Ben Doller

Posted in Past Guests  |  Tagged A–F

Ben Doller is the author of three poetry collections: Radio, Radio (2001), winner of the 2000 Walt Whitman Award, FAQ (2009) and Dead Ahead (2010). Doller is the co-editor of the Kuhl House Contemporary Poetry Series at the U of Iowa Press, and is vice editor and designer of the journal 1913 and 1913 Press. Susan Howe (2000 Walt Whitman Award judge) in praise of Radio, Radio: “What makes this young poet’s work so compellingly in the spirit of Crane and Spicer (even Poe) is its tone of pixilated delinquency.”

Radio, Radio

In the middle of every field,
obscured from the side by grass
or cornhusks, is a clearing where
she works burying swans alive
into the black earth. She only
buries their bodies, their wings.
She packs the dirt tight around
their noodle necks & they shake
like long eyelashes in a hurricane.
She makes me feed them by hand
twice a day for one full year: grain,
bits of chopped fish. Then she
takes me to the tin toolshed.
Again she shows me the world
inside her silver transistor radio.
She hands me the scythe.

–
From Radio, Radio (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)

Links

• A Wesleyan Reader’s Companion to Fauxhawk. 2015.
• Four poems. La Petite Zine. 16 April 2012.
• Q & A: American Poetry. Poetry Society of America. 16 April 2012.

Media

Seminar with Sandra Doller and Srikanth Reddy | April 24, 2012

Reading with Sandra Doller and Srikanth Reddy | April 24, 2012