The Missouri Review
Discovering the best in fiction, essays, and poetry
Poem of the Week - August 11, 2009
Charlie
A new song. A carol, say, to constancy -- not the Northstar's stubborn pivot, boring nightlong through the pole, but the modest steadfastness of the Big Dipper. Draw a line across its basin, star to star and then beyond the constellation till you find, near-invisible, true North. Selfless gesture, at every hour to point and point away to some obscure and ever-fixèd mark, to be prized for pure devotion,for how it bears the gaze away . . . Isn't that how it is, in love as in war: someone gets to pull the wagon, and someone, girding his smallness in glittering mail, gets to be Charlemagne.
[Listen to this poem as an mp3 file]
This week we're proud to feature "Charlie" by Kimberly Johnson; the poem is published in our current issue TMR 32:2 (2009). Johnson is the author of two collections of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God, as well as a verse translation of Virgil's Georgics. Recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee and the Utah Arts Council, Johnson has work recent or forthcoming in the New Yorker, Slate, Iowa Review and Modern Philology. Be sure to check out the audio recording of this poem available through the "Read this Poem" link below.
Our Latest Issue: Crash
33.2 Summer 2010
Featuring work by M.C. Armstrong, John W. Evans, Benjamin S. Grossberg, Becky Adnot Haynes, Nathan Hogan, Jonathan Johnson, Devin Murphy, Wade Ostrowski, and Sharon Solwitz... and an interview with Natasha Trethewey.
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This selection is from a twenty-six-page unlineated poem called ‘Siege Psalter,' each section of which takes its title from a letter of the military alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, etc.). The poem represents an extended petition/complaint addressed to an absent figure who is simultaneously God and a former beloved. The poem's epigraph is from George Herbert's poem "Prayer (I)," in which he acknowledges the combative nature of prayer by calling it an "Engine against the Almighty."