Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Wrote my last poem for NaPoWriMo yesterday, a small poem about LB's reading on Friday. I enjoyed her inventiveness and admired her risk-taking. The poem about two stags in rut, with the scent in the air but not the presence of the doe, was very striking. Her mole poem gave me the idea for my poem. Marie Ponsot sat at the next table. It was a pleasure to speak with her for a while, though distressing to learn that she had a stroke, which rendered her for sometime speechless. We spoke a little about asking the stroke to speak. I think "Eve's Fault" is the best poem I wrote this month. It is not faultless, but it stretched me to write it. I love how the poem enters the garden, and then leaves it. It is not strictly biographical, but it melds several biographical elements with a revision of the myth. The Norton Anthology has whet my appetite for the writing of Renaissance and Restoration women poets. They are feisty, they had to be, and their daring is extremely attrac...

I read tonight at Cornelia Street Cafe, with my student, Talia Boylan, who was part of the Middle School Poets' Circle I led. Now a high school sophomore, she gave a beautiful and hypnotic reading, her first outside of school. Kat Georges, the host of the evening, pronounced it "professional." Of the eight poems she read, my favorite is the ekphrastic poem "Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly," written after Mary Cassatt's painting . It is a poem that I would have been proud to write myself. I read two sequences "What We Call Vegetables" and "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait," both inspired by challenges that the Poets' Circle set for itself. It was a delight to see many friends in the audience, Eric, Wendy, Orlando and Ana, his fiance, Naomi, Sunu, Betsy, Sarah, Amy, Angelo and Iris Berman. I sold five books and traded one.

Thomas Fucaloro read from his new book at Cornelia Street Cafe last evening. inheriting craziness is like a soft halo of light , published by Three Rooms Press, collects poems about family, love and the commercialization of modern life, and their persistent tone is comical self-deflation. The speaker in them almost always manages to be bathetic and pathetic at once. The main poetic strategy is one of juxtaposition, of different registers, images and situations. Thomas is a very likable reader, and his poems make plain their desperation to please. This desperation is a source of the poems' strength, but it is also a cause of their weakness. They are made to give a big pay-off only at the end, but occasionally the ending does not deliver. The last poem he read last night "Tom and Jerry" delivered in his quite inimitable manner. What seemed to be a poem about sexual appetite wound up to be a poem about self-division. It is refreshing to approach existential angst through t...

It was a wonderful evening that, as Nemo put it, focused on the right thing, the work itself. Bob's book Lightly in the Good of Day collects poems written over the course of a decade. They are about family and friends--real and imaginary--nature, art and the trying conditions of existence. The turnout at Cornelia Street Cafe was strong. There was only standing room when the open-mic began. Valerie Mendelson, the painter of the landscape that appears on the book cover, came with her husband, JF. For the feature, the readers, Jane Ormerod, Adriana Scorpino, R. Nemo Hill, and Thomas Fucaloro, chose poems from the book that matched perfectly their very different reading styles. Jane read "In That Petal Flesh," Adriana read "Going Inside--Especially To Feel," Nemo read "Man, Can They," "Inside Your Expensive Watch"and "After Such Fall", and Thomas read "Take This Rose." The No Chance Ensemble, consisting of vocalists Bruce a...

Betsy's new book , winner of the 2010 Grayson Books Chapbook Competition, is about how she was saved by an intestine donation from a 13-year-old boy from Minnesota. After hearing her read from the book at Cornelia Street Cafe last Friday, the audience responded with full-hearted applause. A number gave her a standing ovation. EN put it well, the reading was full of life and full of poetry.

It stands for Greater New York Independent Publishers Association. The audience was small tonight, at Cornelia Street Cafe, but the readers were all interesting in various ways. Four of the seven poets reading were queer, though GNYIPA is not a queer organization. I read "Hungry Ghosts," "For Lonely," and "Blowjob." Helen Dano came all the way from the Bronx, where she worked, to attend the reading, and bought a book. Perry Brass also bought a book, as well as Siddhath whom I met at the reading. The ratio of buyers to audience must be one of the highest ever for me. After the reading, I had a nice dinner with Helen at the oyster bar across the street.

Elizabeth Harrington asked Jackie Sheeler and me to read with her last night, and the reading at Cornelia Street Cafe was seamed with gold. Without prior consultation, all three of us read poems about family. Perhaps with Thanksgiving in our minds, we read about childhood, sickness, loneliness and loss. Jackie's poems deployed detail and imagery in a most telling way. Her assured performance elicited every response from the audience the poems aimed for. Betsy's reading voice was quieter, and perhaps more hesitant, but her poems came out of the deep pit of self. I read mostly new poems, about my grandfather, my father and TH, and did not quite find my groove. Afterwards EN pointed out perceptively why. I was influenced by Jackie's accomplished reading, and so semi-consciously tried to read like her to get the same audience response she did, although my poems are built differently. EN and I thought it was my competitive streak showing up again. But this morning I think it h...

Last night, at Cornelia, I met again Tim Rauch, an independent animator. He and his brother just completed their first animated documentary, Germans in the Woods . Based on a WWII veteran's story, the documentary short won 2nd prize at ASIFA-East (Animation Community for NY and the East Coast). It is making the rounds of film fests. In his blog , Tim writes about his current project, The Park Bench . Will Morris read as the feature at Cornelia last night. I've heard him read three times now, and his poetry, inspired by British Revivalists, postmodernism, and language poetry, is still as entertaining as ever. The incantatory repetitions, the technological imagery, and the social criticism remind me of the other English poet in the NYC poetry circuit, Jane Ormerod. Jane hails from the U of East Anglia writing program. I wonder if Will comes from the same fenlands.

