As a Father of Daughters
As a fathom of waters
As a keeper of otters
As a fan of the Dodgers
As a foremost scholar
As a leaver of mothers
As a giver of quarters
As a failure of rathers
As a faithful supporter
As we gather together
As a fear of disorder
As a phantom of operas
As defender of borders
As a frayer of wires
As a friend of the doctor’s
As an author of gospels
As a field after slaughter
Copyright © 2022 by Hannah Aizenman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Poets are supposed to avoid clichés—bits of language so hackneyed as to seem drained of meaning—but I’m fascinated by what hyper-familiar turns of phrase can reveal and conceal. This poem takes as its title a common expression typically deployed for the purpose of asserting the (male) speaker’s positional identity as a claim to power and narrative control: a ‘humanizing’ rhetorical gesture that functions to delegitimize and dehumanize women. Playing with this idiom, which is also a fragment—making it a formal constraint, sounding it out, in various senses—I hoped to destabilize the imagination that engenders its usage, and destabilize that imagination’s limits.”
—Hannah Aizenman
Hannah Aizenman
Hannah Aizenman holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and serves as the associate poetry editor at the New Yorker.