Guest poem submitted by Paramjit Oberoi:
(Poem #1759) An Apology Forgive me for backing over and smashing your red wheelbarrow. It was raining and the rear wiper does not work on my new plum-colored SUV. I am also sorry about the white chickens. |
I was leafing through one of Billy Collins's anthologies of contemporary American poetry ("180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day") when I ran into this. I love the haiku-like simplicity of the lines, and the random irreverent touches ("plum-colored SUV", "white chickens"). So spare, not a word out of place, and one gets such a clear and vivid picture of the event when reading it. "An Apology" was a finalist for the 2003 James Hearst Poetry Prize and appeared in The North American Review Vol. 288, No. 2. Frances Jean Bergmann is a web designer and artist. She reads at spoken word venues, and has been published in Margie-The American Journal of Poetry, Wind, Pavement Saw, Realpoetik,in the anthology Connected: Poetry Online In The Age Of Computers, in her own chapbooks, and has a poem included in 180 More (Random House 2005). In 2003 she received the Mary Roberts Rinehart National Poetry Award; in 2004 she won the Pauline Ellis Prose Poetry Prize with "Wall." She lives in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), and maintains several local poetry websites. Biographical information from: http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/bergmann.html http://www.wfop.org/poets/bergmann.html http://www.fibitz.com/biostate.html -param PS. Here's the original: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/83.html
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