‘Channeling James Wright’: A Satirical Poem With an Important Message
Shelley Puhak updates James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" to give it a modern political twist. The full title of her poem is "Channeling James Wright Near a Sand Mining Site in Minnesota."
Two workers caught in the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. (Asitimes / CC BY 2.0)
Shelley Puhak updates James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” to give it a modern political twist.
Shelley Puhak reads “Channeling James Wright Near a Sand Mining Site in Minnesota.”
Channeling James Wright Near a Sand Mining Site in Minnesota
Shelley Puhak
Over my head, my cocoon’s roof— netting to impede pests and particles, butterflies and bronzing rays. Down the ravine, someone else’s foreclosure, and out front, someone else’s fat child slurping canned chemicals through a straw. To my right, in the field of sunlight between two pumps, steel giraffes that dip and bob, fracked ooze blazes golden. I lean back into my hammock, hand-knotted in a factory that collapsed upon some other woman’s people. I have wasted her life.
Shelley Puhak is the author of two poetry collections, including “Guinevere in Baltimore,” which won the 2012 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter and North American Review.
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