Enoch’s Blocks

Enoch’s Blocks

By Olivia Clare b. 1982 Olivia Clare
Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks

(for a is the color of fleet,
b is the color of war and demolition,
c is the color of echo and blur,
&c.) and built
a bricolage:

So cab was a whirring warbler.
bach was the Spanish Armada crashing
                                      and crashing.
And enoch he couldn’t describe.

And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

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This poem originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Poetry magazine

November 2011

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Olivia Clare

Biography

Olivia Clare was born in New York in 1982 and raised in Louisiana. She earned a BA in English from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been published in Southern Review, London Magazine, Poetry, FIELD, and other journals. She was the 2008-2009 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She is also working on a collection of short stories.
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Poems by Olivia Clare

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Living, Coming of Age, Social Commentaries, War & Conflict

POET’S REGION U.S., Southern

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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