Mary Jo Salter's "Home Movies: A Sort of Ode"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Surveyors (2017). She is also a lyricist whose song cycle “Rooms of Light: The Life of Photographs" was composed by Fred Hersch. Her children’s book The Moon Comes Home appeared in 1989; her play Falling Bodies premiered in 2004. She is also a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edition, 1996; 5th edition, 2005; 6th edition, 2018).

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Friday, August 28, 2020.
0:06.1	Today's poem is by another one of those poets with an August birthday, Mary Jo Salter, who was born in
0:11.7	August 15th of 1954. She is an American poet and a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry,
0:18.9	and she also teaches writing at John's Hopkins
0:21.3	University. Before I get to her poem today, though, I want to remind you that September 1st
0:27.0	is the deadline for our young listeners' contest. So be sure to go to our Facebook page or go back
0:32.2	to the episodes that describe the rules on that. And be sure to get your entries in.
0:38.3	We've got some great folio books waiting for some winners.
0:41.9	So I just wanted to remind everyone about that.
0:44.7	That brings us to today's poem.
0:47.2	As I said, it is by Mary Jo Salter, and it is called Home Movies, a sort of ode.
0:55.0	It goes like this.
1:04.2	Because it hadn't seemed enough after a while to catalog more Christmases,
1:09.5	three-layer cakes ablaze with birthday candles, the Blizzard Billy took a shovel to,
1:13.0	fell as lawnmower tour of the yard, the tree forts forts the shoot-em-ups between the boys and new string ties and cowboy hats and holsters or mother sticking a bow as big as a
1:19.6	masqueteer ears in my hair my father sometimes turned the gaze of his camera to subjects more
1:26.4	artistic or universal long close-ups of a rose's face.
1:34.3	A real-time sunset in nearly an hour. What surely were some brilliant autumn leaves before their colors faded to dry beige on the aging film.
1:53.3	A great deal of pacing at the zoo by polar bears and tigers caged, he seemed to say, like him.
2:01.4	What happened between him and her is another story, and just as well we have in a movie of it,
2:06.1	only some unforgiving scowls she gave through terrifying, ticking silence when he must have asked her, no soundtrack, for a smile.
2:11.9	Still, what I keep yearning for isn't those generic cherry blossoms at their peak,
	...

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