Here’s a list of great poems for Father’s Day:

“Digging” by Seamus Heaney

“Winter Stars” by Larry Levis

“Working Late” by Louis Simpson

“My Dad’s Wallet” by Raymond Carver

“My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke

“The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes

“Descent,” by Andrew Purcell

“O My Pa-Pa” by Bob Hicok

“This Hour and What Is Dead” by Li-Young Lee

“The Lost Pilot” by James Tate

“The Ghost of Weather” by Bruce Bond

“Mrs. Hill” by B.H. Fairchild

For Mother’s Day, I thought I’d share one of my favorite Stephen Dunn poems.

That Saturday Without a Car

for Ellen Dunn (1910-1969)

Five miles to my mother’s house,
a distance I’d never run.
“I think she’s dead”
my brother said, and hung up

as if with death
language should be mercifully approximate,
should keep the fact
that would forever be fact

at bay. I understood,
and as I ran wondered what words
I might say, and to whom.
I saw myself opening the door—

my brother, both of us, embarrassed
by the sudden intimacy we’d feel.
We had expected it
but we’d expected it every year

for ten: her heart was the best
and worst of her—every kindness
fought its way through damage,
her breasts disappeared

as if the heart itself, for comfort,
had sucked them in.
And I was running better
than I ever had. How different it was

from driving, the way I’d gone
to other deaths—
my body fighting it all off, my heart,
this adequate heart, getting me there.

This poem previously appeared in Blue Mesa Review back in 2012.  The link’s no longer active, so I’m re-posting the poem here to make it available.

THE FUTURE IS BRILLIANT IN THE WAY IT RATIONS SUFFERING

To a sky as big as the day
we were orphaned, to the emptiness
in the capitol’s dome,
to immigrants building walls

that keep their families out.
To the denied insurance claim,
and how it guilts. To the oceans,
which seem to be forever

inviting us to spill and shatter.
To vandalized clocks and birthdays
spent counting candles.
To the grace of whip and tilt.

To the way the sky swallows us
into its quilt of planets and
spits us out each morning
with that confused look in our eyes.

To repetition, and what it’s done
to the meaning of fair & balanced.
To blue, and how it ought to be
the international color for surrender.

In November, the College of St. Scholastica was generous enough to fly me to Duluth to teach poetry breakout sessions to the local high school students.  Ryan Vine, who’s been organizing the event for the past thirteen years, was the kindest, most generous host I’ve ever had.  It’s almost impossible not to recognize Ryan’s work as a professor, but also as an active poet in a thriving community of poets.  His introductions at both the afternoon event and the evening event sent chills through the crowd about poetry’s growing importance in our current political climate.  His passion and loyalty to the art stand as a testament to poetry’s power not only to encourage us to be human, but to demand it.  In addition to being such a wonderful host (he drove me all over Duluth showing me the lake, the childhood home of Bob Dylan, and a number of other amazing sites…he even fed me homemade pancakes at his family dinner table the morning I flew back), his poems (which I have written about here: Ryan Vine’s Ward Poems), continue to impress and inspire me.  The generosity of spirit I find in his work coincides with who Ryan is, which isn’t always the case with poets I’ve met after admiring their work for years.  This trip reaffirmed my belief in poets as a larger community.  Largely because Ryan introduced me to wonderfully talented and dedicated poets: Dore Kiesselbach, John T.  McCormick, Kathleen Roberts, Ellie Schoenfeld (the current P.L. of Duluth!), and the 2016 Rose Warner Series keynote speaker, Danez Smith.

Because I was too lazy (read: too stupid) and missed Danez Smith’s reading at Florida A&M University last year, I was totally unprepared for the relentless nature of what my former teacher Brooks Haxton would refer to as a “tour de force.”  Danez often recited poems from memory, but unlike most reading I’ve seen, even ones where the poet rattles off their poems from memory (I saw Chad Davidson do this at Texas Tech in the early 2000s), Danez’s poems are often most powerful directly from the spirit of their creator.  To say Danez’s a master of tone and speed and pitch is an understatement.  Danez’s poems offer a variation of subject matter, simultaneously deadly serious and funny approaches, an array of emotional vulnerabilities, and brilliantly elaborate rhetorical swings that highlight the complexity of racial and sexual tension in 21st-century American life.

I would normally just link to his poems, but I’m including a link to a youtube video because, as I mentioned earlier, his poems are best (for me) when I experience them.  Otherwise I’ll just filter them through my reader-brain and can’t pick up on some of the tonal shifts, etc.  Here’s Danez Smith performing, “Dinosaurs in the Hood“:

After Danez’s early performance (for local high school students), I met with two different groups of students, who were all floored by the power of Danez’s work and inspired to create their own.  I had each group of students pair off, ran them through a short exquisite corpse exercise, and then we shared our poems at the end of each sessions.  As always the students proved remarkably talented (way more talented than they initially expected, or declared), and fortunately the magic of the exquisite corpse appeared (as it usually does), and the students retraced the process of the poem to see how they responded both indirectly and directly to the lines/images/phrases that they couldn’t see in the process of the poem’s creation.  I loved the chance to work with the students, to be in a space where we could explore the power and importance of poetry together.