G.C. Waldrep
G.C. Waldrep Poems
Half a toy being better than
none. A forest being better than none.
An argot, a pidgin. And the miraculous brevity
...
Things start with fire, or else with music.
Some of us are at the restaurant where the bird got in,
and some of us are elsewhere, and anyway
that was another occasion, some other evening.
...
There is not so much water here as pollen.
A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry:
I am busy, busy therefore the child will live.
...
To be the son of a poet is to lust in a great circle. Places both of you will
visit, for instance—Iowa cornfield, New England farm midwinter.
A mill-race. Plaque for the bell factory hidden now
...
The earth has a taste for us, in its unknowing
appetite there yet resides a hunger, incompletion
that draws all life to its dark self. What, then,
shall we say of the flesh's own desire, distal
...
I call to you as a prism to its oracle denies any prescriptive allure. What
is a high sound when a sparrow takes it. When breath snatches. A latch
catches. Dear diary. I am home now and affect a suitable disregard.
...
I implore clarity on last time. No noose replies. Sinuous furlongs of
ocean light chitter one to another in the livid estuary. Correlatives
sink. Flensed bodies of seals sink faster, into sand. Think of the gulls as
morticians.
...
In my travel closet the ghosts of autumn are hiding, waiting for a little light to
emerge from one of the smaller countries, the ones you almost never hear about,
that rotate on & off the U.N. Security Council like so many ferial days on a poor
...
I don't believe in your pious Emersonian ecstasies, your wind-clocks & wing
bursaries. Autumn cast a wheel in the foundry summer built but then summer
skipped, bankrupt & disguised in women's clothing. You leave a box of tools by
the roadside and it makes fun of the highway, not the workmen, is one theory:
...
Meanwhile a heart-shaped ice storm hovers over Lamar, Pa. Doppler radar tells
us this much. I promise myself I will not hide from the marionettes anymore.
The monks have lost their monastery: we see them brawling in the synagogues,
cutting loose at the Circle K. Someone has set their marionette on fire. We live
...
G.C. Waldrep Biography
G.C. Waldrep (born 1968 South Boston, Virginia as George Calvin Waldrep III) is an American poet and historian. Waldrep earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees in History at Harvard University and Duke University, respectively, before receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. He was visiting professor at Kenyon College, and editor of Kenyon Review. He currently teaches at Bucknell University, where he directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and edits the journal West Branch. He also serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, American Letters & Commentary, Seneca Review,Tin House, Quarterly West, Octopus, Harper's, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. In 2010 he was appointed to be the final judge of the Akron Poetry Prize.)
The Best Poem Of G.C. Waldrep
Many Of Us Identify With Animals
Half a toy being better than
none. A forest being better than none.
An argot, a pidgin. And the miraculous brevity
of small objects. A broken comb. Detach'd
leg of a beetle. One thinks of children
on their crutches, their encounters with ghosts.
Of all shapes & sizes. Thin branches
of the river myrtles reach through them.
They move in slow groups, as if just returning
from a war. They are trying to believe
something they have forgotten.
Or to make us believe it.
In the same way that the elaborate
miniature landscapes surrounding a model
train set make us believe. In the world outside.
The tucked fields, the milkman and his lantern.
Not so much pinprick. As bezel.
Obtrusion of the syncretic.
Half a quantum being better than.
A history of the papacy during the Renaissance
is very depressing, a friend told me.
Lumps of coal for the boiler smaller than pebbles.
And fitted out. With pine boughs sighing.
With microscopes. Whether zoo or
vitrine. To attract. The approaching children.
Who will remain silent or else cry out
in wonder. Which is it we most long for.
Which is it that they fear.
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