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Poem Of The Week: The Committee Weighs In By Andrea Cohen

The Committee Weighs In

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

We are no doubt guilty, in this weekly feature, of erring on the side of earnestness, as if poetry might best be defined by its capacity to educate, redress, move, depress or just plain baffle.

Today we take a step back from the studied and the serious and open the floor to American poet Andrea Cohen, whose ‘dialogue’ with her mother needs little commentary. Operating succinctly on the border between comedy and mourning, Cohen’s poem is a small gem, a witty crossover of pretences whose sardonic final couplet is killingly funny.

A stylistic reminder of one of South African poet Finuala Dowling’s thematic preoccupations, Cohen’s playful, half-apostrophic poem approaches elegy, if elegy it is, from left-field, drawing her mother back into a conversation that is shadowed by inference.

‘The Committee Weighs In’ was first published in the Fall edition of The Threepenny Review (2012)

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