#16: Stutter Monk, by David Graham
About the Author
David Graham was born and raised in Johnstown, New York, and educated at Dartmouth College and the University of Massachusetts. He has served as poetry editor of Blue Moon Review and been Poet-in-Residence at the Robert Frost Place in Fanconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in four previous collections: Magic Shows, Common Waters, Second Wind, and Doggedness. Since 1987, he has taught English at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin.
About the Chapbook
"I have long regarded David Graham as one of the most moving and able poets of his generation. In Stutter Monk, his best work to date, he proves his mastery and soul again. In face of his parents' failing health and the horror of his wife's ordeal with breast cancer, his poems—dead on, unsentimental, profoundly affecting—simultaneously by at the moon in their sadness and express the author's joy in being alive." —Sydney Lea
From the Chapbook
Stutter Monk
In the middle of an old tape
of an even older record
suddenly Monk's stuttering
more than usual over one note,
one note, one note—
it takes a minute to hear
the skip apart from his
off kilter rhythms
which jitter like somebody
rising from a chair
with one leg asleep;
to know that though
he could have played
skipping record if he'd wished,
as he played ragged laundry
blowing across a porch
and the jerk of subway brakes,
this time it's just an artifact
of someone's odd devotion,
a song too good to leave off
the tape despite that stammer
and the half minute it takes
that vanished loved one
to drift in from the kitchen,
puzzled and askew;
then nudge the needle on
a groove or two to complete
this weird arpeggio
on "I Should Care,"
Monk solo, Monk solo, Monk solo—
as who isn't, retrieving
shards of dropped days?
