Janet Holmes
Janet Holmes is the author of Paperback Romance (State Street Press, 1984, a chapbook) and has been recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a Bush Foundation Artist's Fellowship. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Antaeus, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, and Tar River Poetry. Her poems have been selected by A.R. Ammons and Richard Howard to appear in The Best American Poetry 1994 and 1995. Her The Physicist at the Mall won the 1994 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She is director of Ahsahta Press and teaches at Boise State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Three poems from Janet Holmes' collection, Humanophone, were selected by W.S. Merwin for the Pablo Neruda Prize.
PHYSICIST AT THE MALL
BY JANET HOLMES
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Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (1993)
I was surprised by the talk of this traveler in the age of sometimes miracles. These poems are an intimate reading of the spinning globe in a taut and compelling language. Space shifts. I remember again how necessary poetry is in this landscape of a different age. The mall after all is an equation of love and sacrifice. We need Janet Holmes' vision, her brilliant tongue. -- Joy Harjo
Other Longevities
If, like snakes or reptiles, we grew with years,
then imagine the huge elderly, slowed
with age and bulk, frequenting
delicatessens, libraries; crowding
laundromats; taking whole booths to themselves
in family restaurants. The ample bodies
of the long-married, ambling their constitutionals.
The memories, all of smaller times.
Regardless of our wisdom or kindness, faith
or virtue, regardless of our capacity
for loneliness or independence, we would each grow
larger and more splendid,
and, lying down, would dream again and again
of childhood-the narrow long road back
to the vanishing point-each new dream
permitting another to be forgotten.