This is your last chance to submit to a poetry portfolio guest-edited by Alicia Ostriker that will be featured in Prairie Schooner’s Winter 2014. The portfolio will deal with the theme of Women and the Global Imagination. Submissions close May 15th. Send up to five pages of unpublished poetry to schooner.special.subs@gmail.com if you’d like your work to be considered. Once you’ve submitted, head on over to the Prairie Schooner archives to read “Normal Light,” an Ostriker poem published in the Winter 2003 issue of Prairie Schooner.
Which reminds self that one of the poets at the Tyrone Guthrie Center had said Philip Larkin was one of her favorite poets, and he has a poem about Toads.
Self googled, and here it is, dear blog readers:
TOADS
by Philip Larkin
Why should I let the work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it toils
With its sickening poison —
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly men, louts —
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines —
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets — and yet
No one actually_starves_.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something officially toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other.
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
Stay tuned.
