Tim Suermondt
THE GREAT ARTIST
Obviously, this poem isn’t about me
though of course it will be.
Stay with me. Now that I have the Great
Artist out of the way, bundled into a car
and driven to a mansion where he or she can
contemplate matters of art in serenity, I can
continue moving and thinking and writing,
working on lines and images and in hope
given my ridiculous belief that writing a poem
automatically makes the world better.
Today, pressed against a window of a city bus
I’m gathering all the ammunition I’ll need
to start a poem I anticipate will be a decent one,
one the Great Artist wishes he or she had written.
Tim Suermondt is the author of five full-length collections of poems, the latest JOSEPHINE BAKER SWIMMING POOL from MadHat Press, 2019. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, december magazine, and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.