Jennifer Moxley

Jennifer Moxley Poems

Jennifer Moxley Biography

Poet and editor Jennifer Moxley was born and raised in San Diego. She studied at University of California, San Diego; the University of Rhode Island, where she completed her BA; and Brown University, where she earned an MFA. Moxley’s poems combine lyric and innovative looks at daily life while interrogating societal comfort. Reviewing Clampdown for the Nation, poet Ange Mlinko noted, “Moxley's ethical anxieties emanate from a central unease, unease at home, and ripple out to touch nation, earth and cosmos. But … Moxley does not sublimate her psychology and social perspective.” “Truth in my work is just that: a question,” asserted Moxley in an interview with Noah Eli Gordon for the Denver Quarterly. “I am a poet because language, especially as it lives in poetry, approximates my idea of truth in a more satisfying and meaningful way than any other human production or activity.” Moxley is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Imagination Verses (1996), Often Capital (2005), The Line (2007), and Clampdown (2009), as well as the memoir The Middle Room (2007). A noted translator, Moxley has translated Jacqueline Risset’s collections of poetry, The Translation Begins (1996), and essays, Sleep’s Powers (2008), as well as Anne Portugal’s Absolute bob (2010). Moxley has won the Denver Quarterly’s Linda Hull Award, and her work has been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2002), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004), and American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009). Moxley has served as poetry editor for The Baffler, a contributing editor for The Poker, and a founding editor of The Impercipient and The Impercipient Lecture Series. Since 2001, she has taught at the University of Maine.)

The Best Poem Of Jennifer Moxley

Dividend of the Social Opt Out

How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill.
Not seriously ill, just a little under the weather.
To feel slightly peaked, indisposed. Plagued by
a vague ache, or a slight inexplicable chill.

Perhaps such pleasures are denied
to those who never feel obliged. If there are such.

How pleasant to convey your regrets. To feel sincerely
sorry, but secretly pleased to send them on their way
without you. To entrust your good wishes to others.
To spare the equivocal its inevitable rise.

How nice not to hope that something will happen,
but to lie on the couch with a book, hoping that
nothing will. To hear the wood creak and to think.
It is lovely to stay without wanting to leave.

How delicious not to care how you look,
clean and uncombed in the sheets. To sip
brisk mineral water, to take small bites
off crisp Saltines. To leave some on the plate.

To fear no repercussions. Nor dodge
the unkind person you bug.

Even the caretaker has gone to the party.
If you want something you will have to
get it yourself. The blue of the room seduces.
The cars of the occupied sound the wet road.

You indulge in a moment of sadness, make
a frown at the notion you won't be missed.
This is what it is. You have opted to be
forgotten so that your thoughts might live.

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