he shelved astronomy

grand and bold that was stardust
fallen from sky warped passages
not like us at all
a companion to the cosmos
verses sung for no one
you listening to the planets tonite
veils of northern lights
desolate meadows padded with snow
the silence the man
carrying the fire
trained the rocket boys
failure is not an option to become
lost the lost moon
remember when packing for mars
bring hope and the right stuff
the view here from the center of
the universe is a grand and bold thing
but the sky lost the moon
carrying the fire to study
the backyard astronomers
guide to stardust
falling to, falling on
already arrived the soul
recites its cosmic verses
and we pretend to know
how old the universe is
who knows the man
carrying fire on the moon
thumbs through his pluto
files of failure
do not leave unprepared
like those rocket men
who lost the moon,
seduced they say by northern
lights and nights
nothing is as nothing was
you you you
snaked & naked
warped by passages that
contained you too long
deaf since the big bang
you are the soul of the
night and that was
and remains your only
companion

Dance Music a Poem By David Avidan



We reflected at length. Light flooded

the forehead's rectangle, the eyes, the eyebrows. We asked

the same questions and were answered

as always. Winter arrived

and saddened us. From others

we asked nothing and from ourselves

we asked only little. But we grasped

that daylight is not hostile and that night

is only a passing nuisance. Rain came

and silenced the tune. We turned on the radio,

dimmed the lights, and quietly dove

into dark and shadowy abysses. The hairy creature

awoke in us. Man is the sole

goal of all creation. And so

woman found us. We were

hard and festive until nightfall.

Why did light flood the eyes, eyebrows,

the forehead's rectangle, the back, the body. The rain

why did it come, and how would you explain

that we passed underneath and did not sink.

Translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller

-From the book "Language For A New Century Contemporary Poetry From The Middle East, Asia, And Beyond" Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal & Ravi Shankar

For more information about David Avidan & other poems:



"David Avidan", painting by Yael-Shahar Sarid, 1994



http://www.poetryinternational.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=15822

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest: a marathon reading

On Saturday & Sunday, February 11-12, YU & Spare Room will present a two-part marathon reading of The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan, 2008). Now in its tenth year, Spare Room organizes a monthly reading series at various locations in Portland, focused on experimental poetry. In recent years they have hosted marathon readings each winter, inviting members of the community to lend their voices to a new rendition of an existing text. Recent marathons have been devoted to single book-length poems, including H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text, and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; this year's marathon presents the lively & varied life's work of an influential poet who worked mainly in shorter forms.

Barbara Guest (1920-2006) was a poet, art critic, novelist & biographer often associated with the New York School(s) in poetry & painting. Her work reflects a lifelong engagement with modernism in visual art & music as well as in literature, and is marked by a unique combination of audacious abstraction, vivid synesthesia and comic energy. Her posthumous Collected Poems brings together over twenty books published between 1960 and 2005. Readers from Portland's poetry community will read the book aloud from beginning to end over two afternoon sessions, each beginning at 3 p.m. and continuing till about 8, at YU's spacious kitchen table. Listeners are encouraged to come and go as they please, stopping by for a few pages or a few hours.

understanding what it means
to understand music

cloudless movement beyond the neck's reach

an hypnotic lull in porcelain water break mimics

tonality crunch of sand under waddling


a small seizure
from monumentality

does not come or go with understanding

--Barbara Guest, from "Dissonance Royal Traveler"

Saturday & Sunday,

February 11-12
3-8 p.m. each day
in the kitchen at YU

http://www.yucontemporary.org/yu/#yu
800 SE 10th Ave.
free

Poetry Reading: Jamalieh Haley & Joseph Lease 730pm @ open space cafe

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights(Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease's poems "'Broken World' (For James Assa...tly)" and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition). "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.
 
Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

America

my scream is a brand name:

blue -- for a while --

elm trees and summer and birch trees and sky, elm trees and summer and birch trees and sky: expensive houses, expensive houses dying: this lack of justice I acknowledge mine --

America, one extra summer night -- he wants to (you know) feel like a giant eyeball --

Jamalieh Haley lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates If Not For Kidnap Poetry series. Her work has been published in Poetry Miscellany, Birds & Whistles, Folio, Poor Claudia, and Small Doggies, and shown at various gallery spaces such as PLACE, Research Club, and Recess. She currently teaches writing and works on several manuscripts at the same time -- a method that has its consequences. She's a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Art.

You have already changed me

look, my dress

is a little white bomb

of outer space

that will slowly murder

the graceful museum

of objects

we are dedicated to preserving

but we are dedicated to preserving

that moment without objects

which pleads the nightmare

to produce breathable air

body I fold

my body into

just back down

the stairs of blackness

out of my little white dress

already exploded

Body Language poem by Kenny Fries

What is a scar if not the memory of a once open wound?
You press your finger between my toes, slide

the soap up the side of my leg, until you reach
the scar with the two holes, where the pins were

inserted twenty years ago. Leaning back, I
remember how I pulled the pin from my leg, how

in a wast-high cast, I dragged myself
from my room to show my parents what I had done.

Your hand on my scar brings me back to the tub
and I want to ask you: What do you feel

when you touch me there? I want you to ask me:
What are you feeling now? But we do not speak.

You drop the soap in the water and I continue
washing, alone. Do you know my father would

bathe my feet, as you do, as if it was the most
natural thing. But up to now, I have allowed

only two pair of hands to touch me there,
to be the salve for what still feels like an open wound.

The skin has healed but the scars grow deeper-
When you touch them what do they tell you about my life?

.
http://www.kennyfries.com/bio/

killing time

...


this is a great place to kill
time she says. i know, we

bulldoze the drifts of midnight,
soon after we close. thank god

the piles don't smell.


...



Poet reading in a landscape by Schnorr von Carolsfeld