Aaron Fogel

Aaron Fogel Poems

Aaron Fogel Biography

Aaron Fogel was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Columbia and Cambridge Universities, and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia. Fogel currently occupies a space on the Boston University faculty, a position he has held since 1978. He lives with his wife Barbara and his son Adam in Cambridge, MA. Works Aaron Fogel’s books include Chain Hearings (poems) and Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (criticism). Backdoor Books will soon publish his chapbook, Ornery Language Philosophy. His poems have appeared in such places as The Best American Poetry, Boulevard, AGNI, and Slate. Awards 2001: Kahn Award for The Printer's Error 1987-88: Guggenheim Fellow 1967-69: Kellett Fellowship)

The Best Poem Of Aaron Fogel

The Man Who Never Heard Of Frank Sinatra

The man who had never heard of Frank Sinatra: he lived
A perfectly ordinary life in America. Born in 1915,
He followed all the fads, read the newspapers, listened

To Television, knew who Dean Martin and Sammy whathisname
Were (Sinatra's friends), but somehow, by a one in a
Zillion fluke, whenever Sinatra came up, he was out of the room.

Or his attention was diverted by something else, and
(You will say this is impossible, that it cannot be), never
Heard him sing, like a man in my generation who somehow

Missed the Beatles though he had heard everything else.
Once, just as he was about to hear the name Frank Sinatra
A plane flew overhead--he was fifty-five years old--his hearing

A little more impaired. He had heard of Humphrey Bogart,
Of Elizabeth Taylor, of Walter Cronkite, and of perhaps a hundred
Forty thousand other celebrities names by the time he died,

And yet he had never heard of Frank Sinatra. The Greeks had
That famous saying, "The luckiest man is he who was never born."
Which is kind of gloomy, but I think they were wrong.

The luckiest man is he who never heard of Frank Sinatra.

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