A poem by Carthage English professor Richard Meier is today's "Poem-a-Day" on the website of the Academy of American Poets. The poem is titled "The child thought it strange (White Space Conflict)." Read it at Poets.org.

Richard Meier is an assistant professor of English at Carthage and the College's Writer in Residence. He has published two books of poems: Terrain Vague (Verse Press, 2000), and Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar (Wave Books, 2006). He earned a B.A. in creative writing from Hamilton College in 1988, and an M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1993. He joined the Carthage faculty in 2008.

This poem is from his new book, In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary, forthcoming from Omnidawn in September 2012. He wrote the poem in two parts, about four years apart, he said. He wrote the first part after a conversation with a child, and wrote the second part after skating last year's new day, "thinking about Rimbaud, and Wordsworth's skating scene in The Prelude, and work."