‘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.
Your support is crucial...As we navigate an uncertain 2025, with a new administration questioning press freedoms, the risks are clear: our ability to report freely is under threat.
Your tax-deductible donation enables us to dig deeper, delivering fearless investigative reporting and analysis that exposes the reality beneath the headlines — without compromise.
Now is the time to take action. Stand with our courageous journalists. Donate today to protect a free press, uphold democracy and uncover the stories that need to be told.
TD Interview
Marc Cooper, Dig Curator and former translator to President Allende, speaks to KPFK Radio's Suzi Weissman about the complex historical forces at work today in Chile.
Dig Scape
Will microdosing finally bring them home?
The class war that gave rise to his campaign is the fault of a long line of corporate Democrats like Joe Biden, and voters know it.
A new book shows how the activist's positions on issues like the Vietnam War and environmental justice helped move civil rights leaders left.
Intelligence expert William Binney discusses the revelation that a widely used encryption service has been in government hands for decades.
“The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”
You need to be a supporter to comment.
There are currently no responses to this article.
Be the first to respond.