Carl dennis biography
•
Carl Dennis
The Best Poem Of Carl Dennis
The God Who Loves You
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week-
Three fine houses sold to deserving families-
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on
•
Carl Dennis
Carl Dennis was born on September 17, , in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended both Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dennis has published twelve books of poetry, including Night School (Penguin, ), Another Reason (Penguin, ); Callings (Penguin, ); Practical Gods (Penguin, ), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Meetings with Time (Penguin, ), among others. Dennis has also published a book of criticism, Poetry as Persuasion (University of Georgia Press, ).
Known for its casual, plainspoken narrative style that makes its home in the everyday life of the American middle class, Dennis’s poetry is a quiet, almost intimate, meditation on the world around him. In a review of Dennis’s poems in The Washington Post, poet Robert Pinsky wrote, “The musing mind or voice reaches its object no
•
Missing
If I told you simply that the bed in the Baptist Hospital
Last occupied by Cora Stokes is empty again,
And the patient didn’t go home, you’d be likely
Not to feel much interest. So I’m adding here
The news that she’s gone missing, that any tip
On her whereabouts will be highly prized.
Cora Stokes, female, African-American,
Forty-seven, five feet, five inches,
Slender, with a mole on her chin
And a small scar over her right eyebrow.
Last seen the day before yesterday
In the cardiac wing by a night nurse
Who didn’t like the looks of her chart.
Till a week ago, a teacher of botany
At Jefferson Junior High in Chesterfield.
On Wednesday nights a player of bridge
With three women she’s known since grade school.
Left-handed. Slaps her head with her left hand
When she makes a mistake in bidding
Made by beginners. Owner of a bungalow
On Cherry Street, three bedrooms,
One occupied by her mother, Bessie,
Seventy-six, cr