Poem of the Week | March 17, 2012
Cynthia Marie Hoffman: "The General's Report"
This week we’re featuring Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s previously unpublished poem, “The General’s Report.” Runner-up in poetry for our Editor’s Prize this year, Hoffman is the author of Sightseer, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she received her MFA from George Mason University. She is the recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist Fellowship and has been a Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Center. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, Fence, and Mid-American Review.
Author’s Note:
The idea for this poem originated with a book from the late nineteenth century which contains a list of accidental cesareans such as a pregnant woman delivering her child by means of being “gored by an infuriated ox,” or in this case, being cut in two by a wayward cannonball. I encountered this text while reading for a larger manuscript, Paper Doll Fetus, which doesn’t shy away from glitches in human procreation, but this was certainly one of the most gruesome (not to mention unnatural) I had come across.
In troubling over how I could tell such a story, I became captivated by this character of the general and how he might tell it. In the midst of horrors on the battlefield, what must it have been like to witness this equally horrible but also exquisitely lucky birth? So although it contains a central defining event, I think this poem is really about its witness.
And if you’re interested in seeing it for yourself, Chapter III in Gould and Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine makes for some mind-boggling reading.
The General’s Report
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