A Game of Sevens

The rain drifts in on murderous wings
flapping a game of sevens, flapping
in crêpe-paper tunes and tinfoil waltzes.

Persephone ducks under an awning. An old
man holds the lift. Cabs pass black as puddles.
The cables groan out their circular trip.

She shakes out her hair by the fireplace.
The kettle roils, an underground spring.
She shoulders her umbrella like a gun.

What we remember becomes us, when the lights
go out: a glance, a shiver. This time,
she promises herself, I will try to be happy.

Watch all film-poems in order

Same-Day Return

What could I tell to the long twilight?
What would it ask of me?
The dusk is a keeper of secrets
placid as a frozen lake.

My muscles are rinsed with indigo,
my bones glow with a weak,
phosphorescent light.
The darkness can’t fully arrive.

Nothing will come of nothing, warned
the king. So I will speak again:
the moon pours down her tenderness
the city glows back in praise.

The skyline stretches its fingers,
reaching to the tips of the glove.
Even the trees are clambering,
black lightning sprung up from the ground.

Watch all film-poems in order

Fortunately, owing to great variety, imagination, and craft, the evening was anything but a Vogon experience. I was pleased to read my own poem, “In Pieces”, after The Lewis Chessmen, alongside nearly a dozen others. Paul Bentley read a poem about the river Don; Lucy Sixsmith recalled her gap-year missionary work in a rehab clinic in Russia; Alastair McGlashan gave us a prayer translated from the Tamil; Joe Dresner wrestled with philosophy and Ashbery; Janet Sutherland introduced the disturbing and enigmatic Bone Monkey; Robert Chandler translated a Russian folk tale via Pushkin; Abi Curtis revisited Mrs. Beeton in light of her historical anxieties; Jacqueline Smith produced a ballad in Scots about an unlikely witch-hunter; David Punter introduced us to various founding characters of the city of Bristol; Jemma Borg read an insightful and associative prose-poem-come-essay on sleep, and Robert Vas Dias touched on the delights of the quotidian through the Korean Sijo form.

Long Poem Magazine creates an important opportunity, in a time of increasingly compressed information, for that “something longer” to thrive. Issue 7 is now available to order online.

Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.

Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.

Upon Arrival

Longing dabbles in shadows
as the day doubles back,

offering honey and vinegar,
wine to the already drunk.

Memory, that bricklayer, stirs
its slush with a trowel.

Glazed squares shriek their re-
flected light. It is never enough.

Crevices hoard the darkness,
and hiss: never enough.

We rub against newsprint
until our thumbs go black.

Steam chafes against its pane of sky.
We can never go back.

Watch all film-poems in order

Piece Work

Winter, and the loom
of the sky has been
picked to wire.

Light etches its memories
through the long strands
of twilight.
We inhabit
the shell of the world,
and carry it gently.

It carries us too,
the echoing stairwell,
the empty glass aflame.

Look what I have brought–
sand from a bullet-pocked
beach, ribbon from a dead
girl’s hair.
It reaches
through shadow play, gesture,
the conspiring laughter
of birds strung high overhead.

We dwell here, suspended
in ether, vibrating
the strands of the web.

Watch all film-poems in order

The open reading portion of the evening was just as eclectic as those I had attended in California. The flavour, though, was different. Two older gentlemen sang folk songs a cappella. Themes of opera, atheism, and of course anti-war sentiment peppered the poems from the floor. David Floyd promoted his new pamphlet entitled “Protest.” The walls were lined with ink drawings depicting the horrors associated with capitalist greed for oil. And at the back table, a periodical called Peace News replaced what had typically been promoted at Torriano House–The Daily Worker.

The featured poets themselves took up less directly political themes. Sarah Doyle read several ekphrastic poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, each carefully tuned to musical perfection within the constraints of metre and rhyme. She ended with a humorous poem that amplified clever, self-deprecating moments with sucker-punch-timed rhymes. Ruth Ingram read translations from French and German, as well a her own work steeped in keen observation and a quirky turn of thought.

Dennis Evans read short, personally meaningful poems full of plain speech and local knowledge. Diana Bishop, former reader-in-residence at Keats House, read poems with the beautiful diction and expert timing of a trained BBC radio presenter. Her work focused on childhood fears, drawing out the music of language with an easy and subtle relationship to both free verse and form.

Though I miss the longstanding friendships and easy camaraderie of my former California poetry haunts, both the poet and the anthropologist in me came away from the evening galvanised. I look forward to swapping poems with group members in our meeting next month, and continuing to find my way in the eccentric and historically-rich London poetry scene.

As I travelled by tube to the Southbank Centre to attend the first event of the London Literature Festival, and my first poetry reading since moving to London two months ago, I took with me my American expectations about poetry venues: coffee shops, small community centers, the occasional well-appointed-but-out-of-the way theater or library hall. Seated facing the podium on the sixth floor of this clean, bright temple to art, I kept examining the layers of the backdrop as if it were a painting. First, a Union Jack. Then the London Eye. And on the far side of the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. This was not a painting, however, but a window. The statement was clear: art, and for this evening, poetry, commands a central place in Britain. However, centrality means anything but homogeneity, as the four readers in this “Poetry of Place” event demonstrated.

