Poem of the Week: Steven Cramer

   

 from Clangings  

I hear the dinner plates gossip

Mom collected to a hundred.

My friends say get on board,

but I’m not bored. Dad's a nap

lying by the fire. That’s why
when radios broadcast news,
news broadcast from radios
gives air to my kinship, Dickey,

who says he’d go dead if ever
I discovered him to them.
I took care, then, the last time
bedrooms banged, to tape over

the outlets, swipe the prints
off DVDs, weep up the tea
stains where once was coffee.
Not one seep from him since.

What, you wander, do I mean?
Except for slinging my songs
wayward home, how do things
in people go? is what I mean.

 

-Steven Cramer 

From Clangings (Sarabande, 2012). 

Used by permission.   

Photo by: Thomas Sayers Ellis 

Steven Cramer is the author of five poetry collections: Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012), The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), and Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande, 2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, named by Poets & Writers as one of the top ten low-residency MFA programs in the country.

     

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.