Poetic Dove Presents Intimate Sessions

My mother has a history of never asking more from those who are suffering, and she listens to people not just loved ones in a way that makes them feel heard. This spawned years of rebellion from me, her youngest son. I pursued independence by repeatedly rejecting, resenting, desperately succumbing to, and then ultimately depending on this profound well of empathy.

I would, literally, fall asleep. My father, with a heavy heart, had left the home of his wife and four children in order to find out more about the love he had for another woman. It was impossible for my mother to talk about what was happening without crying, and my reaction was always swift. Eventually, she stopped telling me.

For 14 years, we focused on a subject we both loved: The overt parts of who I am, I immediately trace to my father. I was a chubby kid as was my dad , and my three older brothers were not, which made everyone assume I was the primary recipient of his genetics.

We are both viscerally stubborn, until quietly we are not. We lash out defensively, then, over time, we let them watch us change. My time slot at the Jazz Festival is just before the headliner: Gregory Porter is a legend, and the park quakes for him. The ten minutes it takes his band to set up is to be filled with poetry. The festival host from Jazz The crowd communicates two types of people: It was only about of 6,, but sounds like a shitload. It documents the night Ben first knew he loved Wendell, four months into their relationship. This man, possessed only by the desire to bring him joy, unlocked Ben.

In my high school of 2, kids, Ben was the only student out-of-the-closet.

He came out the summer before his junior year, but four years prior, after being bullied at choir practice by an eighth grader who called him a faggot something that had happened to him since he was in second grade , he quietly admitted to himself that everyone was right. He walked into our bathroom and swallowed a bottle of Advil. The doctors induced vomiting, and he spent the next four hours in a hospital bed while my mother brushed the hair across his forehead and whispered over and over again that she loved him.

I read the poem I wrote for his wedding to this man who I need to never lose faith in me: The poem had to claw from my mouth as we held each other sobbing on the couch. The reading in Tompkins Square Park is less cathartic. Some are angry that I am still on stage. A few have tears in their eyes. As though nudged from a dream, my set is over, and I am free to consider what just happened. She drowned in a lake behind their house. My mom is 60 now, sitting with me in Goodale Park. He had carried the body back to their house. Each brother and sister saw her laid out at 4: A neighbor cooked them all hot dogs and heated up frozen corn, and by 5: In the morning, they woke for the wake, and by 2: Mary was buried forever in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

She tells me that when the family got home from the funeral, her two eldest siblings, both in high school, were scheduled to attend a weekly sock-hop. My mother would learn in her adult life that they had spent three years of nights privately crying in the dark. My mom was seven, learning that grief did not involve sadness. You die, then a hole closes around where you were, perhaps leaving a small scar, and then the survivors continue with the business of mortality. Her parents fought, perhaps, the most difficult battle of their lives in silence in order to not burden their children with even a small share of grief.

Her realization, thousands of miles from her gigantic family and past, was that if she died, it would be a small story on the Creighton Campus, a small story in New Jersey, and ultimately, no one depended on her survival. Then she tells me, her youngest son, what I never thought to ask. So that if I died it mattered.

Tears begin to drop from her cheek and gather on the wood. I can see all that I have inherited in this life from work my mother did before she ever knew me; what it means that I am sitting across from her in an empty park watching her cry. I picture my mother again at the hospital with Ben in I can see how she must have wanted nothing more than to protect him at choir practice, to defend him in study hall, or anywhere else that adolescence proved itself relentless to her year-old son; how all she had to give was the person she had become, how it placed her by his hospital bed: Since I was born, I have always assumed I was becoming only my father.

I can see how the desire to matter is not a charge that began with my birth, or will culminate with my death. My eyes are open, and I can see, for a moment, who I have become. Book Previews On Poetry.

Poetry Flash > programs

Poetry forces us to slow down, sit, and pay attention. Stories of transfigurations and conflagrations. Poets affirming their existence on the page. Poetry that cuts through the daily noise and does justice to words. His previous collection, Ghost Machine , was selected for publication by Michael Burkard and chosen as one of the best books of for Believer Magazine's Reader Survey. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Elana Bell and Tiffany Higgins, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash.

Elements basic to life—bread, fruit, water, and rats—are here in profusion. These poems are built for our time. Patrick Herron says of it, "Tiffany Higgins' anachronistic and recast hero is one brilliantly charged nexus of exploitation and war; she is captured, tortured, and released as a series of heartbreaking lyrics. She blogs at http: David Wojahn says of it, "Like James Wright and Sherwood Anderson—both of whom he pays homage to in this stunning collection—Joseph Campana understands that the Midwest is less a place than a strangely inscrutable state of mind, where our losses and vulnerabilities are shown in terrifyingly high relief…Campana also understands…that the principal business of the lyric poem is heartbreak.

