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Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,   

The booze and the neon and Saturday night,   

The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?   

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?   

Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons   

And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?   

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,   

The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

Source: Poetry (April 2005).

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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

This poem originally appeared in the April 2005 issue of Poetry magazine

View this poem in its original format

• On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up
  by Kay Ryan
• Seasprit
  by Ben Simons
• Bronzed
  by Dean Young

• April 2005 Table of Contents
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More about this poem

Biography

A. E. (Alicia) Stallings studied classics in Athens, Georgia and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. She has published two books of poetry, Archaic Smile (1999), which won the Richard Wilbur Award, and Hapax (2000). Her new verse translation of Lucretius (in rhyming fourteeners!), The Nature of Things, is published by Penguin Classics. She lives with her husband, John Psaropoulos, editor of the Athens News, and their small . . .

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Poems by A.E. Stallings

• Actaeon
• After a Greek Proverb
• Another Lullaby for Insomniacs
• Arrowhead Hunting
• Blackbird Etude

• More poems by A.E. Stallings (23 poems)
  • Containment
  • Epic Simile
  • Extinction of Silence
  • Failure
  • Fairy-tale Logic
  • Fear of Happiness
  • First Miracle
  • Fishing
  • Four Fibs
  • Implements from the “Tomb of the Poet”
  • Momentary
  • Recitative
  • Sublunary
  • The Catch
  • The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons
  • Tulips
  • Two Violins
  • Written on the eve of my 20th high school reunion, which I was not able to attend

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Religion, Arts & Sciences, Music, Social Commentaries, Popular Culture

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Related

Audio

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Video

• The Catch

Articles

• Eight Takes: Fenton, Strand, Hopler, Zukofsky, Stallings, Voigt, Kinnell, Wojahn by Peter Campion
• The Poem as Comic Strip #6 by By R. Kikuo Johnson and A.E. Stallings

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