, New Letters, Pank, Segue, Big Bridge, Pemmican, foam:e, and Confrontation, Fulcrum, The International Journal of the Humanities, Fringe, among others. Rich lives in Marblehead, MA and teach
writing at VCU.
| My poem is an
homage to Homer's characterization of Penelope. The poem attempts to
create a seam of its own between Homer's two poems while recognizing
what has come to be thought of as gendered instruments and roles: tools
and weapons; poets and warriors. Needling the Gods comes from a manuscript that is a palimpsest of sorts in which I comment on the poetry, fiction, and philosophy of others, sometimes as a kind of séance. I am interested in writing ironist poems, driving concrete surfaces to address oblique possibility s express ways, giving direction to the distant relations to call attention to lost relations and family resemblances. |
