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September 21, 2015
 

Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City

 
Jennifer Grotz
poem-a-day

About This Poem

 

Ut pictura, poesis: as with painting, so with poetry, the saying goes, and perhaps this is why from time to time poets, like painters, use the exercise of the self-portrait to practice seeing. If either the poet or the painter is lucky, sight leads to insight. In this unabashedly autobiographical poem, I use a shop window on a busy street, not a mirror, to view myself, and though my poem aims for truthful precision, I think it renders what, I’m convinced more and more, poems are meant to achieve, that is: registering what it feels like to pass through time.”
Jennifer Grotz

 

Jennifer Grotz is the author of Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives in Rochester, New York.

 

Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger

Poetry by Grotz

 

Window Left Open

(Graywolf Press, 2016)

"Baudelaire in Airports" by Amy King

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"The Traveling Onion" by Naomi Shihab Nye

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"Manifest Destiny" by Cynthia Lowen

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Poem-a-Day

 

Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.

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