George Wallace Featured Poet

George Wallace

Jan 01, 2015

George Wallace combines the energy of the Beat generation, the force of the Dadaists and the rhythm of the Griots.He tells a story with relentless imagination making memory real. A poem is like a dream where the truth makes up a lie. So George beguiles us with his mind that has escaped all prisons. -Grace Cavalieri

George Wallace is Writer in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace (2011-present), first poet laureate of Suffolk County NY, and author of 28 chapbooks of poetry. An adjunct professor of English at Pace University in Manhattan and Westchester Community College, he is editor of Poetrybay, Poetryvlog, Walt‘s Corner, and co-editor of Great Weather For Media and Long Island Quarterly.

His lecture and reading schedule has brought him to many locations in the US and UK, including the Dylan Thomas Centre, Robert Burns Centre, Brantwood and Swarthmoor Hall; and in the US, at the Pollock-Krasner House, Gordon Parks Museum, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, John Steinbeck Center, Woody Guthrie Festival, Woodstock Poetry Festival, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, The Detroit Labor Conference, Kenneth Patchen Festival, the Greek Permanent Mission to the UN and at the Lyric Recovery series at Carnegie Hall.

A graduate of Syracuse University where he studied poetry with WD Snodgrass and Donald Justice, Wallace obtained his MFA in 2008 at Pacific University, Oregon, working with Marvin Bell, David St John, Ellen Bass and Dorianne Laux.

DADDY

I am the hand grenade
your daddy should’ve
jumped on, back in ‘43,
to save his buddies,
the snipers nest in
fallujah, i am the lost
platoon, the lost soldier
cowering in the bunk
room, i ran away, i am
the village of grasshuts
that got torched, and i
explode on contact,
at night I mean, in
your dream, I am a
wheatfield in flames,
a mortar in pleiku,
i am a busted tank
tread on the yalu, a
helicopter gunned
down in cambodian
rain, I explode and
explode, in the one
dream you cannot
shake, I mean, the
dream in your belly,
the wormhole in your
heart, I explode like
barbed wire and
butterflies, boom
baby boom, your
daddy, your grand-
daddy, you and
you and you, three
day beard, whiskey
on my breath, I'm
making it back,
making it back, i'm
marrying your mama,
driving you to school,
I'm making it back,
having you

THE POETRY OF EMPTINESS

in this dream I am chasing along a ridiculous

riverbank & maybe you have had this dream

too, tangling tangling & untangling my feet,

tugging at a string & a kite tugs back & we

have an understanding this kite & I you see

this kite is writing the poetry of emptiness

on a big blue chalkboard which is the sky –

as for me, I am a member of a lonely tribe

that tries & tries to fill emptiness back up –

more power to you, kite -- & less to me –

tugging your way into the wind & scripting

the sky – more power to you & less to me,

in the wind, in the wind – & in this string,

unwinding my heart in incredible flight

MY FATHER'S FELT FEDORA

I am trying to explain things

I will never understand, for

example my sister by lamp-

light, waltzing with a glitter-

bowl between her knees, my

father’s felt fedora tilted on

her head, she knew that it

came down to this, what it

takes to make night go easy

for a man who, all he wanted

was to take refuge in the ashes

which grow like death from

the end of a cigar, she exacted

some kind of joy I suppose

out of distracting him from

the unfortunate certainties,

it was a mystery to me then,

it’s a mystery to me still,

I was all of seven, she was

incomprehensibly thirteen,

leaning back in his easy chair,

highball in hand, my father’s eyes

would go clear and calm, resolute,

once again an incorruptible, stainless

steel kind of a man, the kind they

advertise on tv, I tell you, I’ll never

understand it, my sister dancing rings

around his chair, flirting with the edge

of the carpet, him laughing and clapping

his hands, it was their secret, she was six

years older than me, very wise, very wise –

a lot of things from those days are a mystery,

the strange intimacies, the unspoken truths,

even now it makes me slightly ill to see a woman

in a felt fedora, or think about the two of us,

camped til dusk by the rainy window,

waiting for his car to pull up

DEATHRAY KARAOKE

It is 1948. In the hallway the landlord is speaking a foreign language called hope. America! Love it or choke on its fist. Love you have to pay for. Mother jams a coin into the electric box & the place starts to spin like ether. I can see stars & stripes. A yellow masquerade called prosperity invades the room.

Hey, we won the war, life is good, says Mother. This is America, get used to it. My Mother loves me like a general anaesthetic. Like a wool rug loves a wooden floor.

Now the radiator’s pumping like an iron lung, coughing up blood & bones. But there’s magic in it. Mother has magic in her too, got magic in her hands. She’s got this American thing by the throat. She’d do anything for me, if she could. Anything. Chesterfields. Cowboy suits. Rock & roll. All we’ve got in this damn room is atom bombs & a closet full of stick butter.

Mother lights up another cigarette, pilots a soup spoon out of the icebox & zoom! into the cavernous mouth of baby.

I am baby. I am doing the deathray karaoke.

HIGHWAY 81

around here it’s a long green finger, the meridian highway, I mean, leads

one man toward death & another man to freedom, or both -- that may be

insanity, it depends on who’s doing the talking & if the snow has set in –

one of woody’s immaculate blue american highways it was gonna connect

everyone to each other but never did, great big ribbon of asphalt, used to

you could hitch hike it end to end, not no more -- sky & more sky – & iron

bridges, brawny & beat, a tough old go in some places, other spots easy

sailing, down around oklahoma it gets yellow & wild with prairie dogs &

coyote, I’m told, overgrown & neglected in texas due to the state cutbacks

though other folks say wildflower restoration project -- anyhow hot dusty

& indifferent, though I don’t know too much about things like that because

around here it’s still a long green hopeful finger pointing straight though a

man’s heart, towards something different -- jesus pot or liberation, I don't

know -- some folks don’t like that but it’s never done no harm to me or to

no one i know & I say give an idea a chance before you dismiss it out of

hand – the great pan-american highway, stupid i suppose, a dream that

never should’ve happened, but where would we be without a dream, up

at the canadian border where if you keep on going you can make winnipeg

by morning or -- depending on who you ask, someone doing some dreaming

or someone doing some plain calculation – either you end up at fort worth,

or it don’t quit there at all

& will take you to mexico

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