Antiquity. Michael Homolka

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Antiquity - Michael Homolka Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

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      Antiquity

      Copyright © 2016 Michael Homolka

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Homolka, Michael.

      [Poems. Selections]

      Antiquity: poems / by Michael Homolka. — First edition.

      pages cm

      ISBN 978-1-941411-27-8 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

      I. Title.

      PS3608.O494436A6 2015

      811'.6—dc23

      2015027060

      Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.

      Cover image by Brian Powers.

      Manufactured in Canada.

      This book is printed on acid-free paper.

      Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

       for PAJ

      Contents

        Title Page

        Copyright

        Dedication

        Introduction by Mary Ruefle

      1  1

      1  Goshen

      2  Second Goshen

      3  Third Goshen

      4  Fourth Goshen

      5  Fifth Goshen

      6  Sixth Goshen

      7  Seventh Goshen

      8  Ode on Quote How to Live

      9  Antiquity

      10  Anamnesis

      11  Circumstances

      12  Retreat

      1  2

      1  Out at the Mall

      2  Listen Up Medusa

      3  Riposte to Ode

      4  Personal Narrative

      5  Broken Home

      6  Endurance

      7  Frame

      8  Phenomenon

      9  Restoration

      10  Unjustified Mood on a Monday Evening

      1  3

      1  Ruins

      2  Modern Sensibility

      3  East

      4  Villa View Drive

      5  West

      6  Artifact

      7  Transients

      8  History Moves in Waves

      9  A History of Art

      10  Emanation

      11  Men on the Road

        Acknowledgments

        About the Author

      The book you are holding in your hands is called Antiquity, and it’s filled with poems as new as April crocuses. Or as old as April crocuses, for as John Berger points out, if poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, it has nothing to do with individual genius, but with the fact that poetry “abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.” The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice, though out of a self that is “flexible in its adherence / to a particular time period.” Hence a poem set at the mall but written after Martial, hence “Napoleon off / at boarding school,” hence “Listen Up Medusa,” hence “He who had pretended to be dead / pops up out of the cart.” Like a crocus, we could say. What’s antiquity anyway but a thing that is always lurking beneath the surface, not only in the sense of its influence—then shaping now—but in the sense our now will so soon be a then.

      And so: could be Goshen, land of the Israelites, could be Goshen, New Jersey. We have our floods, our epidemics, our wars. “Each of us seems convinced he is the sole member of the family running home from the battle at Marathon bearing / good news We have fought bravely and survived.” Of course no one survives, but the book’s subjects—history, paintings, language—are things that have survived thus far,

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