Also this issue: Cover Story Delta -Clare Keefe Foster

January 2- 8, 2003

cover story

The Anxious Poem

By John Shea

Did you ever start a poem and you had an uneasy sense,

nothing you could put your finger on, but a foreboding,

as if someone was going to die somewhere,

yes, maybe even in the poem, and there was nothing you

or anyone else, maybe, could do, and even if you stopped reading,

even if you just stopped writing, it would still happen,

and then whose fault would it be? Now I'm not saying

that this poem is one of those poems, it's too early to tell,

it's hard to determine which direction it will take,

toward a garden, perhaps, where a butterfly loses its way

among azure flowers drooping on tall green stems,

drawn without a hope of escape to their delicate scent;

or perhaps to a crowded city street on an August evening,

when shirts stick to back and neck, when horns honk

even before there's a reason, where people sit on windowsills,

dangling their legs, hardly noticing the police siren

because they've heard it so often, but this time it's coming

closer, and someone darts from between two parked cars,

and suddenly you think this might be the one, and you

glance ahead, desperate for a glimpse of a prairie night

full of stars, say, when the universe guards its secrets

with a hum you cannot quite hear but you know it's there,

and the doings of men and women are inessential,

you can't hear them, you can't see them, and that way

you know that someone won't die in this poem,

because there are larger things, things that matter more,

like mountains that have modeled for the finest poets,

rising sharply into air too thin to breathe, and it's not safe

for anyone to climb there, so they don't, and so nobody

will be there to stumble off a trail, or clutch his heart

with exertion, or turn at the muffled sound of an assailant,

no, not in that scene, not in this poem, I'd do anything

not to have someone die, even though it's not my fault,

so let's not have anyone die, it's not your fault, nobody,

nobody to die, nobody to blame, not here, not now,

not in this poem.

John Shea has been an editor and writer at the University of Pennsylvania since 1985, where he currently works for Penn's Health System. He received prizes for poetry and playwriting as a Penn graduate student, and his poems have appeared in the magazine Negative Capability and in Sometimes the Cow Kick Your Head, an anthology of light verse. His stories have been published in Partisan Review, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Columbia, the magazine of Columbia University. For the last five years, he has been part of the Penn & Pencil Club, a creative writing workshop for Penn employees that meets at the Kelly Writers House.

Judge's Comments: Poetry

Publishing poetry in a newspaper is a pretty bold and principled thing to do in today's America. The very sight of a ragged right margin sends most readers to sleep.

However, the great contradiction behind the public indifference toward this art form is the vast numbers of people who write poetry. The reason for this is simple: The technology of poetry composition -- language -- is available to just about everyone.

In a time of war on terrorism and homeland security, an art form which encourages thinking about language is especially dangerous and important. By promoting the writing and reading of poetry in the newspaper, that most populist of literary forms, City Paper contributes to this progressive aspect of the art.

What's regressive about their annual contest, however, is that it is a contest, meaning it aims to name the best poet of the bunch. What's worse: They've asked me to judge.

As I read through a pile of close to 500 poems (submitted by 124 writers), I see first of all diversity, and value in every attempt. As I read more deeply, patterns emerge. I make piles of poems that sound like song lyrics, poems that resonate with oracular heritage, love poems and lost-love poems, poems that tell a story, poems that assert identity.

But I am left with the problem of judgment. What makes a poem good, and what makes one, out of all, best? I believe that creativity is a basic human characteristic, and that anyone who tries can excel. So in going back over these piles of poems I look for evidence of writers who take nothing for granted, and for whom language is entirely new with each word or phrase.

Several individual entries rise to the top of their respective piles. Lauren Rile Smith's linguistic play in her Latter-Day Acrostics, the impeccable minimalist pacing of Ryan Eckes' about is almost, the little mysteries embedded in each of Kathleen Atkins' poems.

But in the end, the one poem that hits me most squarely is The Anxious Poem by John Shea. This poem takes itself as subject, and in so doing becomes physical, a living thing, complete with racing breath and heartbeat, and a shrug implicit in its existential doubt regarding its own capacity. Its world verges on the ecstatic, but it continually pulls itself back down from that ledge. It is an outburst, a vision, a confrontation, a paranoid rant which recants when it's done. It is a poem that questions the nature of poetry.

Why do I think this is a good thing? If the art of poetry is a stealth art, broadly practiced yet broadly dismissed, it is in constant danger of becoming complacent. Poetry's great strength is its diversity -- that is evident in the range of poems submitted to City Paper's contest -- and if it is to preserve this virtue, poetry must never become too sure of what it is.

Gil Ott is editor and publisher of Singing Horse, a literary press now in its 27th year of continuous operation. He has published 13 books of poetry and prose and has won several awards for his writing, including fellowships from the Headlands Center for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A development professional with over 20 years' experience in cultural and community-based nonprofit management, Gil worked at the Painted Bride Art Center from 1981 through 1995, and currently serves as director of development for Liberty Resources, which advocates for the rights of people with disabilities. He lives in Mt. Airy with his wife, poet and educator Julia Blumenreich, and daughter Willa.