Kay Ryan named US poet laureate. Yippee!! You GO girl!

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And in other news: a past poet laureate, Ted Kooser, still carries on, featuring a poem a week (or so) in the nation's newspapers. I really enjoyed the one featured this week, from Patrick Phillips' new book, The Boy:


Piano

Touched by your goodness, I am like
that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby
that someone had smashed and somehow
heaved through an open window.

And you might think by this I mean I'm broken
or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don't
know exactly what I am, any more
than the wreckage in the alley knows
it's a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves.

Maybe I'm all that's left of what I was.
But touching me, I know, you are the good
breeze blowing across its rusted strings.

What would you call that feeling when the wood,
even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?


c 2008 by Patrick Phillips. Reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, Boy, University of Georgia Press, 2008


PS: I *love* how this poem is a broken/sprung sonnet of sorts.