Kim Bridgford
The Graduate
The archetype takes hold of movie plot,
And shows us how experience—and not—
Can shape a man who’s finding his own way
Before adulthood finds him and holds sway:
The barbeques, the cars, the two martinis,
The pool party with women in bikinis;
The money in retirement, bottom line.
The rules that shape our lives by their design.
In walks a woman, throaty, sensual, bored,
Who’d like the rules above to be ignored,
To have some meaning—or some real effects—
And why not use the vehicle of sex?
This is the life suburbia has brought her,
And then her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter.
Unforgiven
It says the house you build is full of holes,
Morality is two-dimensional,
And women’s feelings are marked optional.
This movie shows what happens to men’s souls.
Clint Eastwood in a role of hesitation
Confuses us. We want to watch some justice;
We want the blood, the carnage that released us
As a nation. We want our liberation.
Then it becomes a bounty gone awry
With Morgan Freeman’s death. And Clint’s rampage
Becomes expression of the blue-sky rage
That is American: the true B movie.
We’re meant to think about the Western’s cost.
Yet we’d prefer to revel in what’s lost.
Bio
Kim Bridgford is the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center and the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the largest all-poetry writing conference in the United States. As editor of Mezzo Cammin, she was the founder of The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which was launched at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington on March 27, 2010, and will eventually be the largest database of women poets in the world. She is the author of five books of poetry: Undone (David Robert Books); Instead of Maps (David Robert Books); In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records (Story Line Press), winner of the Donald Justice Prize; Take-Out: Sonnets about Fortune Cookies (David Robert Books); and Hitchcock’s Coffin: Sonnets about Classic Films (David Robert Books). Her work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Poets’ Prize, and four times for a Pushcart Prize.
A former Connecticut Professor of the Year and a two-time nominee for U.S. Professor of the Year, she was the 2007 Connecticut Touring Poet.
Bridgford has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her work has appeared on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, on Verse Daily, and has been honored by the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada. She has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Connecticut Post, the website of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and in various headline news outlets.
She wrote the introduction to Russell Goings’ The Children of Children Keep Coming, an epic griot song, and joined Goings in ringing the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange when the book was released, a week before the Obama inauguration.