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Kjell Espmark and Mariela Griffor, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. She is the founder of Marick Press and author of three books of poems, Exiliana and House, both published in , and the collection Heartland , about which Jim Schley says, "While she is capable of acknowledging and dramatizing ghastly geopolitical realities with stark veracity, she always—yes, always—approaches the momentous historical complexities she is uniquely situated to describe with a tenderness most people…can only summon for their home life…She is dedicated, intellectually penetrating, and endlessly curious.

His published work includes several chapbooks, the verse novella The Misogynist's Blue Nightmare and the poetry collections, Perplexed Skin and Making Music. His work has appeared in many anthologies including Separate Islands: His play Beauty and the Stalker was produced at the Granary Theatre, Cork in , and he has published short fiction in journals and newspapers. Sweeney has published not only many poetry collections for adults but also several poetry collections for children and two children's novels. Writing Poetry , which he co-wrote with John Hartley Williams, appeared in , and he has co-edited two anthologies of poems.

He has held several fellowships and writer-in-residence positions, most recently at University College Cork. He was nominated for the T. Eliot award for Black Moon. Horse Music Bloodaxe, is his most recent collection. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Jennifer Elise Foerster and Andrew Schelling, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. Joy Harjo says, "Wow. This first book of poems by Jennifer Foerster reminds me of the urgent vision fueling Kerouac's On the Road …Foester spins her poem-songs like wheels.

She's from a younger generation, and not a man but a native woman trying to put the story of a broken people back together. Andrew Schelling 's new book of poems is A Possible Bag. Kit Robinson says of it, "Translator, scholar, poet Andrew Schelling works from linguistic roots both East Sanskrit and West Arapaho to imagine how we might relate to earth differently since we can now see human inhabitation as a limited engagement. Poetry, Ecology, Asia ; the most recent of his translations from Sanskrit—he's been studying Sanskrit and Indian raga for thirty years—is Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India.

Fanny Howe says of it, "In, out, secrecy, exposure. The book is resonant with the poetry of Hafiz and Rumi but stays grounded in the contemporary, especially in its candor and unease. But then the language and vision is also Romantic and pleasurable, calling to be heard aloud.

Poetry in Motion

His exciting, transgenre work Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities , part detective story, part memoir, part imagined past, originally published in , is being re-issued. Tony Barnstone 's latest books of poems are Tongue of War: Translator and scholar as well as a poet, he will present a visual and art slide show in collaboration with the artist Alexandra Eldridge at this event. This last collection stems from his recent two-volume translation of The Restored New Testament. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the distinguished author of some seventy volumes of poetry, prose, and translation.

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Alex Dimitrov and Genine Lentine, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. Mark Doty says, "Dimitrov's passionate, headlong poems seem to want to carve beneath the surface of gestures, beneath the skin, to the warm and dangerous blood beneath… Begging for It is a fierce and memorable debut. Genine Lentine 's new book is Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model.

Mark Doty says, "Poses dwells in a space between forms, and in fact these pieces feel like spaces, each block of text becoming the rectilinear space of a drawing. The white space between passages of ink creates a rhythm, a sense of time passing, as each piece points toward a different moment of composition.

Her previous poetry collection is Mr. A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. Camille Norton says of it, "Tim Kahl's poems are an "open source" for the end of the West. These big, bold poems swerve between history and pop culture, between nineteenth century bull and bear baiting to twenty-first century bull and bear markets.

Joshua McKinney 's new book is Mad Cursive. In this book, McKinney, an accomplished swordsman, moves toward the Japanese concept of binbu ichi —"the unity of martial and literary arts"—a Samurai ideal. Claudia Keelan wrote, "The poems in Mad Cursive move gracefully between beauty and destruction, the essential real locale of poetry in our times. A mad swordsman inside a poet-seer, McKinney dares to locate what resembles, in my reading, spirit laid bare. Morin, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash.

How did they do that? She played professional basketball for several years in Europe and Asia, and now lives in Mojave Valley, Arizona and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. He teaches literature and writing at Texas State University. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Kim Shuck and Chris Hoffman, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash.

His new book of poems is Realization Point , about which Joseph Bruchac says, "Chris Hoffman's poems speak with a clear meditative voice that bridges the gap between our human lives and the healing spirit of nature. Kim Shuck is a writer, weaver, and bead artist, who has shown her artwork on four continents. Shuck's new book, Rabbit Stories , is fiction, about which Deborah A. Miranda says, "Kim Shuck's collection is tenderly constructed, finely woven in and out of Rabbit Food's lifetime as girl, young woman, new mother, and mature artist.

