Witty and Wise Poetry

Liz Wager, the winner of the first annual Phi Beta Kappa Wit and Wisdom Award, presented her essay "Why Do Personas Matter?" at the March 4 Bergren Forum. Wager's essay examined "the use of different voices and different characters within poetry,” as she described it. In addition to the essay, Wager read some of her poems, two of which are printed below.

Electrical storm

On August nights, when pressing heat and swarms
of heavy air hang thick above your bed,
and traffic lights outside your room birth forms
that shift on darkened walls in ugly red
and purple flames, you find yourself awake.
You shuck to clinging boxers, crossly shed
confining sheets, and pray the fan won't break.

These nights all pass the same, until one night
you face the window, conscious of the ache
of sunburned skin. A sudden burst of light
breaks darkened sky and fragments in a flash
that makes you stir with something close to fright.
You watch the show with awe. The feathered slash
of lightning does not echo into thunder,
but rather bears another splintered gash,
and then another, and another. Under
mottled clouds the streaks of white combine
and you, in stupid, juvenile wonder
only stare, as worries leave your mind
and time becomes irrelevant.

It's you
and nature, nothing more, the strange design
of marbled evening, burning deep into
your eyes—the muted fireworks that brought
the ancient people to their knees.

And through
the web of fiery rain in which you're caught
you realize that you truly understand
the marvels of the earth; and age has taught
you swift dissection of the cryptic, grand,
and interwoven meanings of the sky.
You feel your wonder dimming with each brand
of white that shudders through the dark. You sigh
and shut your eyes, ashamed of how naive
you used to be…

and yet, you can't deny
how powerful it was when you perceived
(when you were young, and quite alone)
the magic of the storms. And you believe
that now, since all that can be known is known,
your life meant nothing more than it did then
(when god-like sparks were very much your own)
and it will never mean as much again.

A cigarette, on being consumed

My dry husk, too tight, creases
and threatens to rip.
The column of heat shoots through me
and I tremble, feeling lips
peel away, sticky.

We were clones, stiff-necked in boxes with pressed white sleeves,
clean-shaven. We perched like soldiers on the shelf,
and I liked to pretend that I was the collective,
the only true one, multiplied to the horizon:
I was there in the beginning, and would be until the end.
I thought that all the others were me,
and I loved to die a billion times,
my dead tissue reformed, wrapped again in warm paper.

But as I burn and crumble into gray snow,
I confess that this feels
a lot like permanence.
With what little breath I have, in these final minutes,
I sigh, realizing that I am just a cheap copy
of the ideal. And, with a blink,

I’ll be gone.
My smoke will linger in the purple evening,
but it will soon dissolve into the mosquito night,
the only fading trace of my simple existence.
I could be churned down onto the smooth glass,
or scraped into the sidewalk,
or thrown from the grinding car,
left to bounce along the new-wet
street; and with each bounce,
my orange eye will open less and less
until there is too little light for me to see.