Read the full article online at the Silk Road Review Blog.

“The distant reality every day questions me / like an unknown traveler who wakes me up in the middle of the journey / saying ‘Is this the right bus?’, / and I answer ‘Yes’, but I mean ‘I don’t know.’”

Bergamot Station at night / Photo: Marvin Rand

It was with great excitement that I drove down to Frank Pictures Gallery in Bergamont Station to read poems alongside Tim Green, Nikola Madzirov, and Ilya Kaminsky last night. It is always a privilege to read alongside first-rate poets, but last night was something truly special. It was one of the final readings in the “Third Area” series to be held in this gallery, and my final reading in America before Val and I move to London.

But more than this, the lineup was particularly special to me. I was slated to read with Tim Green at the Carnegie Art Museum last year, but it ended up being too close to the due date of his new baby daughter. He read poems from American Fractal as well as some new work. Tim has been a great supporter of my own work, giving it exposure through Rattle, and is himself a fine poet–sonorous and absorbed when he reads, self-deprecating and down-to-earth in between.

Then I was introduced to the work of Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov, available now in English thanks to BOA editions and the Lannan Translations Selection Series. His poems took my breath away. In them, I found many of the elements of what I admire most about other Slavic-language poets, especially those far to the north in Poland–sensitive, clever observations, at times whimsical, but always with a deep undercurrent of existential longing.

Finally, I had the opportunity to hear Ilya Kaminsky, whose work I greatly admire, read some of his own poems, as well as poems from his new anthology of international poetry (coincidentally, the two poets he read were Polish). Kaminsky, too, becomes absorbed in the music of his poems, making it sometimes difficult, between his Russian accent and some of the variations of enunciation that I can only assume stem from his being deaf, for me to catch every word in the air. Fortunately, the poems he read from Dancing in Odessa I could almost recite by heart, and so it was wonderful to get a glimpse into his own unique and spontaneous lyrical relationship to these poems that I have read so often on the page.

All in all, it was a terrific evening, with friends coming from afar to attend this one last literary bash before I go. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Maclay for making it happen. Really, I could have not have asked for a better send-off.

The following poems were published in Cloudbank and Sugar Mule, respectively. Both poems also appear in my new collection, Human Shade, which has just shipped author’s copies from the printer.

Thanks once again to Charles McDonald for filming.

The following poem received an honorable mention in the 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize, and appeared in Rattle #30 in the winter of that year. While the text and an audio recording of me reading this poem are available on the Rattle website, this is the first time me reading this poem has appeared in a video. Special thanks to Charles McDonald for filming that night.

One day, this poem came to me. I was nervous at first to share it with them. But they told me that they read it over and over in private. On that night, I read it to them in person for the first time. Needless to say it was difficult to keep reading through strong feelings. Kevin Wallace, director of the Center, videotaped the evening, and captured this moment.

Here also is the text of the poem:

Jonah
in memoriam J.B.

It is large, they say, this life,
and however could a dove alight
on the barnacle-armored hull of it
and not fear his own consumption?

You live on through the love
you left behind, in the eyes
of those who speak of you
at the distant whaling outposts.

Although we never met, your story
is all-too understandable,
since all of us are stowaways, deep
in the hold, tossed on a storm.

How could you not have wanted more?
The rafters creaking overhead,
only a swinging lamp to guide you.
You went out on deck alone.

And when the world found you,
and rammed against your hull,
they say you looked it in the eye
before it swallowed you whole.

Glenna Luschei read from her two most recent collections, Salt Lick and Witch Dance, the latter of which is dedicated to the memory of her husband. Her poems are casually observational, but while the themes are clearly cohesive, no line could be predicted on the basis of the previous line. Her poems thereby give voice to the workings of a truly unique turn of mind. There is no one quite like her.

Dan Gerber gave a tribute to Barry Spacks, and to the dignity and integrity with which he has become an elder poet in the community. Dan’s work is deep, spare, with often haiku-like intensity and grace. Not without wit, he also read a poem dedicated to the many ticks that have taken communion at his expense. It seems to me we were all nourished that night by some small amount of blood from Dan Gerber’s heart.

Judith Petraitis read a few longer poems touching upon themes from her childhood in the rural Midwest. She read tributes to her mother and father, and opened up the vast expanse of a prairie dusk with gradual, ever-developing, image-rich poems.

Carol DeCanio gave us each a lovely introduction, and supported a small, friendly team of volunteers in facilitating a very classy event. This seems like a perfect way to end my three-readings-in-three-consecutive-weekends mini-marathon, and a perfect way to spend a Saturday night. Hats off to Carol, Glenna, Dan, Judith, and the Santa Barbara Poetry Series team.

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