Moore Moran, “The Truth Concerning the Pizza in Monterey”

Custom House Cafe stood on this spot, straddling
Pier and seawall like a fisherman gaffing catch.
It was here, in ’46 that Carolos brought pizza
To the country—hand-pounding his dough flats so fine
That when he spun them at the ceiling, light
From the harbor shone through.

At the great iron oven he would hand them out crackling,
Bubbling real Mafia mozzarella,
Tomato so fresh it sassed you all the way down;
Crust edges: buttery popover. Friday nights,
Ramirez and I downed two extra-largers per, hardly pausing
To pull on longnecks so cold chunks of ice

Still knocked around inside the bottles. Today
You can only get pizza at the franchise parlors in town
Where the freshest thing going is the waiters.
And nobody tosses anymore. Instead, they pancake
Their wheat-germy dough through rubber wringers
Lifted from old washing machines in the junkyard.

The Room Within is the second collection of poems by Moore Moran, which also includes “On Wyeth’s Below Dover,” “Ordinary Time in the Pews” (which has also been published as “Ordinary Days”), and “That Breakfast,” all of which were published in a chapbook by the New Formalist Press. It also contains “Late in the Night,” published in The New Criterion, and “Paris, After” and “Today in Time,” both of which were also included in Moran’s award-winning 1999 collection, Firebreaks.

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The poems in this collection were written over the course of more than five decades, along with other poems such as “Sleeping Beauty” (first published in 1956) and “The Mountain Desert” (1986).

1 August 2010 | poetry |

Gerald Stern, “Stepping Out of Poetry”

What would you give for one of the old yellow streetcars
rocking toward you again through the thick snow?

What would you give for the feeling of joy as you climbed
up the three iron steps and took your place by the cold window?

Oh, what would you give to pick up your stack of books
and walk down the icy path in front of the library?

What would you give for your dream
to be as clear and simple as it was then
in the dark afternoons, at the old scarred tables?

Gerald Stern’s Early Collected Poems gathers together much of the verse from six books first published between 1965 and 1992. In an essay published last month at Norton’s Poets Out Loud website, Stern looks back at his early efforts: “I was interested in that which was overlooked, neglected, and unseen, from a political, religious, and personal point of view and a voice that bespoke this in the simplest, most honest manner,” he writes. “I found myself returning to early—to fundamental—experiences, as I found myself discovering a new language. This constituted a celebration as well as a kind of mourning or elegy… [It] was a difficult road to hoe, for it expressed neither formal, academic niceness nor bohemian madness.”

Other poems in this collection include “Kissing Stieglitz Goodbye” (at the Academy of American Poets website, which has an audio recording of “Sylvia” as well), “Waving Good-by” (the Poetry Out Loud website), and “Another Insane Devotion” (Poetry). Earlier this year, The New Yorker published a new Stern poem, “Dream IV.”

27 July 2010 | poetry |