On Dialectical Image by Graham Foust
by Wayne Miller
Hi, I’m Wayne Miller. I’m a poet who lives in Denver, Colorado, and I’m here for Poets on the Plains.
Today I’m going to read a poem by the poet Graham Foust.
Foust was born in 1970 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where his father was a professor of geography. Since leaving Wisconsin, Foust has lived all over the country: in New Mexico; in the Washington, DC, area; in Buffalo, New York; in Des Moines, Iowa; in Oakland, California; and now in Denver, Colorado, where he’s taught at the University of Denver for more than a decade.
Foust’s poems tend to feature stripped-down language and short lines full of formal play, arcane literary references, pop cultural allusions, and many layers of irony. They’re often not “easy” poems, but they’re fun and smart, often addressing the dulled dailiness of middle age with intellectual wryness. They’re the sort of poems that reward repeated readings.
They can also be wickedly funny, and they can shift registers when the reader least expects it. For example, in one of Foust’s poems titled “To an IV Bag”—which thinks quietly and seriously about injury and mortality—the last section turns out to be the well-known refrain of the 1975 Hot Chocolate song “You Sexy Thing.” When I first read the poem, I laughed out loud at that ending.
Foust’s wonderful new book, Terminations, published in 2023, contains a number of poems that are a bit more casual and anecdotal that his usual work—that contain longer, less self-complicating lines and a more conversational tone. The poem I’m going to feature today—“Dialectical Image”—is one of these.
Its title comes from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940. It refers to an image that offers a view of the past and the present simultaneously.
The poem is essentially an anecdote of Foust as a college student doing what college students sometimes do—drinking too much with friends, until someone gets hurt. At about the halfway point in the poem, we encounter an image that anyone older than, say, 45, will likely remember—the American flag flying on a television to signal that network programming had ended. That moment is the first hint that the poem is going to be larger than just an anecdote—perhaps a kind of articulation of America.
I’ll read the poem now, then talk briefly about its surprise ending, which I really love.
And note that the poem contains a word I can’t say on the radio; instead of that word, I’ll say “ape-shoot” with “shoot” being a minced oath—a euphemism.
Dialectical Image
My housemates and I were tossing water at one another
from tall glass mugs, when what anyone would think would happen
happened—a Dorito-sized chunk of glass in Abby’s arm.
I was the boyfriend and the soberest (on both counts,
good for me!) and so I drove her to the clinic to get stitches.
It was a small-town clinic, the wait not long. They sewed her up,
and we went home and had some beers. She took her pill.
The local television station flew a blurry stars and stripes.
We got to bed at pretty much our normal time.
Near dawn, I heard a clicking that could only be called awful,
though it took me several minutes to arrive at that conclusion.
It was Abby’s pet rat, whose name I can’t recall,
who had chewed through the screen on the top of her cage
and climbed our loft to gnaw on Abby’s bloody stitches.
Overhearer, I went apeshit—there was nowhere else to go—
but before I did, I remembered that when I was eight years old,
my dad sold our rusted, flagless flagpole to our neighbor,
an old Republican man who’d once shared his dinner with me
while my hippie parents brained each other verbally.
Graham Foust from
Terminations (Flood Editions, 2023)
We live in such a divided moment in America—a moment full of self-righteousness across the political spectrum. Foust’s decision in that closing flashback to name the neighbor a “Republican” and to describe the fighting parents as “hippies” paradoxically cuts across all that. It’s the peace advocates who are “braining each other verbally,” and it’s their political opponent who offers kind refuge to a child. Political ideologies don’t seem to matter much in such moments of real human need. This “dialectical image” from the speaker’s childhood carries forward into the college-age moment of the poem—and then further forward into our own moment, too.
I’m Wayne Miller. Thanks for listening.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
WAYNE MILLER (b. 1976) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025). His awards include the Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr Press, 2015)—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He lives in Denver, where he teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits the journal Copper Nickel. http://waynemillerpoet.com/
FEATURED POET
GRAHAM FOUST (b. 1970) is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Terminations (Flood Editions, 2023) and Nightingalelessness (2018). He has also co-translated four books by the 20th century German poet Ernst Meister, most recently Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) (Wave Books, 2023). Foust’s work has been published in numerous periodicals, including American Letters & Commentary, Fence, Ploughshares, Poetry, and A Public Space. He lives in Denver, Colorado, and teaches at the University of Denver. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/graham-foust
