Polaroid
Dobby Gibson
The problem with realism,
you once told me,
is the closer your art gets to it
the more real it must become.
Can memory be a worry?
I suspect it works more like a wish.
I worry I should have become
a short-track speed skater. I wish
I weren't this set of rusty steel claws.
If I'm being honest
I'm not entirely sure
what a memory is.
A drawer in the basement
full of old batteries.
A mirror you look into to see
another mirror that shows you
your own butt from behind.
There isn't much I'd do over.
not even the previous line.
I'd rather watch everyone dance.
If I'm left with one memory
let it be dance. The crimson
in a Joan Mitchell painting.
That first F Nina Simone lingers on
in "I Loves You, Porgy."
The old lighthouse we walked out to
near the harbor that summer.
I remember you said it looked
better from a distance
where it was possible to imagine
the light was still shining.
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"“Polaroid” is for my father-in-law Peter Carcia (1937-2024), who made a career of designing cameras for the Polaroid Corporation while maintaining his own art practice. Peter was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019. For a brief while, Peter could reflect lucidly on his disease while simultaneously exhibiting the initial symptoms of its onset. This poem came from one of those conversations and was given to him soon after.

Dobby Gibson on "Polaroid"
"When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In"

"The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters."

via THE NEW YORKER
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Cover image of David Ferry's book, of no country I know
What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on David Ferry's "Johnson on Pope"


"In a way, though, the mundanity of the real story gets at the heart of The World's Wife: throughout the book, our meticulous cultural inheritance—our gods, our legends, our myths, our grandest stories—are stripped of their sheen and recast on a smaller, human scale. The collection is comprised of a series of dramatic monologues from the perspectives of the women who have been sidelined, overlooked, omitted."
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