Radio, Radio by Ben Doller
Radio, Radio
Ben DollerIn the middle of every field,
obscured from the side by grass
or cornhusks, is a clearing where
she works burying swans alive
into the black earth. She only
buries their bodies, their wings.
She packs the dirt tight around
their noodle necks & they shake
like long eyelashes in a hurricane.
She makes me feed them by hand
twice a day for one full year: grain,
bits of chopped fish. Then she
takes me to the tin toolshed.
Again she shows me the world
inside her silver transistor radio.
She hands me the scythe.
SELECTED BY GABRIELLE BATES
This poem haunts me so much. I don’t know Ben Doller, and while it’s high on my reading list to check out his books, at this point, this is the only poem of his I’ve ever read.
I encountered it when scouring the Internet for interesting “swan” poems. I’m drawn most, perhaps, to its utterly clear—terrifying, surreal, bizarre—situation, paired with the resounding mystery at its core.
Such a short poem, and yet it feels like a huge story, a whole world. It ends on a frightening precipice, inviting all sorts of questions about agency, violence, choice.
ABOUT GABRIELLE BATES
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Gabrielle Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as faculty for the Tin House Writers’ Workshops. Her debut poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023) was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, POETRY, and Sewanee Review. A UK/Ireland edition of Judas Goat is forthcoming in October 2025 from the87press. Signed copies of Judas Goat can be ordered online through Open Books: A Poem Emporium.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Radio, Radio by Ben Doller, published by Louisiana State University Press, 2000. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Radio, Radio, Ben Doyle’s first collection, is a book about gaps: between the transmitter and the desired, unimaginable receiver; between the prehistoric insect world and our fast-food, hot-wired culture; between words and what they just might mean. They meet us in the interstices between the moment just gone and the next one, with little agenda but to thrill, refresh, discomfit, and warn. Doyle’s poems leap freely from sestina to sonnet to fragment to prose, searching for what they do not know. These are lyrics of serious intelligence — they think carefully and deliberately but use often startling images and varied, original musics to deepen, widen, and rudder this thinking: “In the middle of every field, / obscured from the side by grass / or cornhusks, is a clearing where / she works burying swans alive / into the black earth” (“Radio, Radio”).
Alternately playful, grim, realistic, surreal, tempered, associative, wise, and astonished, Radio, Radio finds an original niche in the poetry of the day, one that uses the veneer of contemporary poetics to reflect the human mind and soul that lie beneath.” (Source)
ABOUT BEN DOLLER
Ben Doller (previously Doyle) was born in Warsaw, New York in 1973. He completed his undergraduate education at the State University of New York at Oswego and West Virginia University, and he received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. He is the author of Fauxhawk (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), Dead Ahead (Fence Books, 2010), FAQ (Ahsahta Press, 2009), and Radio, Radio (Louisiana State University Press, 2001). He is an… (more)
Read more poems by Ben Doller • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 17 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: violence • power • animals • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
