The Finality of a Poem

By Michael Anania b. 1939 Michael Anania

(after Albert Cook)

All day, that

is forever,

they fall, leaves,

pine needles,

as blindly as

hours into hours

colliding,

and the chill

rain—what else

do you expect

of October?—

spilling from one

roof to another,

like words from

lips to lips, your

long incertain

say in all of this

unsure of where

the camera is

and how the light

is placed and what

it is that’s ending.

Michael Anania, “The Finality of a Poem” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Michael Anania. Used by permission of Asphodel Press/Acorn Alliance.

Source: Selected Poems (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 . . .

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