Poem by MFA graduate has its day on Poem-A-Day website

Poem by MFA graduate has its day on Poem-A-Day website

English, Department of Thursday April 11, 2024

A poem by alumn Miller Oberman, '06, was featured this week on the Poem-A-Day website.

Oberman received his Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University.

"The Centaur" explores themes of fatherhood, gender and loss. It was featured on the Academy of American Poet's website, poets.org, Tuesday, April 9.

His first collection of poetry, "The Unstill Ones" was published in 2017 by Princeton University Press. His second collection, "Impossible Things," will be published by Duke University Press in October.

Oberman lives in Queens, New York, and is program director of First-Year Writing at the New School at Eugene Lang College.

Dr. Kerry Neville, program coordinator for Georgia College's MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing Programs, and Laura Newbern, associate professor of English, congratulated Oberman on this accomplishment.

Here is Oberman's poem, "The Centaur:"

First they called me "it," and then, ignorant of how my people

use this word, they mashed up the meager nouns

they had for gender and called me "the goy," and said

to not be one or the other was to be nothing.

It ate the grass it was shoved in, knelt at salt licks.

It took the barbs and kicks and crushed them into

fur and leather. Oiled and burnished, it made those

halves into one galloping body. Horse and rider.

The centaur endured the school-day, cruel gray rag, filth-

stiffened. The boys and girls who fit so easily in their costumes

looked like stick figures, crude and two dimensional.

Dante already knew, it read later. In The Inferno, in the seventh

circle of hell, centaurs guard the river Phlegethon, one of Hades'

five rivers. Phlegethon: river of fire, river of boiling blood,

which boils forever the souls of those who commit violence

against their neighbors. Centaurs guard the edges, shooting

arrows at any of these sinners who try to move to the shallows.

When sometimes I wish I'd had a boyhood, I remember those

days instead, my four muscled legs. I was seven feet tall then,

riding myself, carrying myself. A centaur is never lonely.

Copyright © 2024 by Miller Oberman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Photo credit: Louisa Solomon

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