Pop Poetry

By Thomas Gagnon

There certainly is more than one kind of love. Using traditional forms of poetry (e.g., sonnet, pantoum) and forms from the pop song (e.g., perfect rhyme, repetition), Thomas Gagnon describes different kinds of love: romance and friendshipwith men and with womenlove for a father and for a mentor, even fascination with a celebrity dancer. Beneath these relationshipslike the ancient town beneath the new cityis the relationship with the self, an especially complicated relationship that Gagnon does not shrink from exploring, whether whimsically or solemnly, or whimsically and solemnly in one poem.
These poems will reverberate in your mindlike the lyrics from the latest pop song.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456897970

Thomas Gagnon

Thomas Gagnon was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1967. He has published articles, reviews, essays and poetry online and off for about twenty years, since his first appearance in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst in 1987. While focusing his writing energies on poetry, he works as an English Language Arts tutor for the Boston Learning Center.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Gagnon.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011905105

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4568-9796-3

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4568-9795-6

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-9797-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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95308

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Doubtless the French have a word for this

Mind Odyssey

What would Job do?

The Writer’s Room

Holiday dilemma

A body in motion

A room of my own

Pilgrimage

Imprints in the Mind

Dynamo

Esplanade

To: some entity, from: me down here

Musing at the christening

Citizen’s Progress

I never wait (at the post office)

Yours, always

Intention: to transcend that record-skipping sensation

Some kind of might-have-been wonderful

Lips of Light

Coffee with Julie

Genius across the table

Bothered and bewildered

Spell

Reluctant Remembrance

Not yet

Rendezvous

Jo v. Lee

Kensington Hill Road

A Beautiful Friendship

Hymn to a Cap

Recalling a vigorous versifier

To Jack Powers, who started me on the poetry road

Acknowledgments

Thanks definitely go out to Jack Powers and Tom Daley, Prabakar Thyagarajan and Julie Collins, my parents Paul Gagnon and Mona Harrington, for encouraging, reading, and/or teaching me.

Thanks go out, moreover, to the Out of the Blue Gallery and the Cantab Lounge (both in Cambridge), for giving me a place to recite my poetry.

Thanks continue to go out to Breath and Shadow, The Awakenings Review, and Voices for Change for publishing my poetry, and to Spare Change News, In Newsweekly, Wilderness House Literary Review, and South End News for publishing anything else that I have ever written.

And thanks to Grub Street Writers for providing its many workshops, its newsletter, its library, and a space to write for hours on end.

Preface

I have, almost always, written something.

At age nine