Word for Word Poetry with Willow Books

We have a collection of very talented guest bloggers to cover the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of our visiting poets who present at the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Anne Lovering Rounds for Word for Word Poetry, June 4, 2013
Featuring the poets of Willow Books

This past Tuesday night, four poets of Willow Books—Randall Horton, Alan King, Tony Medina, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths—delivered a powerhouse program in the Reading Room. When he opened the reading, curator Paul Romero remarked that the poets had a connection to Washington, D.C. in common, and images of the capital did recur in the evening’s different voices: the “one-stop liquor store” of Randall Horton’s “Decision Time for the Would-Be Twelve Stepper,” the “club below U Street” of Alan King’s “At Salaam’s,” the “gutter choke[d] on cherry blossoms” of Tony Medina’s “Cannibals on U Street.” Beyond D.C., these readers’ poems journeyed through a spectacular range of of literal and literary places.

Randall Horton began by reading the poem from which his book, Pitch Dark Anarchy, takes its name. The poem that uses the phrase, “In the Year of Our Lord Circa 1840,” is a reflection on the renaming of the Amistad: “how odd the daylight / at half-mast no valid flag flew— / a nation / above deck pitch dark / anarchy fore & aft.” Setting the tone for the other poems he would share, “In the Year of Our Lord” was a blend—part observation, part protest, part epic. Horton is gifted at maintaining the balance between critique and curiosity, such that the poem can both face the hard truth of “men […] (re) sold (re) manacled” and at the same time wonder, “one day maybe salt cod, mackerel.” Counterpoint also came out of “Decision Time for the Would-Be Twelve Stepper,” where “directly above one-stop liquor store / meetings occur every hour on the hour,” and “a man contemplates which cathedral, / upstairs or down, liquor or step one.” Rather than resolving tension, Horton’s poems do the complex work of exposing it. The end of “Decision Time” summed up this spirit of exposure: “I am. I am. I am.”

The second poet, Alan King, read from Drift (2012) and from his new manuscript, Point Blank. King’s work accesses universal experience: “The Brute,” as he introduced it, was “a poem for anyone who’s ever hated their boss”; “Conundrum” addressed what it feels like to want to know, and to think you know, as a kid, what it means to be cool; “Slippery” spoke to the contemporary quandary about whether to accept an old, yet changed, acquaintance’s Facebook request (“He’s married now”). King takes these moments and mines them—in “Slippery,” Facebook transcended its reputation as a realm of self-posturing and time-wasting, as King wondered about his old friend (was he a loser? A player? Both?), “whether to respond or close him out.” Relationships both profound and casual were often at stake in King’s poems. What is the payoff for connection? What is the consequence of failed communication? Articulating the injustice of predetermined, authority-driven narratives (a form of deep failure to interact), King ended by reading “Strip Tease,” about a nephew who was racially profiled and detained at Target. Even in a moment of outrage (“I’m sick of this striptease we’re forced to perform”), King hinted that the flip side of the power trip is real intimacy, though we may be a long way from achieving it.

The loudest reader of the night, Tony Medina, made the audience laugh with “Broke Bonobo” (featuring an irreverent, odd-couple-type exchange between two bonobos—“It’s hard out here for a chimp”), and with an imagined rant of a letter from President Obama to Santa Claus. Medina’s poems showcased pain as well as humor, and emotion was close to the surface in “High Blood Pressure,” from My Old Man Was Always on the Lam, when Medina struggles with his father’s death: “68 years / of tecata screams / 68 years of street hustle / schemes.” Whether writing litany or fantasy, whether sounding angry or amused, Medina is open about surviving in this world, and what it can take. His poems point up the question, We made it this far, didn’t we?

After Tony Medina’s portion of the reading, Rachel Eliza Griffiths jokingly apologized for her “depressing poems.” Griffiths, a returning reader in the series, is audacious in the way she faces histories of loss in her poems. In “Blues For Sweet Thing,” inspired by Nina Simone, she asks, “How did I end up being a ghost of every nothing?” In “Declarations From Ghost,” the speaker implores a grandmother figure, “Tell me you are dead,” so she can desist “stopping for ghosts who over and over call out your name.” “The Reckoning of Relics” treated Griffiths’s encounter with (the remains of) Edna St. Vincent Millay on a tour through Millay’s house in Austerlitz, New York—an experience the poem figures as a kind of salvation, of being “picked […] up out of the dirt when I wanted to stay face down.” Yet even as Griffiths refuses to soften the impact of loss and uncertainty, the natural and the pastoral are the undercurrents of her poems: dirt; fruit; body. Even the difficult, she reminds us, is organic.

Anne Lovering Rounds is Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. 

Word for Word Poetry with Tightrope Books

We have a collection of very talented guest bloggers to cover the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of our visiting poets who present at the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Michael Klein for Word for Word Poetry, May 28, 2013
featuring Canadian poets and writers from Tightrope Books

The rain moved the Word for Word Poetry series indoors on May 29th, to the wonderful library at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, which also hosts the Small Press Book Fair every year.  It was an evening of Canadian poetry and celebration of Tightrope Books.

