Poem of the Week | September 28, 2026

Lucy Biederman’s poems have appeared in Bat City Review, Sixth Finch, and Poetry, and her prose has appeared in Ploughshares, Rejection Letters, and wigleaf. Her book The Walmart Book of the Dead won the Vine Leaves Press Vignette Collection Award and was published in 2017. She lives with her family in Chicago, where she works in college access and teaches first-year writing at College of DuPage.  

“Cannon Beach” by Lucy Biederman is our Poem of the Week.

Title Image: Deauville, la plage (circa 1888-1895), Eugène Boudin

***

Cannon Beach

After Stevens

Everyone was wearing a yellow raincoat
in the cold August mist
at the edge of the world, the world

that lives as you live,
speaks as you speak.
The mist muzzled sound.

The mist existed
between every one thing
and every other.

All afternoon
officials roamed in the mist,
separate as separate can be.

They wanted nobody
to stand on an anemone.
To go out into the mist like this,

here in the home of nobody I know,
was like starting and starting
again and again

many times,
many times over,
but with dying.

All afternoon the mist.
Everyone was wearing a yellow raincoat,
but only in my memory.

Hey, that’s an anemone,
officials in yellow raincoats said to adults,
and, to kids, whoa, that’s alive!

That rock you’re standing on
in the cold August mist
at the edge of the world.

Such a cliffy mist-ridden edge of world
was nothing
I’d thought of before.

The world as word
played all afternoon on the gramophone,
but no one uses those anymore.

The waves pulled back from the shore,
back into the sea’s sky’s mist,
where nothing exists,

in nobody I know’s home.
Stop. Said the officials, muzzled by mist,
stop standing on that rock you’re standing on.

***

Author’s Note

The seed of this poem was planted in me when I listened to Zach Savich read from and speak about his wonderful book A Field of Telephones (53rd State Press, 2025) in an Annulet Linkages Lecture. A Field of Telephones is a scholarly book about Theodore Rothke, but it pokes ellipses in what it knows, turning itself into poems again and again to show other ways of knowing. The end of the book takes place at a Cannon Beach of the mind and the real Cannon Beach, an alien place that I, a person of the Great Lakes, had been confused, horrified, and interested to find myself at the year before I heard Zach’s lecture.  

I was thinking about what Zach wrote, thinking about it for a year or more. Zach Bryan came out with yet another new album, and this one had a song about Cannon Beach on it. “They covered all the songs that were best left alone,” he sings. I was listening to it on the way to teach. When I got to class and we were all writing together, I began finally to write this poem. It had Wallace Stevens words in it: sky, sea, afternoon. I had to see what Stevens had to say about it, so I started bringing around his Collected in my backpack. By the end of the semester, I had a draft. Thank you always to my reliably brilliant poetry workshop, Kathy Goodkin, Karen Kilcup, Jess Cory, Ruth Hoberman, and Jennifer Whitaker.