Hello, readers of the ‘Poem of the Week’ posts! Just wanted to give you all a heads up--over the course of the next three weeks, we here at the Brown Deer Public Library are moving from our current building to a new one- exciting! Because of the work and logistics required to do so, the ‘Poem of the Week’ posts will be scaled down a bit in order to let me focus more on the physical requirements of the move itself. Instead of the normal long-style posts (introducing the poet, the poet’s background, the themes of the poem, and an analysis of the poem), I will instead write three briefer entries, with all three of the poems coming from poets that we have already featured in our weekly posts. Thank you for your understanding, and enjoy these next three brief ‘Poem of the Week’ posts!
This week’s poem comes from the second poet that we featured as part of this weekly series: John Kenney. For a quick refresher, Kenney is known for writing short and snappy poems, many of them humorous in nature and styled in free verse. He has published two novels and four collections of poetry so far, with the latest collection dropping this past December.
The one that I chose for today’s post is titled ‘Are you in the mood?’, and it comes from his first collection of poetry, called Love Poems for Married People. The entire collection is full of poems that work for both married couples and couples that aren’t married but are dating and have a good sense of humor about their relationship. Even single people can love the collection, honestly, if they put themselves in the mindset of someone in a relationship and can see where Kenney is from by digging up some old nostalgic memories from past relationships, perhaps.
Either way, I chose this specific collection because Valentine’s Day is coming up, and why not have a poem that has ‘love’ at its base for this week? Of course, when you look at the poem, it’s not a sappy-sweet love poem, one that the British poets of the 18th and 19th centuries would’ve written, but instead a poem that recognizes the kind of relationship that a married couple has in today’s technology-driven world.
Obviously, from the title alone, one can easily understand what Kenney is insinuating. The first seven out of eight lines in the poem contain this same insinutation, leading readers to believe that he is referencing what we are all thinking, but then the eighth line turns it all on its head--instead of meaning what everyone thinks of when they read the title and the first few lines, he pivots to one of the least-romantic but common things that couples do nowadays in the 21st century. I myself am guilty of doing such a thing many times--my partner and I turn our TV off after watching a show on Netflix for a bit, tell ourselves to head to bed and maybe read a book or talk before we fall asleep, and then both of us sit up and stare at our phones for the next thirty minutes, killing our eyes and throwing off our melatonin levels. We then proceed to wonder in the morning why we couldn’t fall asleep, and it’s all a self-inflicted cycle.
Either way, I think the poem is great, and it’s the kind of poem that, like much of Kenney’s other work, and poems from similar poets like Billy Collins, is easily accessible, can be read in a breeze, and can attract a layperson to it.
To check out a copy of Kenney’s Love Poems for Married People, head over to the county catalog system here. To buy a copy of it at Amazon, head here. To support a local bookstore with the purchase, please head here.
Are you in the mood?
I am.
Let’s put the kids down.
Have a light dinner.
Shower.
Maybe not drink so much.
And do that thing I would rather do with you than
anyone else.
Lie in bed and look at our iPhones.
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