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been picked by Small
Press Distribution
(SPD). We encourage
bookstores and
individuals to purchase
our titles from SPD.
We have started listing
titles and in the next
months will have all of
our titles available at
www.spdbooks.org.
Poetic Matrix Press
titles are available on
Amazon.com We receive
revenue from Amazon for
any book or non-book
items sold through our
web site.
We encourage you to
request our books from
your favorite independent
or chain bookstore, tell
them they can order
through SPD.
| Poetic Matrix Press P.O. Box 1223 Madera, CA 93639 John Peterson, Publisher & Editor (personal page) James Downs, Associate Editor Member Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. |
PM Books & PM Library Literary and Intellectual Publishing Author Assisted Financial Development poetry, essay collections, monographs. |
American Life in Poetry: Column 255 2/18/10
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
A honeymoon. How often does one happen according to the dreams that preceded it?
In this poem, Wesley McNair, a poet from Maine, describes a first night of marriage in
a tawdry place. But all’s well that ends well.
For My Wife
How were we to know, leaving your two kids
behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon
at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap
hotels in New York City to draw customers
like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby?
Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found
a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door
with a cut on one side the exact shape
of the toilet bowl that was in its way
when I closed it. I opened and shut the door,
admiring the fit and despairing of it. You
discovered the initials of lovers carved
on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart.
How wrong the place was to us then,
unable to see the portents of our future
that seem so clear now in the naiveté
of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s
disdain for those with little money,
the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room
we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay
our love down, and in this way began our unwise
and persistent and lucky life together.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of
Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Wesley McNair, whose most recent
book of poems is Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems, Godine, 2010. Poem
reprinted from Five Points, Vol. 12, no. 3, by permission of Wesley McNair and the
publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The
introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in
Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited
manuscripts.
**********************************
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
A honeymoon. How often does one happen according to the dreams that preceded it?
In this poem, Wesley McNair, a poet from Maine, describes a first night of marriage in
a tawdry place. But all’s well that ends well.
For My Wife
How were we to know, leaving your two kids
behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon
at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap
hotels in New York City to draw customers
like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby?
Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found
a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door
with a cut on one side the exact shape
of the toilet bowl that was in its way
when I closed it. I opened and shut the door,
admiring the fit and despairing of it. You
discovered the initials of lovers carved
on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart.
How wrong the place was to us then,
unable to see the portents of our future
that seem so clear now in the naiveté
of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s
disdain for those with little money,
the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room
we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay
our love down, and in this way began our unwise
and persistent and lucky life together.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of
Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Wesley McNair, whose most recent
book of poems is Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems, Godine, 2010. Poem
reprinted from Five Points, Vol. 12, no. 3, by permission of Wesley McNair and the
publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The
introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in
Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited
manuscripts.
**********************************
fall/winter 2009-2010 online periodic letteR 8 on the Poetic Experience The New Guest Editor and Associate Editor James Downs enter here |
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