I am sometimes undone by minor celebrity, not mine , but rather someone else’s.  For example,  I am part of a group that uses Ada Limon’s poetry as prompts to spark our own poetry.  Why her poetry?   There was similar hero worship for Mary Oliver of late.  I get fed up with knowing that there are unsung poets out there who write just as well and perhaps better.  How about someone like  Tony Crunk.  He has written poems just as evocative as Ada Limon’s.

Souvenirs (for my father) Through the mirror I can see you reading your new testament before bed, putting it away in the dresser drawer where you keep the tin box of foreign coins and the hand-tinted postcards of Italy you brought home from the Navy in 1954. We lie awake my brother and I listening to you on the back steps singing only half to yourself a snatch of an old miner’s song that goes: up every day in the dawn’s early light to go down in a hole where it’s already night to go down in a hole where it’s already night it’s already night boys it’s already night, and through the window I watch the fireflies among the trees, which, you told us once, were dead people lighting cigarettes.

 

Here is a venomous lyric response to Limon.

 

Get Away from Me, Ada Limon, and Take “Give Me This” with You

If a groundhog

stole my last November tomato

off the vine,

I would not say,

“How cute!”

I would not virtue signal

‘mercy’ in the poem.

I would not take delight

nor

answer a stranger’s question

about suffering.

(As if he had any right to know your answer

or mine.)

I would not jam

one ordinary observation

atop another

and then fill it with

broken glass.

Instead,

I would ask a favor,

dear Reader.

When I die

keep giving my cats some creme

to remember me by

and make a note to your own self:

there is nothing so futile

as annotating a thesaurus.