By Flapper Press Poetry Café:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café continues a new series of articles about favorite lines of poetry and the poets who wrote them. We’re reaching out to poets, writers, and lovers of poetry to submit their favorite lines of poetry and tell us why you love them.
Check out our submission guidelines and send us your favorites!
We'll feature your submission sometime this year on our site!
This week, our submission comes from Flapper Press contributor Tim Suermondt:
Jim Moore
Tim Suermondt:
I've always loved Jim Moore's simplicity and how he can turn it into something profound and beautiful, and humorous too, which is quite important. His poems are usually on the shorter side and say as much if not more than poems that drone on. "In the poems I love/there are sailboats/taking lonely Chinese poets away".
As he gets close to 80, Jim Moore is still cataloging the human condition with gusto. The sample lines below are from his latest book Prognosis, published by Gray Wolf Press. They come from a series of poems titled "Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am."
It's settled then: I'll sit by the monument to the fallen for as long as it takes.
Just the two of us in a little motel room, surrounded by pure Nebraska.
Lilacs already, and a man with so much of everything bends toward them as if he has nothing.
Wishing to be loved by everyone in this cafe. Is it too much to ask?
Born in in 1943 in Decatur, Illinois, Moore starting writing poetry in the 1960s and has continued to write and publish work for over four decades. A four time recipient of the Minnesota book Award, Moore has received presitiougs grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The Loft McKnight and the Guggenheim Foundation. He continues to write and teach poetry, his focus ranging from the moments in everyday life to the public issues and the bigger questions and concerns that impact our lives.
Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems, A Doughnut and the Great Beauty of the World, will be coming out early in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, The Fortnightly Review, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge, MA, with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.