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From K UED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim.

Coming up on Forum, a squirrel in the street.

Actors running in movies.

These topics are but a few that Atlantic staff writer James Parker has honored with an ode.

His one to bananas goes,

there's an orthodox old school surrealism to the banana, its cartoon yellowness, its absurd

curvature, the fact that when we think about a banana, we think about it upside down. Enjoy me now,

it says, with its banana grin, I was created for your pleasure.

We'll talk with Parker about the power of honoring the everyday with odes, and hear from you to whom or what would you write an ode. Tell us after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. James Parker describes his new collection of odes and his practice of writing them as devoted to, quote, encounters with the ineffable, encounters with the highly frigging effable, the grace of God, the piece of toast, whatever gets me through the next five minutes. His ode to not

drinking goes, I note the change when I resist my alcoholic whim. The mornings are more sparkling,

but the evenings are more dim. What's something from the mundane to the profound that you paid

...