Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter Poems

Mary Jo Salter Biography

Mary Jo Salter (born August 15, 1954) is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry[1] and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was raised in Detroit and Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.A. from Harvard University in 1976 and her M.A. from Cambridge University in 1978. In 1976, she participated in the Glascock Prize contest. While at Harvard, she studied with the noted poet, Elizabeth Bishop. She has been an editor at the Atlantic Monthly and at The New Republic. From 1984 to 2007, she taught at Mount Holyoke College and was, from 1995 to 2007, a vice-president of the Poetry Society of America. She has two daughters, Emily and Hilary Leithauser. She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.)

The Best Poem Of Mary Jo Salter

Video Blues

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,
and likes to rent her movies, for a treat.
It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

The list of actresses who might employ
him as their slave is too long to repeat.
(My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,

Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy
Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...)
It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Does he confess all this just to annoy
a loyal spouse? I know I can't compete.
My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy.

And can't a woman have her dreamboats? Boy,
I wouldn't say my life is incomplete,
but some evening I could certainly enjoy

two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy.
I guess, though, we were destined not to meet.
My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,
which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

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