David Wojahn's "Pentecost"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

David Wojahn grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. Ever since his first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1981, Wojahn has been one of American poetry’s most thoughtful examiners of culture and memory. His work often investigates how history plays out in the lives of individuals, and poet Tom Sleigh says that his poems “meld the political and personal in a way that is unparalleled by any living American poet.”

Wojahn’s book World Tree (2011) received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004 (2006), which Peter Campion called “superb” and “panoramic” in a review for Poetry, showcases Wojahn’s formal range, the scope of his personal narratives, and his intense, imaginative monologues and character sketches, such as his sonnets on pop culture icons and rock-and-roll musicians in Mystery Train (1990). He is also celebrated for the emotional resonance of his poetry—the ability to, in the words of poet Jean Valentine, “follow … tragedy to its grave depths, with dignity and unsparingness, and egolessness.”

In addition to his books of poetry, Wojahn is the author of From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry (2015) and Strange Good Fortune (2001), a collection of essays on contemporary poetry. He coedited A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry (1991), and edited a posthumous collection of his wife Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (1995).

Wojahn has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Indiana Arts Commission. He teaches poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

-bio via 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.
0:08.1	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 9th, 2025.
0:13.4	Today's poem is by American poet David Wojohn, and it's called Pentecost.
0:18.5	It opens on an American soldier in Italy after the end of World War II,
0:24.4	doomed to wait around there while he awaits transport to the other side of the world,
0:32.3	reminiscent of the apostles of Jesus and the Book of Acts waiting in Jerusalem until the coming of the
0:40.0	spirit at the feast of Pentecost. From there, he descends into himself, as it were,
0:46.3	and has an encounter with inspiration. And it's this artistic impulse that makes him feel for a moment like he has touched something which is expressable to all men that can sort of transcend or bypass language.
1:06.5	The noose speaking to the noose and the brilliance of it is so great that he cannot behold it for long.
1:15.3	But importantly, the poem does not end with this divine fire being extinguished.
1:22.5	Here is Pentecost.
1:26.8	Inside the cage, a card table with a broken lake, an ancient Olivetti in the bar is etching
1:32.8	stripes, diagonal across the face of the man who crouches there, a shell case for a stool
1:38.4	talking to himself in an English of his own design. Writing in a spiral notebook, the kind the child would take to school,
1:46.0	he tugs his beard's gray stubble. This is Pisa, 1945. Beyond the prison compounds barbed wire mesh,
1:54.8	20 yards away, my father, in his corporal stripes, sips sick sweet grapa at a cafe with the men of his platoon,
2:02.8	the lattice-work canopy, intricately shadowing his face as if he wore a beekeeper's veil.
2:08.8	He must wait ten days until a DC-3 can ferry him to the Azores, then a troop ship to Havana.
2:14.9	But until then, he must help to guard a compound for Italian prisoners and spies,
2:19.7	pacing the rows of tents and cages every night from eight until two. Some nights he smuggles
2:25.9	cigarettes and chocolates to the old man, who claims that he's American himself, who speaks in
2:30.9	whispers from within the bars in the corny, mannered slaying of a movie cowboy.
	...

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