For Ifeanyi Menkiti
Ifeanyi Menkiti was part of the poetry community in Boston and Cambridge for almost fifty years. His Boston Globe obituary lists all the good he accomplished during his life as a poet, teacher, philosopher, supporter of the arts, and rescuer of the Grolier Poetry bookstore. Back in the late 1970s, when Jane Kenyon and I published the little magazine Green House, Ifeanyi contributed two short poems to our fifth issue. His contributor’s note included his birthplace — Onitsha, Nigeria — his position at Wellesley College, and that Pomegranate Press had just published his latest book, The Jubilation of Falling Bodies. Pomegranate authors included Richard Eberhart, Mark Van Doren, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Robert Bly; Karyl Klopp was the editor and illustrator of Pomegranate books and broadsides by Van Doren, Grace Paley, and Kathleen Spivack.
Here are the two poems Ifeanyi published in Green House. They are playful and serious, languid and taut. May Ifeanyi’s generous, canny spirit linger in his words.
What I Like About Summer
What I like about summer
Is summer come, summer go;
after two glasses
of the most ineffable
wine in Christendom
the heat simply
finishes you up;
and finished up, also,
the lady with the lilacs
in her bosom
sitting across
the table from you—
the lady whose name
is Miranda,
the lady far away
from Itta Bena,
the lady, O lady,
whose other name
Is Magenta.
In Agawam
Massachusetts so much
In love with itself
The longest street
In the state
Is named Massachusetts;
but that is not the point;
I mean in Agawam
you do not argue
you lie down and go to sleep.
Joyce Peseroff's fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a "must read" by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Plume, Plume Anthology, and The Massachusetts Review. She directed UMass Boston's MFA Program in its first four years, and currently blogs on writing and literature at joycepeseroff.com