American Life in Poetry supplies weekly columns featuring poems free to newspapers and online publications.
Sponsored by The Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and University of Nebraska
at Lincoln, American Life in Poetry was initiated by poet Ted Kooser while he was serving as Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.
The project’s web site offers useful information, including a biographical sketch of the former Poet Laureate, a description of the project, an archive of past columns, and the current column.
The Weekly Column
Ted Kooser always introduces each poem with a helpful bit of information that orients and entices the reader to enjoy the poem. This week’s column is number 101, featuring Cynthia Rylant’s fun poem “Wax Lips.”
“Wax Lips”
Rylant’s “Wax Lips” portrays a visit to a hardware store that also sold candy and had a real monkey in residence; the speaker begins the description in the first three lines: “Todd's Hardware was dust and a monkey— / a real one, on the second floor— / and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass cases.”
The remaining nine lines take the kids back to candy counter where they pick out their goodies from among “red wax lips,” “Mary Janes,” and “straws full of purple sugar.” They have “stepped over buckets of nails and lawnmowers” to get to the candy counter. The speaker mentions Mrs. Todd again, noting that she was “white-faced and silent.”
The kids leave the store with their goodies and walk “the streets of Beaver” (a real city in Oregon) biting into the wax lips that the speaker inexplicably, because these are after all just children, describes as “big red lips worth kissing.”
But Kooser knows how to take the best and leave the rest as he describes the poem: “Those big cherry flavored wax lips that my friends and I used to buy when I was a boy, well, how could I resist this poem by Cynthia Rylant of Oregon?”