Sue Goyette read first and, probably more than any other Canadian on the program, talked a lot about Canada.  Most of what Ms. Goyette read were poems of place – what one feels about place and how a place is perceived by people who don’t necessarily live there.   She told a wonderful story about living in Halifax, Nova Scotia where all the downhill roads lead to the ocean and if you’re on a bike you need to make sure the brakes are working well so you don’t  bike down and get taken by the sea.

Aside from being a good storyteller,  Ms. Goyette was also a wonderful reader and began with her poem “The Canadian Apology” – about the somewhat silly ways Canada is perceived by outsiders (perhaps most humorously expressed by the line:  “We’re sorry one of us invented frozen fish filets”).  But the poem was – like most humorous poems – also deeply felt  moved from humor to quiet wonder all in the same key:  “We’re even sorry for feeling a little lucky”.  The poet also spoke of both the pleasurable and the overwhelming experience of editing this year’s Best Canadian Poetry anthology – a series helmed by Molly Peacock, who also read.

Nyla Matuk read next and the poems were of such density and of wild invention that I couldn’t write any of the lines down fast enough and be certain I was listening accurately – a strange sensation, to be sure.  Her poems are kalidoscopic and, like Ashbery, I suppose come with the instructions on how to read them.  By that I mean, don’t look for complete sense or logic here – but a flagrant, irreverent  and somewhat intense foray into both language’s associational power and how sound gives the poem its sense.

“Like a crest falling in a foghorn” she begins one poem – and that one phrase, in a way, describes the feeling I had listening to all the poems Ms. Matuk gave us.  We also learned that she hates spring because of a wicked case of hay fever and that she is somewhat obsessed with the character of Don Draper from television’s “Mad Men” whom she managed to put into two poems.  I also learned that she is someone driven by language so completely that you need to just trust you’ll be able to leave the deep and surrealistic woods she’s taken you into.  All she can tell us, as she does in her last poem of the evening, “Theory”  is:   get to the truth by crossing the bridge.

Jim Nason, the evening’s third reader, started by saying the poems were new and he’d never read them out loud – but felt compelled to which, of course, was our great gain.   Mr. Nason began with “Shroud”, a poem about 9/11 which was more multi-dimensional than most poems written about 9/11 (no towers or planes here; instead, the speaker looks into a pit and sees:  “a desk, a ring, a ring finger?” and later the great line:  “as if God mistook Manhattan for a cluttered table.”)  But the poem’s competing  focus is fixed on the fireman who becomes a guide to hell as much as – could he be, a love interest? – he is a kind of beacon leading the speaker of the poem out of the wreck.  The poem ends with this searching line delivered to the fireman: “What could have possessed him to show me what he’d seen.”

Nason also read a fine poem about Frederico Garcia Lorca recognizing and reveling and, at times, identifying with Lorca’s homosexuality.  And, in another poem which continued a kind of leitmotif about gay life and its complexity, Nason ended his reading with a touching poem about being in a relationship with a married man.  The lie, he called it.

Elise Partridge read three poems (everybody did).  One of the poems was about an old stove that a kindly old man fixed and just wanted, as payment, two loaves baked in it.  The second poem was about a snake eating a frog.  The snake was drawn, beautifully, as “a drowsy magistrate hearing a plea”.  The last poem was about blurry vision – and the quiet sense of trauma that strikes all of us in our 40’s or ‘50’s when we can’t see the world as clearly as we used to see the world – a poem about “wanting to see everything!”  Partridge firmly reminded us before reading what she had written.  “Are you too dim for the world to keep courting” she asks at the end.

Partridge revels in the everyday the way a poet like Matuk, for instance, revels in the complete opposite – the other-worldly – which is another revelation that made this evening so interesting.  Each one of the poets, I would have to say, had completely different concerns and all of them read the work that best represented those concerns.

Molly Peacock reads poetry out loud unlike anyone you’re ever likely to hear.  Each line is so carefully measured for nuance that one senses in this very forthright and original style of reading that some poems are literally a sum of their parts and we hear as she reads her almost building them before us.  Almost theatrical in her presentation of the work – but reined in just a bit (for humility?) – Peacock read three wonderful new poems from the manuscript she has just finished about having a therapist and being in therapy which, for her, is a kind of being in love.  Peacock was also, to my mind, the real laureate of the group – a Canadian transplant (she lived for years in New York City before moving to Toronto) – having established a literary reputation in the U.S. as well as Canada.

Her poems are funny – if nothing else – but also completely original, spare and deeply moving.  Her first poem, “Paid Love” (wonderful title), had to do with the give and take in therapy and the sense of the diminishing lines which identify that relationship over time.  “Minds have bones” she says in the poem and one realizes in hearing Peacock’s work that she is as finely attuned to the idea that the ephemeral has a kind of physical shape to it.

The last poem she read, “The Last Time” was a short and funny lament about breaking up with someone on a rainy, rainy, day.  “I threw off my sodden coat off for the last time” finishes the poem in a grand gesture which also describes the way Peacock comes through in her own work:  dramatic, ironic and very wise.

Moez Surani – the most elliptical of the six poets that read – writes lovely short poems most about traveling the world and taking in as truthfully as possible what makes South Korea or Latvia or any number of places intimate.  The poems are personal and surprising and feel, in a way, like prayers being asked or being answered.

