Afternoon Inquiry

Hi Dr. Selinger!

 

I took your Modern American Poetry grad class last winter, and I am now teaching a class on poetry and would really like to bring in a poem we read and discussed last year, but I cannot, for the life of me, find the poem in our anthology. 

 

Would you by chance recall the poem about the woman sitting on the park bench eating the rotten peaches?  It describes how she eats the peach, and I believe she doesn't have any teach.  Anyway, it basically illustrates how people can find beauty in the simplest things, even items that the general public would find rotten (aka the peaches). 

 

If you can think of this poem it would help me out greatly because I have been flipping through the pages of the anthology for hours and it's been driving me absolutely nuts! 

 

Thanks so much!

 

---J

 

***

 

Dear J:

 

Was it possibly the William Carlos Williams poem about plums, not peaches?  That wasn’t in our anthology; I put it on screen, via the Poetry Foundation’s archive.  Here’s a copy—let me know!

 

 

To a Poor Old Woman

 

munching a plum on   

the street a paper bag

of them in her hand

 

They taste good to her

They taste good   

to her. They taste

good to her

 

You can see it by

the way she gives herself

to the one half

sucked out in her hand

 

ComfortedComforted When originally published in the journal Smoke (Autumn 1934), the line read: “Comforted, Relieved—”

a solace of ripe plums

seeming to fill the air

They taste good to her