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Photo credits: Rachel Eliza Griffiths as posted on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gregory-pardlo
Gregory Pardlo an American poet, writer, and professor. He was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey. He is the author of Totem (2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”
Live Readings
Live Readings
Skip to 6:25 to hear him read "Double Dutch"
Poems
Poems
Aquinas: The mover gives what he has to the one who ismoved in that it causes him to be in motion. Jumping often refers to something you’d rather notget involved in, but when you’ve left the parkinglights on overnight, a jump can mean the differencebetween being employed and not. Worse than havingto buy a swipe from a stranger on the bus is having to flaga neighbor for a jump. People willing to defibrillateflatlining cars on ice scraper mornings are like organdonors and subway heroes. For karma like that you needa Winnebago covered with solar panels sprouting a fountainof jumper cables so you can spend your day sucklingweary vehicles like an electric wet nurse. By your example,thugs would soon measure their cred by a tattooed lightningbolt under the eye to symbolize each battery they havesprung back to life. Soon gangs will jump-in initiates onetoothy clamp at a time, and civilians will jump all over eachother with reciprocal gifts and hugs, finding power wherepower is given, a residual lifting of the spirits in the act.
-from Digest (2015)
-from Digest (2015)
Antebellum
Unfinished, the road turns off the fillfrom the gulf coast, tracing the bay, to followthe inland waterway. I lose it in the grittylimbo of scrub pine, the once wealth—infantile again, and lean—of lumber barons,now vested in the state, now sanctuary for renegadesand shamans, for pot growers and moonshiners,the upriver and clandestine industries that keepmostly to themselves.Misting over a lake-front terraced lawn, evening’s pinktablet, japanning lawn and lake, magnolia leaf,ember easing, dips and gives gilt to the veilednocturne vanishing in the view: the hint of maisonthrough the woods faint as features pressed onan ancient coin. Swart arms of live oaks that hagtheir bad backs surreptitiously, drip Spanish mosslike swamp things out of where a pelican taxis limp-legged across the lake, pratfalls awkward as a drunkon a bike. The bat above me, like a flung wristwatch.-from Totem (2007)
Unfinished, the road turns off the fillfrom the gulf coast, tracing the bay, to followthe inland waterway. I lose it in the grittylimbo of scrub pine, the once wealth—infantile again, and lean—of lumber barons,now vested in the state, now sanctuary for renegadesand shamans, for pot growers and moonshiners,the upriver and clandestine industries that keepmostly to themselves.Misting over a lake-front terraced lawn, evening’s pinktablet, japanning lawn and lake, magnolia leaf,ember easing, dips and gives gilt to the veilednocturne vanishing in the view: the hint of maisonthrough the woods faint as features pressed onan ancient coin. Swart arms of live oaks that hagtheir bad backs surreptitiously, drip Spanish mosslike swamp things out of where a pelican taxis limp-legged across the lake, pratfalls awkward as a drunkon a bike. The bat above me, like a flung wristwatch.-from Totem (2007)
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