Amanda Gunn

Amanda Gunn was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, with two older brothers. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure.

Araminta

by Amanda Gunn

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Before General, before Moses or Harriet, she was

      called Minty.
      Araminta: 
      a name of two roots.
    
Arabella “yields to prayer”; Aminta “defends.”
And, O, where ends the might of that arm?
Perhaps her mama, Rit, felt the squeeze of Minty’s fist.
Did she know then her child would wander
from the farm? That she would peer into the marsh
and find the face of God, be blinded one day
in the Philadelphia sun? She arrived

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Poets Book of Days

February 5

Thomas Lux died, 2017

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Poetry Trivia

Question:

What poet had the nickname "Possum"?

Answer

T.S. Eliot. Ezra Pound gave him the name, which appears in Pisan Canto 74. ("Yet say this to the Possum, a bang, not a whimper / with a bang not with a whimper.") Eliot took up the name for his final work, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats .

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