Matrimonial Toast by Ken White

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 7, 2014   Matrimonial Toast   Ken White

My dear near-to-hearts, commoners and peers, miscreants, Cluniacs and other such habitués, the day of my wedding is every day. Let us be thankful for the long perpetually animate hands of John Berryman tweaking the guylines of his Pal, Mr. Bones. And let us hope that if he were here he might extend that glorious pallor of his index finger, that skeletal and elegant baton toward the podium to bless this union                                                                              over here                                                                                    and other such wonders                                                                                               we’re sitting on.            Copyright @ 2014 by Ken White. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “My new manuscript—a medieval melodrama set in contemporary Los Angeles—is populated by rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints. ‘Matrimonial Toast’ is of course a direct homage to Berryman, but also functions as a benediction for the soon-to-be and long-since doomed who populate its pages, and as fair warning to the reader that the first well-intentioned step set down on the other side of the Acheron will initiate a sequence of carnal catastrophe, a conniption of camp, a nuptial of transformation and the inadvertently divine.” —Ken White   Ken White is the author of Eidolon (Peel Press, 2013). He divides his time between Montana and Southern California and teaches screenwriting in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Most Recent Book by White   Eidolon (Peel Press, 2013) "Dream Song 29" by John Berryman "Los Angeles, 1954" by David St. John "Like This" by Carol Muske-Dukes Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit poets.org   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038