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Bruce Isaacson and Jan Steckel, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. His new book of poems is the chapbook, Book of Rebellions ; his other recent books of poetry include Dumbstruck at the Lights in the Sky and Ghosts Among the Neon.

Former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman says, "[Isaacson] gives his realist and insightful eye to seeing and revealing how poetry remains the king of affirmation amid devastating negations and the ghosting of the soul. Her new book of poems, The Horizontal Poet , a Lambda Literary Award-winner, is audacious, worldly, and deeply compassionate.

Among other critical endeavors, she's author of Boston Comment , a series of critical essays archived online. She's published five books of poems, most recently Dogged Hearts. We passed by a beach, which was empty except for a couple and their dog. The dog ran along the waterline chasing after its toy; its dark coat against the white sand made me think of our old lab who used to follow us down to the cove near our house where we'd all go swimming. One of my most vivid memories of that place was from high school, just before I left for college, swimming after sunset.

The water was calm and the wind was warm. I floated on my back a few yards from shore, listening to our dog chewing on driftwood, the wind rustling the leaves on the hillside, the water echoing in my ears. Slowly, the stars appeared in the sky above me - and then, somehow, all around me: I was surprised but not afraid: I had seen this before - phosphorescent algae in the marshes and water in the area - but I had never swum in and among them.

Poetic Dove Presents Intimate Sessions

The dark water pulsed with an otherworldly glow that seemed to surround and include and devour me all at once. I looked out the window of the train and over the winter ocean and thought: It seemed as truthful a comparison to my poetic aspirations as the memory of walking home on that lit street came to represent my approach to telling a story. These memories weren't perfect analogs to why I've come to do what I do, and they couldn't have served as sufficient answers to the audience members at the reading. But they were answers I felt grateful to come upon, embedded, as they were, in a version of myself that feels very far away.

So in that way, I guess I did arrive at a response to that second question: I think I would have to say: This was a great read. Brilliant — what a joy to spend time with a writer of such wit, erudition, skill. Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. The anxiety that hounds Larkin turns out to be the prospect of his own death: I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Larkin wants us to see that these states prefigure death itself: Insomniac poets glimpse it with particular sharpness, and often seem proud of this: If the rest of his oeuvre is any indication, Larkin had a devilish time with sleep. But in this he is hardly an anomaly: Of the 37 writers featured in that piece, though, only around three were poets. And yet poets occupy the most special relationship to sleep. Partly this is because poetry is itself a form of sleep: Take Lord Byron , who went to bed at dawn and rose at 2 p.

Prior to sleep, Byron punctually swallowed a single egg yolk whole while standing, then retired to his chambers, where he slept with two loaded pistols at his bedside and a dagger under his pillow. The weaponry served two purposes: An aggressive teeth-grinder during sleep, Byron habitually awoke from nightmares that left him awash in suicidal gloom. I wish the dead would rest, however. Vita Sackville-West -- a friend and lover of Virginia Woolf and a poet herself -- combated her insomnia by collecting as many dogs as possible and inviting them into bed with her.

Amy Lowell , who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in , would check into a hotel and rent out her own room as well as those above, below, and on either side of it. He attempted to stave these off by repeating a rhyming prayer before sleep: His notebooks relate one of these, which reads today like a thinly veiled drama of castration anxiety: Whatever the nature of their sleep hang-ups, their poems have furnished these writers with spaces in which to record their nocturnal trials.

We dwell for a time in this stanza and then that, breathing the air it stores through its particular respiratory patterns, thinking and feeling in time with the poet. Poets plot paths through these dwelling spaces, and the paths often lead us to, or at least through, bedrooms.

• Crematorio (Compactos Anagrama) (Spanish Edition).
• Покупки по категориям.
• When God Wept.
• 2 585,17 RUB?
• Frequently bought together!
• Books by Patricia Garcia?
• Bottom panel for Description;

In the end he brags to the sun that its journey round the earth is redundant, since his own bedroom, rightly seen, is a microcosm in which all the truth and goodness and riches in the world are concentrated: But then, a penchant for the dramatic gesture does come with the poetic territory. He remarried the following year. In the hewn angularity and symmetry of his stanzas one sees the imprint of an obsessive designer; here are verse-rooms adorned with complexly irregular stress patterns that embellish like molding, tracery, or cornice -- meticulous masonry.