In one lovely poem, “Near the Pagoda” he writes about South Korea and a temple there where people believe that reincarnation happens in clusters – i.e., a father could be a brother in the next life and so on.  In “Near the Pagoda”, Surani writes, “Everything of me was different” and later… “… and with all my selves, call you mother, sister, wife, daughter.”

The poems are simple – most of the poems of the evening came across this way – and striking – with slight and satisfying surprises along the way – the most surprising in Mr. Surani’s last poem, “It All Keeps” which began “There are bells under your shirt”.

Michael Klein's last book of poems, "then, we were still living" was a Lambda Literary Finalist and his first book, "1990" tied with James Schuyler to win the award in 1993. His new book of poems, "The Talking Day" was published in January, 2013. Recent work appears in Tin House, Ploughshares, Los Angeles Book Review and the Ocean State Review. He lives in New York City.

Word for Word Poetry with Hanging Loose Press

We have a collection of very talented guest bloggers to cover the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of our visiting poets who present at the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Michael Klein for Word for Word Poetry, May 21, 2013
featuring writers published by Hanging Loose Press

It was a beautiful, warm and windy summer-like evening for the second Word for Word Poetry reading in Bryant Park and four New York institutions took to the podium:  Elizabeth Swados, Robert Hershon, Joan Larkin and Charles North. All the writers have had books published by Hanging Loose Press which is, in itself, a New York institution, founded in 1966 by Mr. Hershon.

Elizabeth Swados, who read first, said that her poems “come out of the sky”  (an affirmation, I imagine, that may have to do with the fact that she is known mostly for her work in the theatre).   Or maybe it was because the poems she read were not from her first and only book of poems, The One and Only Human Galaxy which is, ostensibly, a book of related poems about the life of Harry Houdini.  She read, we have to assume, all new poems – the first of which (“The Contest”)  was a free-associational rant about the emotionally tilted, bi-polar and manic depressives put on parade to rule what has become the “reality” culture – those people in trouble, that much of television and the print media can’t stop talking about.  Swados is exasperated by it all:  “The Anorexics are publishing more books!” she laments mid-way through the poem and she ends “The Contest” with the news that the most popular game show on television is one in which the loser shoots himself.

While that first poem is, in a way, breezy and hyperbolic, it also serves as a key to Swados’s larger concerns as a writer which have always been about community and politics – where the two happen to intersect and where the two exclude people.  The poems she read were immediately accessible, humorous and irreverent (I am certain that there was not one poem that didn’t have a variation of “fuck” in it), but they were also concrete statements about how the world misrepresents us, fails us.

She’s hopeful about animals, though – but, even then, there’s some regret.  One poem about a trip to an animal reserve and not seeing the animals that had been advertised in the brochure ends with Swados in her car, humorously acknowledging that the animals (in hiding?) didn’t know who somebody named Liz Swados was, either.

Quirky, anecdotal and reminiscent of other great prose poets Russell Edson and James Tate, Robert Hershon was a complete delight – deck-shoe comfortable in front of an audience and tender hearted with the way he read his poems – many of which were in some way about getting older (“I write old and decrepit poems”), or about forgetting things, which is also about getting older:

“Mary Astor was a movie star Eddie Kranepool played first.
First what? Walter Lippmann wrote a column. Where to draw the line?
Franklin Roosevelt was a president of the United States. Faulkner wrote
Books. Honey, you look just like Veronica Lake. No, that's a person,
not a place.”  -- “The Death of Reference”

Hershon is self-deprecating and doesn’t take anything too seriously except, perhaps, the literary establishment of which he is an integral but skeptical part.  He is refreshingly anti-poetry-establishment (recounting the horror he felt while attending the recent AWP Conference in Boston) and you could sense a longing (and you could sense the same longing in everyone who read this particular night) to be back in another New York moment when poets like Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler and other poets/New Yorkers were lighting up the scene.

Joan Larkin is, in my mind, one of the great – the way Akhmatova or Jane Kenyon or Jean Valentine are great – poets of our time.  Her poems are direct, brief and quietly shattering and almost always double-sided:  one thing sets off another thing; memory, itself, expands into a kind of volatile expression of what it means to be alive in the present moment.  In her simple – even, at times ambiguous language – she is always tracking an abiding consciousness that is as critical as it is loving:

“I’m older than my father when he turned
bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver
in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain.  I don’t
believe in the afterlife, don’t know where he is
now that his flesh has finished rotting from his long
bones in the Jewish Cemetery ….”  from “Afterlife”

Larkin read from her new book, “My Body,” a volume of new and collected poems, as well as some newer work and her last poem she read began as eloquently and mysteriously as any poem of hers that I’ve ever encountered:

“Before I saw him
I felt his blind cane digging
for purchase in my chest.  I
was the road.  Rocks, gnarled roots,
sudden hissing.  I was the town
on the mountain, not drug sleep
in a fifth-floor walk-up….”

