This Is Not The Hour of Poetry
By Lance Larsen
Alpine Fellowship 2022 – Poetry Prize Winner
For Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021)
These the precise words you shared on a Friday
at noon with an audience of two hundred,
then read your poems anyway. Your voice
a brash witness to the mutilated world.
Late October, safe in the Rocky Mountains.
Not the hour of poetry, not the hour to be seduced
by the smells of Poland, its strong coffee
and weak tea, its alleys and chickens beheaded
in backyards. And we were not seduced.
We could have been doing Pilates instead,
napping in carrels, or stapling small thing A
to large thing B. We should have taken you
at your word like good seminarians and bumbled
our way to the exit. After all, who can suss out
meaning from a cowering poem at noon?
“This is not the hour of poetry.” I repeated
your words to myself, in half agreement.
But, if not now, Adam, then when—
must we wait till midnight? If day turns
to mist, is that the hour, and will verse follow?
Must we wear a raffish scarf and gargle
philosophy? We sank deeper into our chairs
and tried to amp up our animal hungers,
listening now with our skin and hair, taking
in your images: pigeons fouling windowsills,
strangers waiting for trains, the sky scribbled
with smoke, untuned pianos drinking our grief.
Also cut flowers in the plaza, a drifty sweetness
almost primeval. Had we left, we might have
sipped a Coke, crammed for a quiz, ghosted an ex.
Instead something caught. We took off
our vagabond shoes and wriggled our toes
in hopes of pilgrimage. Some fuse burning
inside us. True, we had no business practicing
mysticism for beginners or trading bodies
with a hungry owl coursing a field. We had not
looked in our heart and parsed the difference
between loneliness and solitude, but couldn’t we
close our eyes and entertain the mysteries?
Maybe noon was the hour of poetry after all,
the hour of freedom. All the beautiful verbs crawled
out from under rocks, nouns pulsed and multiplied
like manna, and adjectives, once forbidden,
were everywhere again, quickfire fireworks!
Metaphors lit up history and bid us stare
at the gulag and pogrom, into the burning
church of our own bodies. Late Beethoven
was there to help. And Osip Mandelstam.
Wasn’t the search the thing? That was poetry.
And you at the podium, and us shouldering
the sadness of East Europe. That was poetry too.
Your mouth moving, our mouths savoring
and gulping, savoring and gulping.
Your caesuras tugged at us. We could almost,
I swear, taste lost cities in your enjambments
and white space. Pauses everywhere.
Was Jerusalem tucked away at the end
of a line? Were our hearts broken yet?
Was God sitting in a dingy café in Warsaw
dreaming of us, steam rising from a blue cup?
About the poet:
Lance Larsen
Lance Larsen is the author of five collections of poetry, including What the Body Knows (2018); Backyard Alchemy (2009); In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), winner of the Tampa Review Prize; and Erasable Walls (1998). His poems touch on Mormon heritage while examining everyday encounters. Mike White, in Valparaiso Poetry Review, noted of Larsen’s Backyard Alchemy that “the metamorphic translation of beings from one mode of existence to another is the dominant motif of the collection.”
Larsen has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2017, he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate. He is a professor of English at Brigham Young University.