End of Poetry month, and then May Day: specific poem about work
May 1, 2022 4:25 PM   Subscribe

Help me find a poem about painting the underside of a boat

Unforunately this is one of those things where I can't untangle what the poem was actually about and what I took away from it, which might not have explicitedly been a part of the poem. My best recollections:

I read this poem for the first time maybe 3-4 years ago. I sure it was comtemporary-ish at the time I read it. It was free verse, and not terribly long: maybe 30 lines. I think the poet was a woman.

It opens with an image of a person painting the underside of a boat and goes on a bit about how this person is doing work, but most people won't see the work. The poet may have then compared this work to other kinds of work--work like mine, I interpreted, with children and their caregivers--that don't have a witness or an obvious outcome. A comparison was made but this might not have been precisely it.

I am fairly certain I read it online on some kind of "poem of the day" type thing from Poets Academy or another well known organization; I don't think it was a person poem someone was linking to from their blog or something too obscure. It had a real Poet's Almanac, accessible sort of feel, which isn't an insult at all. I liked the poem and want to read it again.
posted by Ideal Impulse to Media & Arts (1 answer total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: This wasn't the poem I was thinking of but it hits a lot of the same notes so I thought I'd share it: Invisible Work by Alison Luterman

https://pollycastor.com/2019/05/11/invisible-work-poem-by-alison-luterman/
posted by Ideal Impulse at 9:08 AM on May 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


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