My friend, Chris, has a favorite joke he made up:  In the parallel version of earth, everything is just like this one, except that in very fancy restaurants, the waiter brings you a silver tray at the end of every meal on which someone has placed a pair of red wax lips.  Charles North writes poetry that reminds me of this kind of joke.  It all has a logic, but it’s all mixed up.  North, who collaborated with the great James Schuyler and who called North “the most stimulating poet of his generation” was also the most experimental writer on the program – by which I mean, he puts words down for the way they sound together as much as for what they mean together.  North – in an always brave gesture – only read one (but long) poem:  the wonderfully titled, “Day After Day the Storm Mounted.  Then it Dismounted” – which, even though it sounds like the title of a composition by Steve Reich – actually came to North when he overheard it coming from the next room (a Woody Woodpecker cartoon his son was watching).

The poem begins, “Suppose I am not the uplifter of all I have lift, in the same sense that the coal black sky stumbled and showing a few red streaks, doesn’t exactly equal space.  The air is thick.  Now, it swirls.  It isn’t air.”  Nobody sounds like this and North proceeds with a kind of kaleidoscopic array of found objects, lopsided aphorisms, and a phantasmagorical explanation for life in general.  But, make no mistake, North is really playing – and playing with high stakes – with language until it all sounds almost familiar but really is something completely new:

“Here you are a highly educated person:  hands, feet, chin, everything.  One morning, out of the blue a flock of wild turkeys ….”  He says in one poem.  Everything gets thrown into a North poem and because the imagination is open, even wildly open, anything can happen.

Here’s a list he made: 

“Beloved branch manager
Dear critic
Fragrant disciple
Esteemed concert mistress
Caring strip miner
Wondrous substantiator
Affectionate florist
Moving engineer”.

North is also a dry, but compelling reader – professorial, in a way – but, mad professorial, delivering a lecture from a seemingly parallel universe, just left of this one.



Michael Klein's last book of poems, "then, we were still living" was a Lambda Literary Finalist and his first book, "1990" tied with James Schuyler to win the award in 1993. His new book of poems, "The Talking Day" was published in January, 2013. Recent work appears in Tin House, Ploughshares, Los Angeles Book Review and the Ocean State Review. He lives in New York City.

Word for Word Poetry 2013 Kickoff

We have a collection of very talented guest bloggers to cover the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of our visiting poets who present at the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Anne Lovering Rounds for Word for Word Poetry, May 14, 2013


Tuesday, May 14, a crisp spring evening, saw the start of the park’s Word for Word Poetry Poetry series. Opening night featured Alex Dimitrov, Monica Ferrell, and Brenda Shaughnessy, three acclaimed poets who noted they were honored to be reading in the park and to be performing together.

Alex Dimitrov inaugurated this year’s series by reading from his debut collection, Begging For It. As he put it, he tends toward “quiet” “broken love poems,” although in the outdoor space of the Reading Room, he specifically sought out “louder” work. If Dimitrov’s poems are loud, it’s in the way they condense desire, in lines like “we start and stall, / and all all all we do / is want” (“This Is A Personal Poem”). About the poet Frank O’Hara, Dan Chiasson has spoken of the elegiac strain underlying the poet’s work, as if parties full of friends could end any time; as if any hookup could become a breakup. Dimitrov raises these stakes, starting from the broken moment—“After every needle finds its way inside me” (“America, You Darling”)—and exploring it for potential pleasure: “A mosquito presses into my skin / with such cruelty I mistake it for love” (“Sensualism”). In a timely expression of the seductive power of terminal interaction, Dimitrov shared “Self-Portrait as Daisy in The Great Gatsby”: “I wait for everyone to leave the party,” the poem says, darkly confident that the end of party will be climactic in its own right.  

Monica Ferrell followed this first set with poetry of surreal spaces. In “The Date,” she mused, “This time we’ll come gloved and blindfolded. We’ll arrive on time, with bees in our hair, with an escort of expiring swans… This time…This time…” The mood turned tongue-in-cheek when she read “Oh You Absolute Darling,” which catalogued the at once cliche, humorous, and bizarre utterances of an ex: “You are sexier than anyone I’ve ever met”; “Dear gypsy-themed Barbie doll”; “If your waist were any smaller, you wouldn’t exist.” The poems Ferrell read had complexity of texture in common—even the familiar, annoying “drip, drip, drip” of a bathroom faucet took on a hypnotic, sinister quality in “Days of Oakland,” as “copters’ dilated eyes” shone into the poet’s apartment. Ferrell’s diction covers an amazing range (from “drip, drip, drip” to the sigh, “Ah, invalid,” in “Beautiful Funeral”), and her poems operate on fascination with and transformation of the environments they observe.  

The final reader of the night, Brenda Shaughnessy, offered a last take on longing and possibility. Reading from her most recent book, Our Andromeda, she dwelled on questions of potential relationship, potential versions and reinventions of the self. “Did you receive my invitation?” the poem “Visitor” asks, twice. In “I Wish I Had More Sisters,” “My sisters will seem like a bunch / of alternate me, all the ways / I could have gone…/ …But who could say they weren’t / myself, we are so close. I mean, / who can tell the difference?” Like the only-half-fantasies and alternative reflections her poems imagine, Shaughnessy’s tone is both playful and haunting: “Heart, what art you? / War, star, part?” she asked in “Artless.” Alex Dimitrov began the reading with the landscapes of breakup; Shaughnessy left us with fantastical proposals for rearranging the pieces.  

Anne Lovering Rounds is Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. 

