Craig Arnold's "Meditation on a Grapefruit"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Craig Arnold, born November 16, 1967 was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell. He taught poetry at the University of Wyoming. His poems have appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1998 and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, and in literary journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, The New Republic and The Yale Review. Arnold grew up in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Arnold’s Made Flesh won the 2009 High Plains Book Award and the 2008 Utah Book Award.

In 2009, Arnold traveled to Japan to research volcanoes for a planned book of poetry. In April of that year, he disappeared while hiking on the island of Kuchinoerabujima. In the New York Times, the poet David Orr mourned the loss of Arnold, but noted it would “be a mistake to think of him as a writer silenced before his prime... His shelf space may be smaller than one would wish, but he earned every bit of it.”

-bio via Copper Canyon Press and Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.6	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, November 29th, 2024.
0:09.8	Today's poem is by Craig Arnold, and it's called Meditation on a Grapefruit.
0:14.9	I'll read the poem once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
0:19.8	Meditation on a grapefruit.
0:21.6	To wake when all is possible before the agitations of the day have gripped you,
0:28.6	to come to the kitchen and peel a little basketball for breakfast,
0:33.6	to tear the husk like cotton padding, a cloud of oil, misting out of its pinprick pores, clean and
0:41.3	sharp as pepper, to ease each pale pink section out of its case so carefully, without breaking
0:49.2	a single pearly cell. To slide each piece into a cold blue china bowl, the juice pooling,
0:57.7	until the whole fruit is divided from its skin, and only then to eat. So sweet a discipline,
1:04.8	precisely pointless, a devout involvement of the hands and senses.
1:13.4	A pause. A little emptiness.
1:17.6	Each year harder to live within.
1:20.6	Each year, harder to live without.
1:27.3	This is a poem that opens up, no pun intended, but the poem itself presents the grapefruit as a kind of microcosm, a little world, a little cosmos.
1:37.3	And as the speaker contemplates the peeling, the opening up of the fruit. So the world at large opens up a little more.
1:49.5	And if you can see this poem on the page, there are spaces, there are pauses,
1:56.7	lacunae inserted into the middle of the text. and they come at these punctuating moments in which
2:04.1	something critical has just been observed and the space pulls you up short to see it.
2:11.1	This poem does that so well.
2:12.6	It is what the poet's task is at its heart to look, to see, and to invite those of us who are
	...

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