Everybody’s got a song
they’ve gotta sing.
So they say. So they
think. Everybody’s got
a pair of fat thighs
they believe they can
just crush together
& crank out the golden
tunes, ye olde razzmatazz,
& the opposition will drop like—
no, I’m not going there.
I’m gonna sit here
awhile, & watch the dew
drop: its letting go
so lurid a metaphor for failure,
I can’t help but take it
out of circulation. Everybody’s
hungry, everybody’s hunkered
in their hedges, hanging on –
in the end nothing’s left
to talk about but Style.
This poem is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
contributor
contributor
Rita Dove is a former US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner (Thomas and Beulah, 1987). She is the author of numerous poetry books, a novel, short stories, and a play, and is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her honors include the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama—the only poet ever to receive both medals—as well as the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Collected Poems: 1974–2004. She is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her next volume of poems, Playlist for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in the summer of 2021.