From the Reading Room to Capital Hill

Next Monday, January 21, Richard Blanco will stand in front of the nation to deliver an inaugural poem honoring President Barack Obama, as he is sworn in at the 57th inaugural ceremonies. Only a few months ago, poet Richard Blanco stood on a stage of a very different kind as part of Word for Word Poetry in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

President Obama chose Richard Blanco as his inaugural poet because his “deeply personal poems are rooted in the idea of what it means to be an American.” (NYTimes) After next Monday, Richard Blanco will join the ranks of past inaugural poets, Maya Angelou and Robert Frost. Get a sense of his style with a video clip from his reading in the park.

Word for Word Poetry with Red Hen Press

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Amanda O'Connor for Word for Word Poetry, August 21, 2012
Featuring the poets of Red Hen Press

A deep purple dusk drew over the American Radiator Building as Camille Dungy walked up to the podium in the Bryant Park Reading Room.  As night approached—a moody night, the promise of a storm—she opened with a poem from her latest collection, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) entitled “Out of the Darkness.” Dungy uses practically every connotation of darkness I can think of, contemplating the word, inverting it, and unfolding its many meanings.  She anthropomorphizes darkness:  both skin color and inner-nature, ignorance and the expanse of outer space.  Darkness is at war with itself, she writes “some of the darkness got away from the darkness.”  Within it, though, there is a star.

“Out of the Darkness” framed the many poems Dungy read.  Out of the darkness, she moved across the country (leaving a stack of unpaid parking tickets behind).  Out of the darkness, a 16-year-old girl explores her sexuality.  Out of the darkness, a woman becomes a mother.  Dungy also read a short elegy for Adrienne Rich, considering her arthritis and the even more painful inequalities around the world.  It reminded us of how much there is to celebrate, and still left overcome.  Dungy ended her reading on a note of celebration, feeling the heat of summer, the sensuality of eating.  Threaded through each of her poems is a fierce love of life that left the crowd warm and joyous.

Word for Word Poetry with Blue Flower Arts

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Jason Schneiderman for Word for Word Poetry, July 24, 2012
Featuring the poets of Blue Flower Arts

Gerald Stern & Galway Kinnell are such celebrated fixtures of American Poetry that they hardly need an introduction. Kinnell’s Selected Poems won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and he has received a long list of awards and honors. Stern has a similarly long list of publications and awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. Both born in the 1920’s, these elder statesmen of American poetry continue to write and publish with remarkable energy and vibrancy. The Bryant Park Reading Room was filled to capacity with loyal fans, many of whom had been following their poetry for decades.

Kinnell’s poems focused on nature and love. He opened with “Astonishment,” a poem that recently appeared in the New Yorker. The poem makes observations about the human condition while reflecting on the natural world:

 A woodpecker, double-knocking,
keeps time. I have slept in so many arms.
Consolation? Probably. But too much
consolation my leave one inconsolable.

Kinnell’s voice is at once soothing and engaging, bringing the listener into a kind of trance as he meanders through the wilderness, through love, and through observation. Kinnell inhabits both the voices of animals and of men who live in close proximity to those animals. He conjures a kind of primal truth. Kinnell read with very little explanation or embellishment, allowing the poems to speak for themselves.

Stern read from two new collections—one a collection of prose, and the other a collection of poetry. Stern is an avuncular charmer. After he opened with a piece of prose, he welcomed a friend in the audience whom he hadn’t seen when he started reading. He added, “Had I known you were coming, I would have read that section.” Stern’s poems are both wise and wise-cracking, full of wry humor and patient knowledge. His sentences often wrap across a whole poem. He read love poem, “Counting,” he describes the beginning of a relationship. The poem ends:

…I climbed into your car and two weeks later
though neither of us gave it a thought we walked
across the street for breakfast where there was an ocean
nearby and that’s the morning we started counting.

Stern ended with a set of short love poems from his newest book In Beauty Bright. Stern had received the books that day, so this reading marked the entry of his new book into the world.

At the end of the evening, the bookseller did a brisk business, and Stern and Kinnell were occupied signing books for quite a while. It was a beautiful summer evening, and we lingered in the shade.


Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point (Four Way Books) and Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Grand Street, Bloom, Court Green, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Story Quarterly, the Virginia Quarterly Review and Tin House among other publications. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from The Poetry Society in 2004. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, he is currently completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Word for Word Poetry with Poets and Writers

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Anne Lovering Rounds for Word for Word Poetry, July 17, 2012
Featuring the poets of Poets and Writers

Prefacing her first poem for the Word for Word poetry series on Tuesday, July 17, Tina Chang told the crowd she had “tried really really hard” not to write a poem about Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old Hasidic Jewish boy murdered in Brooklyn a year ago this July. But she found that she had to, she said. Chang didn’t feel compelled to treat the horrific details; instead she wrote “Milk,” a tender poem that meditated on the title word, on “milk trousers,” a “milky life,” and that wished for childhood rewritten, a world in which “this version [could] be true.” By beginning with “Milk,” Chang set the tone for an evening showcasing the insistent power of surprising inspirations: the sometimes strange-seeming (even to the poets!) images and scenes that become expressions of desire, yearning, need.

