The Creative Drive
A recent study found that poems increased
the sale price of a home by close to $9,000.
The years, however, have not been kind to poems.
The Northeast has lost millions of poems,
reducing the canopy. Just a few days ago,
high winds knocked a poem onto a power line
a few blocks from my house.
I had not expected to lose so many at once.
“We’ve created a system that is not healthy
for poems,” said someone. Over the next thirty years,
there won’t be any poems where there are overhead wires.
Some poems may stay as a nuisance,
as a gorgeous marker of time.
Copyright © 2019 by Catherine Barnett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Thinking about literary influence, I wanted to write an ars poetica out of a day's New York Times. I turned first to the Real Estate section, which would, I figured, be least poetic and therefore most challenging. It was a fortuitous mistake—there I found Ronda Kaysen's thoughtful lament about the fate of trees in her New Jersey suburb; her article provided the raw material for this cento (with substitutions). I tip my hat to all of the Times reporters, to whom we are indebted for their excellent and very real reporting (along with environmentalist Mike Brick and forester John Linson, whose quotes also slip into the poem). I tip my hat to all trees, which, like poems, prove simultaneously fragile and resilient.”
—Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett is the author of the collections Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Graywolf Press, 2024); Human Hours (Graywolf Press, 2018); The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), which was the recipient of the 2012 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004).