poets.org Open in urlscan Pro
2606:4700:20::ac43:4495  Public Scan

Form analysis
4 forms found in the DOM

GET /search

<form class="poets-search__form" method="GET" action="/search">
  <div class="form-group">
    <label for="poets-search-input" class="sr-only">Search</label>
    <div class="input-group">
      <input type="search" autocomplete="off" name="combine" placeholder="search" value="" class="poets-search__form-input form-control">
      <div class="input-group-append">
        <button type="submit" class="btn poets-search__form-button btn-secondary"> Submit </button>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</form>

Name: mc-embedded-subscribe-form — POST https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=0e208b88ae&f_id=00686de1f0

<form action="https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&amp;id=0e208b88ae&amp;f_id=00686de1f0" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_self">
  <input type="hidden" value="1" name="group[5895][1]" id="mce-group[5895]-5895-0">
  <div id="mc_embed_signup_scroll">
    <div class="indicates-required"><span class="asterisk">*</span> indicates required</div>
    <div class="mc-field-group">
      <label for="mce-EMAIL">Email Address <span class="asterisk">*</span>
      </label>
      <input type="email" value="" name="EMAIL" class="required email" id="mce-EMAIL" required="">
      <span id="mce-EMAIL-HELPERTEXT" class="helper_text"></span>
    </div>
    <div class="clear"><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button"></div>
    <div id="mce-responses" class="clear">
      <div class="response" id="mce-error-response" style="display:none"></div>
      <div class="response" id="mce-success-response" style="display:none"></div>
    </div>
    <div style="position: absolute; left: -5000px;" aria-hidden="true"><input type="text" name="b_e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822_0e208b88ae" tabindex="-1" value=""></div>
  </div>
</form>

Name: mc-embedded-subscribe-form — POST https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&id=0e208b88ae&f_id=00686de1f0

<form action="https://poets.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822&amp;id=0e208b88ae&amp;f_id=00686de1f0" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_self">
  <div id="mc_embed_signup_scroll">
    <div class="mc-field-group input-group">
      <ul class="newsletter-checkbox-list">
        <li class="newsletter-checkbox custom-control custom-checkbox">
          <input class="custom-control-input" type="checkbox" value="2" name="group[5895][2]" id="mce-group[5895]-5895-1">
          <label class="custom-control-label" for="mce-group[5895]-5895-1">Academy of American Poets Newsletter</label>
        </li>
        <li class="newsletter-checkbox custom-control custom-checkbox">
          <input class="custom-control-input" type="checkbox" value="8" name="group[5895][8]" id="mce-group[5895]-5895-3">
          <label class="custom-control-label" for="mce-group[5895]-5895-3">Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter</label>
        </li>
        <li class="newsletter-checkbox custom-control custom-checkbox">
          <input class="custom-control-input" type="checkbox" value="4" name="group[5895][4]" id="mce-group[5895]-5895-2">
          <label class="custom-control-label" for="mce-group[5895]-5895-2">Teach This Poem</label>
        </li>
        <li class="newsletter-checkbox custom-control custom-checkbox">
          <input class="custom-control-input" type="checkbox" value="1" name="group[5895][1]" id="mce-group[5895]-5895-0">
          <label class="custom-control-label" for="mce-group[5895]-5895-0">Poem-a-Day</label>
        </li>
      </ul>
      <span id="mce-group[5895]-HELPERTEXT" class="helper_text"></span>
    </div>
    <div class="mc-field-group newsletter-email">
      <label for="mce-EMAIL" class="visually-hidden">Email Address</label>
      <input type="email" value="" name="EMAIL" class="required email form-control form-control-9" id="mce-EMAIL" required=""><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe"
        class="button btn btn btn-primary btn-secondary">
      <span id="mce-EMAIL-HELPERTEXT" class="helper_text"></span>
    </div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    <div id="mce-responses" class="clear">
      <div class="response" id="mce-error-response" style="display:none"></div>
      <div class="response" id="mce-success-response" style="display:none"></div>
    </div>
    <div style="position: absolute; left: -5000px;" aria-hidden="true"><input type="text" name="b_e329a0cb6f08842f08a05d822_0e208b88ae" tabindex="-1" value=""></div>
  </div>
</form>

<form class="g1drdc1 gsxaqnp" novalidate="novalidate">
  <div class="g-qqqgno"><w-div class="gjj44fd g92w19j"><label for="gscw_email_input" class="g-9ntlnu">Email</label><w-div class="g5xalms g-lrx97t"><input type="email" maxlength="1000" title="Email" placeholder="Email address" name="email"
          id="gscw_email_input" class="g-1d3wnd g-ufh3bo"></w-div></w-div> <button type="submit" class="gmr9564 "> <span class="g-hhhhb5">Subscribe</span> <span class="g-snw0ew" title="Subscribe"></span></button></div>
</form>