For Chang, for instance, the Empress Dowager of China became a figure through which she could voice post-9/11 powerlessness  (“Empress Dowager Boogies,” “Self-Portrait as Empress Dowager”); the poem “Praise,” written “for Haiti” in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, came from a request she received to write a poem for Brooklyn after she became the borough’s poet laureate. We don’t always get to choose what must be written about, Chang suggested. But by the same token, in “Praise,” weeping can give way to “something that sounded like celebration”; or, as in “Love,” intimacy can be haunting, a family secret, but can also manifest itself in the “pale fleshy bead” of a peeled grape. Maybe Brooklyn can be vested in Haiti, tragedy in tenderness, love in the flesh of fruit.

Word for Word Poetry with Spiritual Poets

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Anne Lovering Rounds for Word for Word Poetry, July 10, 2012
Featuring spiritual poets

Rachel Snyder and Robert Cording, the two poets reading in the Word for Word poetry series on Tuesday, July 10, were a study in counterpoint. These two writers (three were slated originally: Emanuel Xavier, we missed you!) allowed us to hear the profoundly different ways poetry takes on life’s big questions and range of emotional experience. How do we practice forgiveness? Is faith worth it? What happens in and after death? Admitting to an identity as a spiritual or metaphysical poet is risky business; Snyder and Cording showed us both the risk and the reward.

Rachel Snyder practices a doctrine of fearlessness. A self-taught poet, she is mesmerized by the way words seem to take on a life of their own; as she put it, she strives to “be the instrument” for expression. Her willingness to acknowledge and to submit to the power of language comes across in the litany-like form of her long, intentionally inspirational poems, in the way she returns to such phrases as “Forgive me” (“Prayer for Radical Forgiveness”), “It’s that easy,” or “I will” (“Now for the Unbound”).  Written in defiance of self-consciousness, Snyder’s prayerful poems were big, bold, and outright.

If Snyder’s poems live large, Robert Cording’s can start small. As apparent in the poems he selected, Cording’s gift is to take ephemera and passing thoughts—a moth, a chair—and persist in spinning them out, so that, almost without noticing, we end up in another world altogether, sometimes painful, always transformative. What would happen, he mused in “Parable of the Moth,” if there were a moth in your ear? Or why does grief make itself so sharply present in the form of a chair, left in the backyard, covered with snow? A dream vision, “The Chair” takes us from nondescript furniture to “my waking sense / of everything missed, and missing again”; “Last Things,” from the distractions of dust, afternoon sun, or a dog’s barking to “all of it / part of a world so hard to finish loving.”

Cording told us that he frequently finds himself compelled to write about death, as a way of trying to fathom the change he knows it must bring. But his last poem of the evening was, in fact, about joy. “1964,” a meditation on the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, starts as a family portrait of the age (parents on the couch, a TV set, Sullivan’s voice) and ends with the poet “shaking himself alive,” “armed with nothing more than joy and wonder.” I’d thought of elegy as the default mode of writing about the Beatles: Mary Jo Salter’s “John Lennon,” in which “The music was already turning sad, / those fresh-faced voices singing in a round, / the lie that time could set its needle back / and play from the beginning”; Valzhyna Mort’s lines in “maybe you too sometimes fantasize,” where “a boy from the neighborhood […] / says look even the Beatles die.” Maybe a poem like “1964” is itself not so far from these elegies. Even so, Cording can laugh at the scene as he remembers it, as if asking, “Was hearing, on TV, the yeah yeah yeahs of ‘She Loves You’ really something sublime? Even today, 40 years later, is that still worthy of celebration?” Yes, his poem tells us. Yes it was. And yes it is.      

Starting in August, Anne Lovering Rounds will be Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. She blogged previously for the Reading Room in summer 2010.

Word for Word Poetry with Letras Latinas

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Amanda O’Connor for Word for Word Poetry, June 26, 2012
Featuring the poets of Letras Latinas

The warm weather held well into the evening on the first Word for Word reading of summer.  In partnership with Letras Latinas, Bryant Park’s reading room was alive with bilingual poetry, dipping into performance, music, and even new media.  Under the shade of a tree canopy, excitement and energy burst from the night’s readers.

Aracelis Girmay opened the evening with a sweet work, “Ode to the Little R,” which is about the “little helicopter” rolled R in her name.  She describes an experience she often had growing up—and still experiences—of people mis-correcting the pronunciation of her own name.  That little rolled R between the two A’s is butchered, time and again, into a hard R.  More than a simple mispronunciation, though, it is a certain phrase that nagged her heart, “You mean Ar-a-cel-is,” as if she’d intended to say it like a real American, but her native tongue got in the way.  My heart truly sank as I listened to this poem.  I have about as much hope of rolling an R as an elephant riding a unicycle.  It’s as if my mouth is numb with Novocain.  An engine that won’t start.

Word for Word Poetry: An Emily Dickinson Program

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Jason Schneiderman for Word for Word Poetry, June 19, 2012
Featuring an Emily Dickinson Program

Word for Word’s tribute to Emily Dickinson pushed back against the idea of the beloved poet as the reclusive belle of Amherst, and instead presented the rapt audience with an active, engaged, and sensual Emily Dickinson.

