Wade Newman



Wade Newman is a graduate of Kenyon College where he was awarded five poetry prizes. His poetry has been published in literary journals such as The Kenyon Review, Pivot, American Arts Quarterly, Cortland Review, Mid-American Review, Carolina Quarterly, Crosscurrents, Southern Poetry Review, Confrontation Kunitz) and Edge City Review. He is the recipient of the Croton Review (Kenyon Review), and The Literature of Work, University of Phoenix Press. In 1996 Somers Rocks Press published his chapbook, Testaments.



Business and Poetry

It's not easy to be a modern businessman
And also a writer of modern poetry,
And find in either profession a receptive coterie.
For though rhyme and meter can gracefully expand—
And at the same time frame—the world's infinite contents,
Only under a blue moon will poetry merge
IBM with AT&T, or even urge
A public buyout, or more rarely pay the rent.
And though an all-night corporate annual review
Will not sing a body into something electric,
Or change an unfaithful wife into an epic,
Or from a red wheelbarrow spawn a stanza or two,
Just one profitable week at the office
Will offset a recent manuscript's rejection
And white-out bad press in the Book Review section
By granting almost every temporal wish.
And on days when faithful clients ignore your call,
When a slumping stock becomes more than an omen,
When you stagger home wasted as Willy Loman,
How easy to write a line and damn them all.

Originally published in Crosscurrents



My Father Walking Toward the Unisphere

My father, walking toward the Unisphere,
Blends comfortably inside the photo's frame
With every other candid pedestrian
Casually strolling the World's Fair streets.

He views the globe like any sightseer
Vacationing from the weekday domain
Of surplus/deficit meridians
That span the poles of success and defeat.

He proceeds, oblivious to the lens
Through which our labors are judged, the losses
Predestined to accrue and divide him
From the world he'll strive to produce for us.

My father's end spins past his origin.
Earth stands still against the heavens.

Originally published in Edge City Review



Not Every Couple

Not every couple on the street sleeps together,
Though to the single, wandering pedestrian,
Every man walking with a female companion
Smiles as if boasting that he woke up beside her,
Making the loan stroller even more lonesome.
But odds are the couple is just sister and brother,
Or co-workers dissing their anal employer,
Or two fools on a date they wish they hadn't gone on. rarely will fester.
Not every couple on the street sleeps together.

Originally published in Manhattan Poetry Review