Text Content

Skip to main content
Poets.org


MOBILEMENU

 * Poems
 * Poets
 * Poem-a-Day
 * National Poetry Month
 * Materials for Teachers
 * Literary Seminars
 * American Poets Magazine


MAIN NAVIGATION

 * Poets.org
 * Academy of American Poets
 * National Poetry Month
 * American Poets Magazine


USER ACCOUNT MENU

 * Log in
 * Membership
 * Donate

Donate
Donate

Search
Submit

Poetry offers us that silence—that quiet space.

—Ada Limón, United States Poet Laureate


PAGE SUBMENU BLOCK

 * find poems
 * find poets
 * poem-a-day
 * literary seminars
 * materials for teachers
 * poetry near you


POEM-A-DAY

Academy of American Poets · Idra Novey: "Value City"


ABOUT THIS POEM

“I knelt in the temple of imagination for much of my childhood. In Fanny Howe’s
spectacular book Second Childhood, she poses a number of questions about that
‘temple,’ [and] what causes the imagination to go on burning against all odds.
This poem began with someone else’s memory of hiding with me in a discount store
while I imagined us traveling to Alaska. I have no memory of my imagination
burning against all odds in Value City. I know it happened though; I still have
a hat from the final sales from that store.”
—Idra Novey


VALUE CITY

Load audio player about

Under the marked-down dresses, we conjured trips to Oslo.
Also to Lima. Mel says the game was my idea, hiding
behind hundreds of hems, inventing trips to cities we knew
 

only as pleasing arrangements of letters, places we’d likely
never see. Mel says it’s how she remembers me: cross-legged, knotting
lengths of licorice, traveling the planet under racks of final sales.
 

A rhinestone belt fell on my head once, she says, and I kept on talking
about Alaska, the claws of King Crabs we’d crack open and taste
the arctic, find out what we were missing at Red Lobster. Our travels
 

to nowhere, she says, lasted beyond the training bras
we compared in the dressing room. So what explains it, my failure
to recall these conjured trips, or why my psyche delivers words
 

from a woman I never sat with under packed rows
of dresses—the poet Fanny Howe asking what keeps the temple
of imagination burning with candles against all odds, whether it remains
 

behind a nipple and a bone? This fraught asymmetry with Mel occurs
after our nipples became a milk source. We’re older, bowling by chance
in adjacent lanes, recognizing each other most from the bodies
 

of our children—echoes of ourselves in their noses, a familiar drop
in their shoulders. How’s it possible, Mel asks, you recall none of it,
not even the red stickers that stuck to our palms? You must
 

remember picking off those stickers, she insists—amid news
of her divorce, her interest in crystals. I deliver trivia
about my long-haired sons bowling into the gutter, about my brother
 

who bowls much better, and still lives in town. New pins lower
like sets of dentures, get swept again into the open jaws
of our separate lanes. There’s no saying it: my betrayal. How else
 

to name the absence of our game in my mind? The thick clouds
over Lima, I remember; I got there after college, saw
the bronze rear of Pizarro’s horse before protesters heaved
 

his pedestal to the ground. Alaska, too, I got to see, confused
the sound of calving glaciers with the blasts of rifles
I knew here, where Mel’s continued through forty years
 

of deer season, the few weeks each November
for shooting bears. If I’d stayed, had Oslo remained
a sonic cluster, would my lack of recall rub less? Guilt
 

is what floods me at my swift retrieval of Fanny Howe’s lines
but not the hems in Value City. I tell Mel the rhinestone belt
must’ve done something to my brain. We hug, exchange numbers
 

we’ll never use. If there’s a temple beyond glands and bone
for all that goes blank in a lifetime, maybe it resides in the body
of a poem, in meanings left between the spread knees
 

of enjambment. The next bowlers go live on the lane screens:
Eddie Wins, JP the Dream Pony, La Reina Carla, and CU
on the Moon. Reader, some of these names are flourishes
 

for the sake of this poem. Eddie Wins, he’s up there. Also Carla,
but with no bravado. CU on the Moon is true; someone assuming
our lane has lunar plans and wants a companion. Maybe Carla.
 

Maybe JP, who prefers to keep his dream pony to himself.

