The poetry of odd facts

Poet Todd Hearon was my favorite of four emerging writers featured at PEN New England's annual Discovery evening tonight. I hope he finds a publisher -- and soon -- for his collection of poetry. One poem imagined a monologue by Harry Farr, one of 306 British soldiers shot for desertion or cowardice during World War I. Farr was executed by a firing squad in 1916 after he refused to return to the trenches. Another, published in Slate magazine, riffed on "man is a weapon of mass destruction.'' Hearon, who teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy, knows how to keep it light, too. He called the following poem a "found " poem because many of the facts in it come from the Findings section in Harper's magazine.

LAST LOOK

The ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica are melting
but the Neolithic Briton had a one-in-fourteen chance

of having his head bashed in. What do you do
with the mass grave of dodos discovered on Mauritius?

With the family of retarded people walking on all fours
they found in Turkey? Either you get up or you don't

and scientists insist we're still evolving. A recent
study of bats found that males with big brains have

small testicles. Holocaust survivors are more prone
to die from cancer. Even guppies go through menopause, the rhesus

monkey drinks more when it drinks alone. Homesickness
is on the rise in Canada. A pair of drunken moose

attacked a Swedish old folks' home. So what they did
in Guantanamo was astonishing but not

more than Taiwan's transgenic pigs that glow
in the dark-as, apparently, so do we-or the toxic

waste in the Arctic turning hungry polar bears
hermaphroditic. It's extreme, but the gene

experts conjecture we're only about ten percent
human, the rest of our cells bacteria. The red

rains that fell mysteriously over India
back in 2001, no one knows what they were.

Astronomers posit small clusters of galaxies
near Andromeda are floating on a river of dark

matter and postulate Pluto to be much
colder than Charon, its moon. We're not alone:

dolphins use names and songbirds
grammar. The male Nigerian putty-nosed

monkey makes the sentence pyow hack hack pyow
hack hack to indicate it's time to be moving on.