Two Poems by David Lehman

(Hatice Yardim/Unsplash)

Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom
is a great name
for a nation-wide magazine
as Newsweek proved
in its ad campaign, circa 1991,
which claimed it offered the opposite
of “conventional wisdom”
and inadvertently
proved opposites are equal.

Poetics

“Reading your poems,” you said,
“One would hardly know
There’s a pandemic going on.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the point.”

David Lehman is the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry, the general editor of the Best American Poetry anthology series, and the author of such recent books as The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir and The Morning Line, a book of poems. He writes an occasional column on movies for the American Scholar.