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. I’m Marjorie Maddox
On this Columbus Day, “Early Music,” by Valerie Fox, references Simon and Garfunkel’s song “America.” In the hit tune, the narrator and his girlfriend board a Greyhound to Pittsburgh, searching for America and its many meanings. In “Early Music,” the poet becomes the girl “the young man can only tell the truth to while she’s sleeping,” and road signs point to both Pitt and Philly. Hop on board as she journeys back to the songs that shaped her.
Valerie Fox is a poet and fiction writer who grew up in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, the town where the main and west branches of the Susquehanna River meet. Her poetry books include The Rorschach Factory, The Glass Book, and Insomniatic. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose, Philadelphia Stories, SmokeLong Quarterly, Juked, Maudlin House, and other journals. She's taught writing at many schools, including Drexel University in Philadelphiam and Sophia University in Tokyo.
Closely tied to place and memory, old songs transport us to who we were and what we were doing when they entered our lives. In “Early Music,” Valerie Fox presents a dream-like narration of history and the choices it hands us.
Here’s “Early Music” by Valerie Fox.
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Early Music
In which I’m the girl that the young man can only tell the truth to while she’s sleeping, the one in Simon and Garfunkel’s “America.” And a few years later riding a Greyhound bus with a quiet kitten in my backpack, at the toll plaza one sign pointing to Philadelphia and one to Pittsburgh.
And before that “Rock of Ages” and “The Old Rugged Cross” in the usual pew. And I used to pretend to be asleep hearing my mother sing, if that mockingbird won’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring, early like that. With a light patting on my back. And later smoking childishly right by a no smoking sign in the waiting area, was it Pittsburgh? And before that the monks singing in their monasteries for God. Minstrels passing along their lore about familial birds and lime-green snakes, saints and room-like trees. Did it bear fruit? Could we eat it? And the dapper man telling me what I ought to do, as if he could see my life stretching out in a gray arc, inevitably patterned, he has my young man’s eyes. But perhaps a much bigger heart. Not my type. And I am sleeping not pretending to, when he alights.
That was “Early Music” by Valerie Fox. Previously published in Maryland Literary Review and used by permission of the author. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
