☀ Today's Poem: Excerpt from "signs, music" Raymond Antrobus

Today's Headline: "Detroit Poet Steps Out In Her ‘Good Dress’"

February 4, 2025 signs, music (excerpt) Raymond Antrobus The new father didn’t want to be called father so he raised the bridge to protect the borders of fatherhood. He shouted over the water. The harshness of his voice was hereditary. Why is he a monument when he could be a yoga stretch, an open hand, a name over another name? There can be no dispensation for the father. He’s gone through life pretending it was the house shivering and not his father. His father never said he wanted to be his father and here he is, wanting to be his father. He wants to be warm as midnight cups and running car engines and the man in Freetown who rowed him across the river and asked him to name the countries he’d been to, before he told him he’d never been anywhere but motherland, fatherland. Amen. • I hold my son in a fluorescent corridor, a floaty fatherland, a new field of focus. • Fatherland! he said, when he meant a lake of delirium. • from the book SIGNS, MUSIC / Tin House READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward This poem appears in Raymond Antrobus' poetry collection, "Signs, Music," about fatherhood and masculinity, published in 2024 by Picador in the UK and Tin House in the US, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Raymond Antrobus on "signs, music" "Detroit Poet Steps Out In Her Good Dress" "I think a lot about adornment. I think a lot about land, about gentrification. There are a few poems in the book that are thinking about places that my family used to live that don’t exist anymore. Lycaste and Vernor is where my family’s neighborhood was and now there’s a Chrysler (Stellantis) plant there. So, very much thinking about the history of the land and what things are removed and then what things stay in and how we maintain those stories of the things that are removed. " viaBRIDGE DETROIT READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Carol Moldaw on Drafts "In many ways, this draft marks the end of my blind groping and the beginning of the poem proper. Nothing I’d written up to that point had caught my poetic interest linguistically; my thoughts, preoccupations, and perceptions had been floating around without substance or anchor. In this draft though, images began to coalesce, and the lines develop a distinctive voice—the poem’s voice." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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