Tom Black
pushed me into my locker
right after I found out
my brother had killed himself.
He didn’t know yet.
A few years later,
a winter dusk in the field
behind our high school:
he, too, pushed a cold trigger.
The next night I walked
through snow to where
the northern lights
fell over the dead field.
The sky crackled in blue ash
above the police ribbon
strung around some stakes.
His sprawled imprint
had melted a little.
It looked like his life
had fallen asleep.
On the white plate
my flashlight made
on the snowfield, the blood
flickered. I turned
my light off and cried.
— Matt Rasmussen
from Black Aperture, winner of the Walt Whitman award for 2012
You can hear Matt Rasmussen reading two other poems from this very beautiful book on YouTube, where he explains that the book is about "my brother's suicide when I was 16 and he was 19". It's extraordinary — not gloomy, as you might imagine, but, in the words of the judge, Jane Hirshfield, “Autobiographical, speculative, imaginal, at times bitterly comic, often lyrically surreal, Matt Rasmussen's transformative poems look outward … [are] built on the observable leaf, field, hand, bird, and act.” 
Someone else suggests that in eschewing the universal and focusing on the specific, he engages us more deeply. Indeed, the poems are totally engaging. I am blown away by this poet's mastery — HOW does he do that with such few, spare words?
He works as an academic. The Poetry Foundation details his literary and academic achievements. He hails from Minnesota. None of the online references gives his date of birth, but he's clearly still quite young. Pay attention, people — I think this is a great poet at the beginning of his career, and we may expect wonderful things to come.
A poet friend and I were recently discussing the work of someone who is considered a "poet of place". I said that although that someone has some lovely (if self-conscious) lines and phrases, he doesn't make me care.
I am about to email her a copy of "Tom Black", saying. "THIS is poetry of place!" It doesn't even set out to be that; it simply is, in the evocative details. (And is many other things besides.) And it most certainly makes me care!
I am about to email her a copy of "Tom Black", saying. "THIS is poetry of place!" It doesn't even set out to be that; it simply is, in the evocative details. (And is many other things besides.) And it most certainly makes me care!
Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written
This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).
