Eat and Remember

Carl Lindner

Lindner’s poems are immediately engaging in their clear images and witty fun. Lindner delights in word play and constructs several of his poems in a variety of lingoes: academic life, food, electricity, the body. “Breathing is tenure…/colleagues,/you have more/faculties than you know.” “…this man who tells/by touch the livest wires…/sorcerer, conductor,/he’s positively thrilled….” Interwoven with the cleverness are sturdy threads of self-examination, parables for living and gentle iconoclasm. Lindner’s aim is lightness — not careless light-heartedness, but a genuine unburdening and emergence into simplicity, openness, renewal. Lindner likens this to shaking snow from bent trees, permitting them to stand upright again. So, he seems to say, might we become lighter and freer. “Bent by snow still/falling, the young/pine called him out…./giving the slender/trunks a shake…. /over and over, he/lifted like a branch./ …singing ‘evergreen’/to himself….”

Carl Lindner is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside where he has been teaching courses in American literature, creative writing (poetry) and composition since 1969. He has won several teaching awards. He has also been recognized for his poetry by the Wisconsin Arts Board, which awarded him a fellowship in 1981, and by his university, which honored him with an award for Creative Activity in 1996. He has published two chapbooks of poetry (Vampire andThe Only Game), one full length collection (Shooting Baskets in a Dark Gymnasium), with another in press (Angling into Light), and approximately two hundred poems in various literary journals. Among his greatest blessings are his two children, Jennifer and Peter. At present, he lives in Racine with his cat Jesse James.

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Excerpt

Outside Activities

“As mandated in UWS 8.025, all
faculty and academic staff
must file a report on their
outside activities.”
– Vice Chancellor

Every day, religiously,
I change my underwear.

When I leave my house,
I always lose my way.

I no longer pay
attention to the news.

When my cat meows,
I listen to the syllables.

On my back, I study
the language of clouds,

the wheel of jay,
the swoop of cardinal.

At the close of light,
I wrap myself

in the blanket of night.
I pray the blackness

finds in me good company.
Morning showers me with gold.

Less and less I count
the change in my pockets.

More and more I grow
rich from these activities.