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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman was born June 5, 1952, in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. He earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems About Fathers
		Blood by Naomi Shihab Nye

		Daddy by Sylvia Plath

		Deer Hit by Jon Loomis

		Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

		Father Outside by Nick Flynn

		Father's Song by Gregory Orr

		Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World by Sherman Alexie

		Inventing Father In Las Vegas by Lynn Emanuel

		Man of the Year by Robin Becker

		my father moved through dooms of love by E. E. Cummings

		My Father on His Shield by Walt McDonald

		My Father's Hat by Mark Irwin

		My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke

		Parents by William Meredith

		Poems about Fathers

		The Idea of Ancestry by Etheridge Knight

		Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

		Whose Mouth Do I Speak With by Suzanne Rancourt

		With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach by William Stafford

		Working Late by Louis Simpson

		Yesterday by W. S. Merwin

		Poems About Hell
		Inferno, Canto XIV by Dante Alighieri

		A Myth of Devotion by Louise Glück

		A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

		Canto XIV by Ezra Pound

		from The Aeneid ["First, the sky and the earth"] by Virgil

		Hades' Pitch by Rita Dove

		Hellish Night by Arthur Rimbaud

		How Can It Be I Am No Longer I by Lucie Brock-Broido

		I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra by Ishmael Reed

		Medusa by Patricia Smith

		Orfeo by Jack Spicer

		Proverbs of Hell by William Blake

		Silence Raving by Clayton Eshleman

		Slim Greer in Hell by Sterling A. Brown

		Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen

		Styx by Dana Levin

		The Bistro Styx by Rita Dove

		The Philosophy of Pitchforks by Sue Owen

		The Pomegranate by Eavan Boland

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Descriptions of Heaven and Hell
by Mark Jarman


The wave breaks And I'm carried into it. This is hell, I know, Yet my father laughs, Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong. We're safely rooted, Rocked on his toes. Nothing irked him more Than asking, "What is there Beyond death?" His theory once was That love greets you, And the loveless Don't know what to say.
From The Rote Walker, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by Mark Jarman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Audio Clip
February 1, 2008 AWP Conference, Hilton Hotel, New York City From the Academy Audio Archive

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