Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Bad things happen. They happen everywhere. Sometimes you try to disconnect from the world, but when you reconnect, they are there again, facing us, challenging us to figure out how we are going to respond. We’ve all had that experience, at one point, or at many points. You can become paranoid, or you can grow numb. Perhaps that is what Fred Marchant  (https://fredmarchant.com/) is giving us a picture of, that numbness, in his poem Here Is What the Mind Does (https://poets.org/poem/here-what-mind-does).  I had the good fortune to be able to watch and listen (thanks to Zoom) to Fred Marchant as he read several pieces as part of Amherst College’s annual Emily Dickinson reading series. He is the author of four poetry collections, and is a professor emeritus at Suffolk University.  The poem begins with:

when my laptop opens to a small red car

a tight street in Jenin gray-yellow dust

an electric window half-open and five

lean-to cards where on each a number

denotes a round spent or the place where

it began to travel at the speed of its idea

You’ve all seen this scene, on the news, in police procedural dramas on television, in movies. This one happens to be in Jenin, a West Bank city. Note that the person narrating this is not talking about the how or the why or the who - questions that perhaps no one can answer. It is absorbed in the small details - the yellow dust, the half-open car window, the ubiquitous  numbered tent-cards. Why? Because, Marchant is telling us, that “is what the mind does” when faced with violence on such a persistent basis.

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