The evening began and ended with lyric soprano Marsha Andrews performing song settings of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the accompaniment of Shirley Anne Seguin on the piano. The settings were remarkably varied, ranging from amusingly staccato to sweeping and dolorous. The music took different approaches to Dickinson’s work, sometimes letting the syntax of the poems guide the music, while other times the music made the words hard to hear. The virtuosity of Andrew's singing filled the park with Dickinson's words, beautifully carried on her voice.

Daniela Gioseffi, a significant poet and Dickinson scholar, gave a rousing biographical sketch of Dickinson. She described the ways in which Dickinson had deep friendships and correspondences with many of the most important thinkers of her day, particularly with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson is often thought of as having kept Dickinson from publishing, but Gioseffi told the audience that he actually considered her a genius, and that the decision not to publish was Dickinson’s. Dickinson poetry engaged politics and current events, and Gioseffi pointed out the new developments in science and philosophy that influenced Dickinson.

Lee Briccetti focused on her personal connection to Dickinson’s poetry, particularly focusing on the Dickinson as a poet of trauma. Having lived blocks away from ground zero, Dickinson’s poems helped her in the wake of 9-11. Briccetti marveled at Dickinson’s understanding of trauma while taking comfort in it, and being led forward to write her own poems. Briccetti stressed the idea of being an amateur (rather than a scholarly or professional) lover of Dickinson, emphasizing the root of “amateur” being love.





The readers and performers put themselves in conversation with Dickinson. The poets read both Dickinson’s poems and their own poems inspired by Dickinson. We heard Dickinson poems that were by turns funny, elegiac, clever, mournful, and ecstatic. Susan Howe famously titled her exploration of Dickinson’s work My Emily Dickinson. Tonight we saw many Emily Dickinsons, and all of them were stunning.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point (Four Way Books) and Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Grand Street, Bloom, Court Green, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Story Quarterly, the Virginia Quarterly Review and Tin House among other publications. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from The Poetry Society in 2004. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, he is currently completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Word for Word Poetry with Cavan Kerry Press

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.


Amanda O’Connor on Word for Word Poetry, June 12, 2012
Featuring the poets of Cavan Kerry Press

While Tuesday’s rain showers may have kept some poetry lovers homebound, the dedicated and proud gathered in a warm, dry conference room 24-stories above Bryant Park.  With a direct view of the Chrysler building behind the poets, each transported us miles away of New York.  Carole Stone put it well, remarking, “Phillip Levine has Detroit, I have Newark.”  It seems that the same could be said of Paola Corso’s Pittsburgh and Kevin Carey’s Boston.  Regionalism was alive in the Bryant Park Reading Room.

Carole Stone opened the evening with poems from her latest collection American Rhapsody (CavanKerry Press, March 2012).  The cover photo’s amber glow of a mostly-drunk whiskey bottle begs the question, who drank all the liquor?  Stone wastes no time letting us know it was her father and mother.  The collection is an elegy for her parents who were once hopped up on bootlegged, bathtub booze and hot jazz.  Stone adeptly describes scenes she only could have imagined, from Josephine Baker to bars where the patrons smoke fat Cuban cigars.  She describes an exhilarating, perhaps even dangerous life.  The underbelly of these poems, though, is the life her parents left her, one that is sad and confused.  “English-American Duet” strikes this dichotomy well, noting poverty and corruption, money and middle class.  Between the highs and lows, Stone finds W.H. Auden.  At the end of the poem, the speaker remarks that she’s found her poets, “pastoral all,” which have provided a salvation. The collection is filled with wonderfully narrative work that blends Stone’s own experiences as an orphan with the dreams of who her parents were.  Really, we can only see as much as she does in the eyes of an old picture of her father.  “Black Dress” is a wonderful poem, breathing light and insight into the collection.  It begins with the speaker asking if she can give her black dress, the one she wore to her uncle’s funeral, to goodwill.  My heart sank as she confessed that no one at the funeral acknowledged that this man raised her as a daughter.  In the last lines, we learn that the poem was triggered by a Proustian memory, a lozenge in the pocket of another black dress reminded her of candies he ate.  The shifts between present and memories, memories imagined and experienced, are tightly controlled in form poetry, including a sestina and a lovely villanelle.  I have to admit, the simple rhyme of “rye” and “goodbye” still makes me tingle like a martini on my lips.

Word for Word Poetry with Barrow Street Press

We have the help of some very special guest bloggers at the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of the talented poets who present in the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC .

Amanda O’Connor on Word for Word Poetry, May 22, 2012
Featuring the poets of Barrow Street Press

Last Tuesday marked the first installment of the ninth annual Bryant Park Summer Reading Series, sponsored by Barrow Street Press and University of Pittsburgh Press.  After the week’s thundershowers, the air was thick with humidity and the smell of wet grass.  The audience was unfathomable — friends of the poets, lovers of poetry, curious passersby, chess players within earshot, businessmen rushing with briefcases, children cart-wheeling on the lawn, fathers, and of course tourists.  Unlike so many poetry readings huddled in the back of bookshops, the Bryant Park Reading Room is especially enticing to those who weren’t planning to attend at all.  One audience member admitted that he’d never read a poem before coming to this reading.  Listening to contemporary poetry between the sounds of 42nd Street traffic is one of New York’s lingering romances, whether you are a connoisseur or a first-timer.