Last night Jane launched a new reading at Cornelia Street Cafe called Emotional Rescue. The idea is simple but effective. The audience calls out an emotion, and the four featured poets read a poem related to that emotion. Last night I read with Jack Wiler, Iris N. Schwartz and Phyllis Talley. We provided a good mix of poetic and performance styles and voices. The Quarterback described it well as "theatrical." The emotions on parade last night were bliss , embarrassment , lust , terror , pain , regret , ease , vengefulness , despair , tenacity , obsession, anger , and pride. Jack Wiler read a wonderful poem on the last emotion. I read a poem for every other emotion. Click on one to read the poem I read last night.

I've heard Jane read at various venues in NYC, but last Friday's feature at Cornelia Street Cafe was my first full-length exposure to her work. It's still impossible, two days later, to describe the impact of that reading on me. That evening many open-mic readers read good poems: striking ideas, surprising phrasing, brilliant images. But Jane's reading crushed all of us, or, at least that was how I felt. Her poems--discontinuous, imagistic, chant-like, wide-ranging in its references, sonically dense--challenge more traditional ways of putting a poem together. She made us sound old-fashioned, more, she made us sound artificial, our tidy methodical artefacts simulacra of reality, instead of the postmodern reality caught and then broadcast like a radio signal from her poems. She does not make me want to write like her, but challenges me to write better in my own way, to prove that my style is also adequate, in some sense, to reality. You can read her work on her website , ...

Mark Strand was the featured reader at Cornelia Street Cafe last night. His reading was unhurried, unfussy and unshowy, relying on the precision and valence of words ordered well. Reading in a basement, he chose poems that resonated in the subterranean. They were funny, yearning, compassionate. They were also highly conscious of traditional forms. He read a ballad about a couple who met in an underground train station. He read "Black Sea" when someone in the audience shouted out the request. The poem blew the top off my head. Looking at it on the page, now, I just realized that it is a Shakespearian sonnet. Black Sea One clear night while the others slept, I climbed the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it, the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long, whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach of a distant light, and I imagi...

The Friday before last John Marcus read at Pink Pony a tremendous poem about men who have sex with horses. Inspired by the film "Zoo," the poem was not prurient but delicate. Yesterday he read "Summer Stories," the third part of which offers a different take on the Iragi war. 3. Summer in Iraq expect bombs to tear the limbs off males who used to like to wear high heels when they had toes to their dear feet expect the explosion in the road to sever the tendons of the lady driver who liked a good tobacco in her pipe Know who to look for within the cemetery Certain military graves contain the remains of men dubbed 'sissy' the handsome skeletons of brainy dikes

I posted Bob's "To a She or a General They " a couple of weeks ago. Last Friday, I bought his poetry book, Acrobat , and really enjoyed the warmth and wit that suffuse his poems. Bob and I are going to read one another's poems at the Pink Pony open-mic this Friday. I have decided to read the perfect little poem, "Warm," which not only displays that wit, but also conveys Bob's gift for observation and his spirit of adventure. "Warm" by Bob Hart The warm blood of the walrus; his frost filled whiskers and his syrupy eyes: swimming, he butts the ice. The warm blood of the polar bear, white like butter across the starwhite wastes: emerged from the transparent splash he can run or sleep in snow, his vapored breath an aura round his mouth like our planet's air against sub-zero space. I like these guys. I'd like to play one in a movie. Inspector Walrus. Cool but kind in an embittering world. No day's work with him without some smile. Or the...

Jay is another regular at the Pink Pony Express open-mic at Cornelia Street Cafe. Bald, bespectacled, atheistic, Jewish, he is a visual artist who has turned to writing poetry late in life. From the start his poetry impresses me with its intellectual muscle, its rhetorical flights and its mixture of ornate and colloquial diction. Last night at Cornelia, he read an eloquent, moving prayer for survival, for all of us. Finding the Refuge Look back--ahead--the place is dense but we are forced through creeping almost blind, to move, we've seen too much. Is there, away from the world's appalling room, a quiet Spot--some place of weakened energy--to lie, sink down upon, is there a hill; a water sound; and muscled with light twittering, is there a tree, a massive twig to catch the tearing of our shadows on, does it Exist? A place of deep forgetfulness, where, braided into greenery the skull is hushed; and where, to the quiet vapor of the mind a herd in dappled movement comes, we know a...

Bob Hart is a regular reader at the Pink Pony Express open-mic, a reading series in the Village. A tall, gaunt, grey-haired man, Bob is always courteous in a way that strikes me as old-worldly. His poems are philosophical in approach, meditative in tone, and the best of them achieve a sweet gravity. I heard him read "To a She" 2 weeks ago, and loved it. Bob was kind enough to handwrite a copy for me, and to give me permission to share it on my blog. To a She or a General They There's less a barrier between you and me today than there was yesterday --maybe a few minutes ago-- perhaps because space or I am more alive. I am not less evil I'm afraid though I'd love to be good which is to say I'd love to treat you with the pure respect affinity considers it should tender to softness and loftiness clothed in the pride beyond body. I shouldn't make you less than you nor even for my power's and my pleasure's sake should I be less than me. But my being evil...