Poetry

Jordi Alonso

A Constellation of Poets

Rumi and Khayyam sang of god––or wine;
Fitzgerald and Millay both liked their gin
with or without a twist of Persian lime
Dorothy Parker played bridge to drink and win,
and Oscar Wilde was fond of chilled champagne.
Poor Dylan Thomas had a glass of rye
too many and though he did not complain,
he stopped his writing long enough to die.
While Hemingway had rum and Cuba Libres,
Neruda sampled his night-colored wine,
Arthur Rimbaud sailed on his bateau ivre,
and here I am just trying to lease mine.
With stars like these, no wonder people think
the only thing we poets do is drink.

Jordi Alonso graduated with an AB in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Kenyon College in the spring of 2014, where he studied poetry and literary translation. He was the first Turner Fellow in Poetry at SUNY Stony Brook where he received his MFA, and is now a Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri, Columbia where he is a PhD candidate studying English, Classics, and the cultural translation of nymphs and fauns in anglophone literature of the long nineteenth century. His first book, a collection of erotic poems inspired by Sappho, Honeyvoiced, was published by XOXOX Press in November of 2014. His chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published in 2017 by Red Flag Press.