Elaine Equi
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FollowAbout Elaine Equi
Short, dry, immaculately timed poems that take a pop-cultural or everyday object — a shade of lipstick, a film, a brand, a saint — and turn it over until it looks strange.
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The mode owes something to New York School casualness and something to Surrealism, but the tone is entirely her own: cool, amused, never straining for profundity, and considerably sharper than the light surface suggests. The poems are short enough to look slight and are constructed with real precision. A single one is a joke; twenty in a row are a sensibility.
Read next
- Ron Padgett — Comic deadpan of the same lineage.
- James Tate — The straight-faced absurd.
- Kay Ryan — Compression with a comic edge.
14 poems
04/28/2026 14:58h
Leave it to the street vendors
of NYC to improvise a shrine
from whatever they find,
setting a place at their table
for animal and divine nature
symbolically joined with
color-coded floral candelabras.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
We have orgies at home.
Tonight, it’s The Book of Mormon.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
Look deep into the blueberry eyes of breakfast.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
The
silver
hour
drops—
a spider
on the mirror.
*
Silver
the hour
like drops
of a spider’s
mirror.
*
The silver drops,
the spider’s hour,
the mirror . . .
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04/28/2026 14:58h
How much greener
is paint than grass,
especially in winter.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
They don’t play loud music.
They don’t have a dog.
I think they’re both mimes.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
cheerful stoic epic
cozy corporate convalescence
hollow gold-brick rhetoric
almighty and sleek
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04/28/2026 14:58h
even if we won’t admit it.
Getting off the subway at Canal St. —
I wonder if the author
is a man or a woman?
A teen? A team?
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04/28/2026 14:58h
are all that’s left
of Gray’s Papaya
on 8th St.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
Sometimes the blue in Blue Hawaii
gets lost. But Elvis’s eyes speak
pure Esperanto.
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