Poem of the Week | September 10, 2013
James Galvin: "Bet"
This week we offer a new poem by James Galvin. Galvin is the author of seven collections of poems (most recently As Is, from Copper Canyon Press), and two prose works. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Author’s Note:
In my last book, As Is, I was overwhelmed by circumstance. I was in love, and I was living in George Bush’s America. I was trying to figure out a way to live and love and value in a culture based on lies and deceit. Two wars, economic collapse, an oil spill, all the result of lies. We lost our Constitutional rights. We were helpless victims in a melodrama of lies. People who live in cities tend to think of reality as a matter of human actions and their consequences. During the Bush years we all came to think that way. Even a hurricane was eclipsed by the inadequacy of the response to it. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t continue to dwell entirely in a world whose reality is a matter of landscape and weather, where the people play the audience. It made me, to some degree, a satirist—not at all my comfort zone.
In the poems I’m writing now I’m trying to come home. In “Bet,” the protagonist is landscape and sky. The people in the poem are almost too small to see. They are part of the landscape. They are betting on a snowdrift. There’s no money on it. They have achieved a right relationship to their environment.
Bet
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