This is poetry moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
- - -
Welcome to Poetry Moment.
In this season of Halloween and fading light, what do you see as the darkest and brightest moments in 2024? Today, in his poem “In the Times of Most Extreme Symbols,” Corey Zeller analyzes identity and the passage of time based on the snippets we remember.
Corey Zeller is the author of Man vs. Sky, You and Other Pieces, and There Is Only One Ghost in the World, which was written with Sophie Klahr. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Colorado Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He has roots in Erie, PA.
We’ve all heard the saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.” But what can the trends of the past tell us about the future? In his prose poem “In Times of the Most Extreme Symbols,” Corey Zeller catalogs decades by societal fads and catch phrases. In the future, when we look back on the fall of 2024, what will we remember? How will we define this season’s “dark times”?
Here’s 'In Times of the Most Extreme Symbols', by Corey Zeller
—
We spend the evening listening to folk songs from the early 2000s. Make a stew. Cut carrots the color of Halloween or your brother’s nail polish. Rib eye and onions. Oyster mushrooms dug out of the earth by some guy at the farmer’s market who always wears a T-shirt with a picture of the Earth on it. As if that means something. As if we’ve forgotten where we are. We remember when we first heard the word organic. First heard text and meme. GIF and kale. Run and scatter. How proud we were in 2014 that we’d never cheated on our spouses. That we’d never bought a cellphone. How far, now, we’ve strayed from where we thought we had gotten. What we’d become. Which is what, really, but a battered sign on someone else’s highway. All the miles they’ve made from every version of themselves. None of it matters though. Not today. We’ve found ourselves here in 2024 and there’s no search party. No last goodbyes. We grow beards. We learn how to knit. How to thrum some kind of music out of where there are no strings. We sit down to our dinner and the dark presses itself against the windows as if it were hungry. And it is. It always was.
—
Previously published in Poetry (May 2024)
—
That was “In Times of the Most Extreme Symbols” by Corey Zeller. Thanks for listening.
- - -
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
