Joshua Poteat

Joshua Poteat Poems

Joshua Poteat Biography

Joshua Poteat is an American poet Joshua Poteat got his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 1993. received his Master of Fine Arts in writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in May 1997. Poteat has published two books of poems, Ornithologies (Anhinga Poetry Prize, 2006) and Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World (University of Georgia Press/Virginia Quarterly Review, 2009), as well as a chapbook, Meditations (Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Award, 2004). He has won prizes and fellowships from bodies including The Literary Review, Bellingham Review, The Millay Colony, Virginia Commission for the Arts and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He was named the 2011-2012 Donaldson Writer in Residence at The College of William & Mary. Poteat is also an assemblage artist of sorts, making light boxes and ink transfers out of found materials, and collaborating with the designer Roberto Ventura on art installations, one of which won Best in Show for InLight 2009. Poteat lives in Richmond, VA, with the writer Allison Titus. He is an editor at the Martin Agency. Melanie Drane, at ForeWord Magazine, stated in May 2006: “Joshua Poteat’s stunning début has received the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, selected by Campbell McGrath. Poteat’s poems are suffused with the cognizance that ‘nothing in this world is ours.’ Each image teeters on an unsustainable, exquisite edge." Mary Oliver, a judge for the 2004 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Award, stated that: “It is a lyricism that reminds me of James Wright, and this I mean certainly as praise, when he employed, as I called it, an intensified vernacular—throwing me off my stride, gathering me to him by the detail of some earnest and often terrible beauty, in the easy language of our country with its sweet, oiled syntax…" Darren Morris a book reviewer for Style Weekly said in 2006 that: “Be careful when reading Ornithologies by Joshua Poteat. His poems are so mysterious, eloquent and downright powerful, they may ruin you with beauty. Good poetry calls attention to what would otherwise be overlooked, but the best poetry changes us.")

The Best Poem Of Joshua Poteat

Fahrenheit Meditation

Must it be this way, the air no longer wet, seamless,
no longer ours, becoming the cicada's path
from night-blooming cereus to creosote,
the summer of moth larva rolling in the rice jar?

If so, let the heat rise over these desert mountains,
rot-filled, and cover this city.
If so, begin with sadness, sadness,
because it is a good place to start,

because heat is a sadness of its own,
though I cannot begin to define it,
except for that first awareness as a child,
that dim ache of the wrist, on a night like this,

years ago in a different south, the silent acknowledgment
of a thing so spread out and weightless it becomes a landscape
of radio towers across the fields, red lights flickering
beyond the marsh's conspiratorial hum.

Ask me and I will tell you of the flowering tobacco leaves
of my youth on fire in the night, lit by lightning,
the sweet wind pushing the flames
toward the tree-break and into the stables

where my father sat on a three-legged stool birthing a foal.
To see night burning is to see God, or a minor version:
angelic palette, grub-white cataracts of summer.
To see Father is to see night long for the sea.

This is how we live within us,
concubined to the land.
White peacocks aflame can sing the song
of flight, I think, of rain and June:

ash-plumed amniotic sac:
manure shoveled into the cantaloupe rows.

Alexander the Great, after observing the depths
of the ocean from a glass barrel said Sir Barons,
I have just seen that this whole world is lost,
and the great fish mercilessly devour the lesser.

Call me lesser then, I don't mind it.
Call me lost.

This morning an airplane lifted over the city, the ghost
of a pale child's toy, and left this desert behind.
A cactus wren danced mid-flight with a cicada,
danced, yes, but truth, too, and even a certain perfectness,

both catching the last breath of early light,
both filled with a promise,
to not give in, to die in this air a truthful death,
in this land that should never have been ours.

The hunger of fire becomes a landscape of its own,
an alternate world: to harvest, to harvest.

My father mutinied the mother mare
and took the foal to the marsh, delicate like a kite,
and drowned her.
So what if the moon sang of its rising then?

I was courageous, wind-strong,
I grew to fit that brackish air,
three-syllable morning
through the pines.

Later, he walked the fields with me in his arms,
over the roasted copperheads, spun me
through that black sea, a smoke sail tied on
with handkerchief dabs. This would be our life.

Black: it hurt to look at it. Empty: I had to love it,
and he held my wrist against a stalk blue as plum,
still smoldering, so I couldn't forget,
so that heat stayed with me forever.

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