Home > Poems & Poets > from Stops Along the Western Bank of the Missouri River: Of the River Itself

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

from Stops Along the Western Bank of the Missouri River: Of the River Itself

By Michael Anania b. 1939 Michael Anania

This is my advice to foreigners:

call it simply—the river;

never say old muddy

or even Missouri,

and except when it is necessary

ignore the fact that it moves.

It is the river, a singular,

stationary figure of division.

Do not allow the pre-Socratic

to enter your mind except

when thinking of clear water trout

streams in north central Wyoming.

The river is a variety of land,

a kind of dark sea or great bay,

sea of greater ocean.

At times I find it good discipline

to think of it as a tree

rooted in the delta,

a snake on its topmost western branch.

These hills are not containers;

they give no vantage but that

looking out is an act of transit.

We are not confused,

we do not lose our place.

Michael Anania, “Of the River Itself” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Michael Anania. Used by permission of Asphodel Press/Acorn Alliance.

Source: Selected Poems (Asphodel Press, 1994)

Biography

In the afterword to his first book, the 1969 New Poetry Anthology, Michael Anania wrote, "There is little evidence that modernism is dead or even dying. The tradition of Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens and their contemporaries is very much alive." Anania's importance as a poet lies in how he preserves and develops this modernist tradition in American poetry. A deep commitment to modernism and the tradition of experimental, often . . .

Continue reading this biography