Copyright © 2024 by Idra Novey. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October
15, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

read the rest


IDRA NOVEY

Photo credit: Jesse Ditmar
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

ADD TO ANTHOLOGY

×



SIGN UP FOR POEM-A-DAY

* indicates required
Email Address *





POEMS

16232 poems


IN THE MATTER OF TWO MEN

One does such work as one will not,
    And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
    The black must serve the white.
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s softening flesh,
    While the black man’s muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,

James D. Corrothers
1922


COMPENSATION

O, rich young lord, thou ridest by
With looks of high disdain;
It chafes me not thy title high,
Thy blood of oldest strain.
The lady riding at thy side
Is but in name thy promised bride.
       Ride on, young lord, ride on!

James Edwin Campbell
1922


A POEM FOR MY WIFE

I’m in my room writing
speaking in myself
& I hear you
move down the hallway
to water your plants

I write truth on the page
I strike the word over & over
yet I worry you’ll pour too much water on the plants
& the water will overflow onto the books
ruining them

If I can’t speak out of myself
how can I tell you I don’t care about the plants?
how can I tell you I don’t care if the books get wet?

David Meltzer
2005


I HAVE FOLDED MY SORROWS

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.


Bob Kaufman
1965


POETS

4328 poets

Photo credit: Anna Min


DANEZ SMITH

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and
[insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014).

Read more about Danez Smith >


JACKIE WANG

Jackie Wang is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to
Save Us from the Void (Nightboat, 2021), which was longlisted for the National
Book Award.

Read more about Jackie Wang >
Photo credit: Nancy Wong


JANICE MIRIKITANI

Janice Mirikitani was born on February 4, 1941, in Stockton, California. 

Read more about Janice Mirikitani >
Photo credit: Paula Champagne


CHEN CHEN

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further
Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017).

Read more about Chen Chen >


MEG DAY

Meg Day grew up in California’s Bay Area and received a BA from the University
of California, San Diego, an MFA from Mills College, and a PhD from

Read more about Meg Day >



FEATURES


OCTOBER 2024 POEM-A-DAY GUEST EDITOR SARAH GAMBITO

Listen to a short Q&A where Sarah Gambito discusses her curatorial process for
Poem-a-Day.


POEM-A-DAY GUEST EDITORS IN 2024

Since 2018, the Academy of American Poets has invited twelve new Guest Editors
to each curate a month of


2023 POET LAUREATE FELLOWS ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

Learn more about the 2023 Poet Laureate Fellows, their communities, fellowship
projects, writing practices, and thoughts on poetry, by reading these interviews
and essays from their fellowship year.


ANNOUNCEMENTS

October 10, 2024
New York, NY (October 10, 2024)—The Academy of American Poets announces the
recipients of this year’s
Read more
September 26, 2024
New York, NY (September 26, 2024)—The Academy of American Poets, a leading
champion of poets and poetry in the United States, is pleased to announce the
2024 winners of the
Read more
September 12, 2024
We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Harold Morton Landon Translation
Award will be judged by 
Read more


AWARDS






AMERICAN POETS MAGAZINE

Produced exclusively for our members, the Fall–Winter issue features cover art
by Childe Hassam; essays by B. K. Fischer, Eunsong Kim, and Rena Priest. Become
a member to receive your digital and physical copy of the most recent issue
of American Poets.

 * Unbinding Poetic Lives by Eunsong Kim
 * River as a Verb: Reading Ecopoetry with High School Students by B. K. Fischer
 * "The poetry of earth is ceasing never...": Reflections on Ecopoetry by Rena
   Priest

… and much more

Become a member to receive your copy of American Poets twice a year.



NEWSLETTER SIGN UP

 * Academy of American Poets Newsletter
 * Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
 * Teach This Poem
 * Poem-a-Day

Email Address





SUPPORT US

 * Become a Member
 * Donate Now
 * Get Involved
 * Make a Bequest
 * Advertise with Us


FOLLOW US

 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * Tumblr
 * SoundCloud
 * YouTube
 * Instagram
 * Pinterest


FOOTER


 * POETS.ORG
   
   * Find Poems
   * Find Poets
   * Poetry Near You
   * Jobs for Poets
   * Literary Seminars
   * Privacy Policy
   * Press Center
   * Advertise


 * ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
   
   * About Us
   * Programs
   * Prizes
   * First Book Award
   * James Laughlin Award
   * Ambroggio Prize
   * Chancellors
   * Staff


 * NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
   
   * Poetry & the Creative Mind
   * Dear Poet Project
   * Poster
   * 30 Ways to Celebrate
   * Sponsorship


 * AMERICAN POETS
   
   * Books Noted
   * Essays
   * Advertise

© Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038
poets .org
Thank you!
You have successfully subscribed.
Subscribe to Poem-a-Day
Celebrate poetry with a poem delivered to your inbox every day.
Email Subscribe
We will not share your information with anyone