Don’t know much about poetry, but I know what I like, and I LOVE Kim Addonizio

Originally posted May 13, 2009

Today at Paperback Writer, Lynn Viehl is talking about poetry and Sage Cohen’s book WRITING THE LIFE POETIC. I know next to nothing about poetry, not about iambic pentameter or modernist and post-modernist, though I do love me a good Haiku and for awhile was Twittering in Haiku form. That said, PBW’s post reminded me of my discovery of Kim Addonizio. Her work is gritty and raw and real, and it’s the same tone that I find in many of my favorite fiction authors, where prettiness isn’t used to cover up the truth, but potent words are used to convey it.

Since I’m such a blogging failure these days, I thought I’d share a couple of her poems that are available online at Poets.org and PoemHunter.com, and urge you to check her out. (Disclaimer: The poems aren’t necessarily included in the covers of the volumes shown. I just grabbed those for illustration purposes.)

You Don’t Know What Love Is

You Don’t Know What Love Is

but you know how to raise it in me

like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to

wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.

How to start clean. This love even sits up

and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.

Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want

to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive

to some cinderblock shithole in the desert

where she can drink and get sick and then

dance in nothing but her underwear. You know

where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up

with an ache she can’t locate and no money

and a terrible thirst. So to hell

with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt

and your tongue down my throat

like an oxygen tube. Cover me

in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

What Do Women Want

I want a red dress.

I want it flimsy and cheap,

I want it too tight, I want to wear it

until someone tears it off me.

I want it sleeveless and backless,

this dress, so no one has to guess

what’s underneath. I want to walk down

the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store

with all those keys glittering in the window,

past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old

donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers

slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,

hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.

I want to walk like I’m the only

woman on earth and I can have my pick.

I want that red dress bad.

I want it to confirm

your worst fears about me,

to show you how little I care about you

or anything except what

I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment

from its hanger like I’m choosing a body

to carry me into this world, through

the birth-cries and the love-cries too,

and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,

it’ll be the goddamned

dress they bury me in.