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In this issue we begin a new feature in the Faculty Newsletter. We hope to publish poetry by MIT faculty in every issue from now on. Submissions from all regular and irregular faculty are welcome. Send your poems to the poetry editor, David Thorburn, at fnl@mit.edu.
The excerpt below is from Rub Out (Pressed Wafer publishers, Boston, 2003) by Ed Barrett, senior lecturer in Writing. The book is a trilogy of experimental verse novels: Rub Out, a meditation on Whitey Bulger and other Boston mobsters, Concord transcendentalists and the disappearance of a young woman; Breezy Point, a monologue set in New York City’s seaside community of that name; and Tell On You, a prose poem sequence focusing on boxing, Las Vegas comics and a corpse that washes ashore in Brooklyn.
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Nothing toys |
of the children |
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of Boston |
Ralph Waldo |
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(The Rifleman) |
Emerson and |
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Whitey |
Thoreau cut shallow |
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graves in railway |
embankments, |
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children in shifts |
they had |
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buried who sang |
Irish |
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airs, stupid sentimental |
favorites you couldn't |
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get out of your |
mind if you |
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heard them |
They saw their |
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desire and their grief |
over their desire |
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buried in the woods |
around Boston, |
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oily light of cars |
and Indian arrowheads |
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rising out of the clay |
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