Larkin lying in bed at 4 a. And to what alien terrains, what modes of being and desiring that run counter to whoever you thought you were, will sleep waft you? Resisting such self-dissolution, such loss of control, the insomniac hangs on, clinging to consciousness that is the binding agent of identity and our way of retaining our hold on the world. It may be true that, as Greg Johnson has suggested, this holding fast to consciousness -- a clutching at cognizance that fends off self-loss -- is most pronounced in writers. That numerous poets have approached the business of sex with a trepidation to match their fear of sleep is practically proverbial.

Eliot remained virgins till 30 and 26, respectively; Christina Rossetti , gorgeous and much sought-after as a young woman, never married, and in Goblin Market imagines fleshly pleasure as an addictive, otherworldly fruit capable of depleting and devouring the soul. Sleep is an occasion for self-loss, but so is sex. Here then is the crux of the matter: Beds are where we go to lose ourselves.

But sex too entails a kind of dying: And it can lead to intervals of self-annihilation and a communing with otherness that few other pastimes can. But this might be a thing to embrace rather than fear.

Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline: The New Jersey Poems of Timothy Walsh

The capacity of sleep and sex both to catalyze a death-like self-abandonment has been, historically, what certain poets have most cherished about these phenomena. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. The perspective of Keats and Gandhi -- which looks enthusiastically on the nightly metamorphoses of self that happen under the covers -- may be an altogether healthier one than dread. It may be, too, a perspective consistent with recent advances in microbiology. That is, those who dread self-loss would do well to ask themselves what it is they are holding onto, and whether their endeavor to retain it might not have been doomed from the get-go.

We now know, as microbiologist Ed Yong has shown in his gripping I Contain Multitudes , that our bodies play host to trillions of immigrant microbes and quadrillions of viruses that momently multiply on our faces, hands, and in our guts, making up roughly half our being and forcing us to reconsider what we even think of as a self.

Yet insomniac writers have been grappling with how to make sense of this fact since at least the Victorian era. They bring the image of one washed out beyond the bar in a sea at an ebb, losing even his personality, as the elements of which he is composed pass into new combinations.

Struggling, as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he loses at every moment. Lying awake at night and contemplating our eventual demise, we fret over an event that is already behind us, that has played out unendingly since we came into being and will repeat itself innumerable times in the future. Accepting this, we might more cheerfully brave the windows of self-loss that lie in wait for us in bedrooms: American poetry has performance issues.

1. Customers who bought this item also bought.
2. www.newyorkethnicfood.com: The Ground: Poems (): Rowan Ricardo Phillips: Books.
3. Poetry in Motion - The Millions.
4. Historical Dictionary of Israel (Historical Dictionaries of Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East).
5. Follow the Author.

As the poet approaches the mic, you brace yourself: The poet could make conversational eye contact with the audience, as poets Naomi Shihab Nye , Forrest Gander , and Toi Derricotte do; or she could never look up from the podium. Why do some poets perform as though they had just come to in a bad dream? Meanwhile, the other American poetry — the stage-centered continuum that runs from slam to rap and back again — whose lifeblood is making poems sound and feel good out loud, has taken a long time to get a break. As these poets have developed a new kind of poetry career, where a packed performance tour can predate a first-book publication by years, the line Bloom so firmly drew in the sand has been eroding.

Other, less hidebound critics have taken note: Susan Somers Willett , in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry , notes that slam has, since its inception, put critical power directly into the hands of the audience, making slam attendees feel that they, not the editors of book reviews, are cultural tastemakers and determiners of authenticity. As poets with performance backgrounds rise through the ranks of poetry print culture, American poetry appears caught between a fear of performance and a celebration of it. To disdain them is to shoot yourself in the foot.

No one speaks that way. Slam poets have typically not shied away from associations with the theatrical, maybe because slam is more likely to embrace genres, like persona, that lend themselves to character-building. These movements, she writes, provide a precedent for the audiences at poetry slams, who are predominantly white while the winners of major slam competitions are predominantly black. Is the opposite true — do poets who came up in performance communities shy away from line and form? And poets comfortable with both are aware of the potential for groundbreaking work.

In between the two columns, naturally, is a seam of space. The video opens with a shot of the left column, folded along its seam, black ink on white paper. Later, we see its right half, white ink on black. By lingering on the text, May calls attention to the form of the poem as it can only be seen on the page, with all three performance possibilities presented simultaneously to the reader. But he also makes his performance of the work essential, moving a hand across his mouth, closing his eyes.

Shop by category

At one point, he quietly doubles his voice. What kind of poet does May want to be? Steeped in the familial community of Detroit slam, May is now finding the kind of success most poets in MFA programs dream of: Is this inter-weaving of genres, this promising poetry Frankenstein, actually changing the way students and teachers approach poetry and its performance? The litmus test, as usual, is high school and undergraduate students.