David Roderick

cantfindit

David Roderick grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts. His first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was published jointly by the American Poetry Review in 2006. Blue Colonial led to fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Following the book’s publication, David was named the recipient of the 2007-2008 Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship. The Americans, David's second collection, was published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series in 2014. Since completing his M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, David has taught creative writing and literature classes at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. For nine years he taught in MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. David currently co-directs and teaches at Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center serving writers in the East Bay. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, poet Rachel Richardson, and their two daughters. He also serves as the Commissioner of Old Man Basketball, a basketball collective in Berkeley's Thousand Oaks neighborhood. Source

Self-Portrait as David Lynch

I wear a flower in my lapel.

I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose.

A carnation, the fool’s flower,

 

its heart a wilting empire.

In late-night editing sessions,

I imagine I’m planting flowers

 

in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps

me reach our rigor mortis,

bound behind the wheel,

 

a little Bowie on the radio, maybe,

at six frames per second,

headlights plowing the dark’s divided road.

 

Cities grow to calcified castles.

Fish groom the coral brains

anchored in a tank’s purple volume.

 

I love the scratch of celluloid

and a low-register noise,

the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.

 

Sometimes I swap my carnation

for an orchid or rose.

On-screen, there’s every hint

 

a man-child built the night.

I read it once, by flashlight, as a kid—

that Sleep and Death are brothers,

 

and they send our dreams through two gates,

one made of horn, for the true dreams,

and one made of tusk, for the false.

 

Published:

2014

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Death & Loss

Faith & Hope

Persona Poems

Pop Culture

Literary Devices:

Allusion

an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Internal Rhyme

A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Surrealism

a style of art and literature in which ideas, images, and objects are combined in a strange, dreamlike way.

Tercet

A stanza of three lines of verse that rhyme together or are connected by rhyme with an adjacent stanza.