[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: This past July, I had the good fortune to be invited to the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference as a faculty member. The Conference is one of the most successful in the Country by virtue of its excellent cohort of working writers and I was honored to toil among them. Among them was the poet Dana Levin who grow up in California’s Mojave Desert and attended Pitzer College in Claremont. A Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "January Garden" by Dana Levin.

January Garden

Woke up with:	the minute I let “I love you” touch me, trees
				sprouted from my hair


Woke up with:	Zeus fatigue—		(what ails the nation)

Woke up with:	the soul a balm, a lozenge, yet another
				pill-shaped thing—

Woke up with:	recalled nothing—		took a walk in winter air—

Woke up with:	in the January garden. No one
				on benches—

			And then remembered—with a bolt—how I’d been
				titling a poem in my sleep:

				A Little Less, Day after Day, Bomb after Bomb

			And just as I remembered, I passed a young woman
				at a picnic table, writing in a journal—

			And she held—so help me!—a pen shaped
				like a bone—

			And I heard the poem:

				Each of us by nature, a killer—

				Each of us, by nature,
					picking something to practice

					mercy on—

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 71



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