Lesley Wheeler opened the evening, reading from her latest collection, Heterotopia (Barrow Street Press, 2010).  The collection imagines her mother’s childhood in Liverpool during the Blitz. The poems, many of which are written from the perspective of her mother as a young woman, express more than fantasies and daydreams.  On one hand, Liverpool seems more like home than the poet’s native New Jersey; it is her birthright.  On the other hand, the darkness of the Blitz hangs heavily over her mother’s childhood.  The complexity of these second-hand memories is as twisted and entwined as the internal rhyme.  Wheeler puts us into those rooms, take us to the middle of a conversation even she never had.  It becomes clear that Wheeler’s sense of identity is tied so closely to a life she never lived, a place she cannot ever go.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They'll attend each Poetry event, and provide a first-hand account of the talented poets' readings. Take their word for it, or experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 6, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.

Mary Austin Speaker on Word for Word Poetry, June 28, 2011

On Tuesday, June 28, four days following the New York Senate's decision to legalize same-sex marriage, three poets came together in Bryant Park to read their work, offering a perspective on gay life both sobering and hopeful. Only one mention was made of the historic decision— but we are at a point in history when the legality of marriage is only the newest, most formal part of the lives of gay men and women. Tuesday's reading portrayed a rich, volatile, deeply complex existence— one that took us from the personal drama of publicizing one's sexual preferences to the specter of the AIDS crisis.

As the scaffolds rattled with drills across Fifth avenue, as the citizens and tourists went about finishing up their days as though nothing was any different (how very like New Yorkers), Paul Romero opened the evening with a quote from Paul Engle: "Poetry is ordinary language to the nth power." And with that, Francisco Aragon took the stage. Francisco Aragon is the director of Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, editor of Contra Cosas (a Latino book series) and the author of the poetry collections, The Glow of Our Sweat and Puerta del Sol. Francisco began by offering a shout-out to Macondo, the socially-engaged writers workshop in San Antonio founded by Sandra Cisneros that works to serve underrepresented communities. "Viva Macondo!," he began, and then offered a poem, "Bridge Over Strawberry Creek," from his first collection, Puerto del Sol.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They'll attend each Poetry event, and provide a first-hand account of the talented poets' readings. Take their word for it, or experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 6, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.

Justin Petropoulos on Word for Word Poetry, June 21, 2011
Featuring the poets from Blue Flower Arts

It was a balmy evening in Bryant Park.  The movie screen on the lawn, half drawn, like horizontal Venetian blinds, sun as if shot through smoke, settling between the buildings. The persistent rumble of jackhammers and people on their way to or from.  Chess players flocked around the tables just behind the statue of William Earl Dodge.  Paul Romero made a few quick announcements and introduced Ofer Ziv, the Senior Speakers Representative, from Blue Flower Arts, an organization that represents writers of all genres and is committed to fostering U.S. and International authors.  Ofer introduced Blue Flower Arts to the audience and then introduced all three readers in order of their appearance.

Sophie Cabot Black opened the evenings proceeding, situating herself on the stool behind the podium.  She matched the microphone to her posture, her silver and turquoise rings spooling the threads of sun fraying though the leaves.  Sophie began by talking about the poems from her latest collection, The Exchange, which contains cycles of poems dedicated to love poems, war and the economic downturn, but she started with a cycle documenting her struggle watching a close friend in the process of dying. These poems really stuck with me, which I will confess, is strange because economics is one of my favorite subjects. She read four pieces, which shepherded the audience from diagnosis, through treatment, to the struggle, both speaker and friend have accepting death and finally the longing that comes with surviving someone we love.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They'll attend each Poetry event, and provide a first-hand account of the talented poets' readings. Take their word for it, or experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 6, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.

Mary Austin Speaker and Justin Petropoulos covered the first two evenings of Word for Word Poetry in the park, featuring Chris Martin, Joseph Lease and Elaine Equi of Coffee House Press on June 7, and the poets of CantoMundo on June 14: Diana Marie Delgado, Deborah Paredez and Carmen Tafolla.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. All summer long, they provided a behind-the-scenes look at each event and the talented poets who shared their work in the park. It's been a wonderful season of Word for Word Poetry at the Bryant Park Reading Room and we hope to see you at next year's series.

Mary Austin Speaker on Word for Word Poetry, September 14

The last reading of the summer. We New Yorkers (at least the secular ones) don't have enough ceremony in our lives. When the seasons change, we buy things, anticipate the drama of the coming season, and act surprised whenever the seasonal weather doesn't kick in ontime. Tuesday's reading at Bryant Park was the very thing to remind readers and audience members that literature is often the thing that ushers in the new season— and that it will outlast each and every one of those months that seem to alter us, in their small ways, with each passing year. The reading was dedicated to the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, a magnificent anthology which samples poems from almost 150 poets, spanning 500 years. Edited by the magical Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, the book comes in at 608 pages—a doorstop, complete with illustrations that trace the history of Latin American poetry from Precolumbian Mesoamerica to concrete poetries of the 18th century to Raul Zurita's skywriting of 1982.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at each event and divulge about the talented poets who share their work in the park. Join us tomorrow from 12:30pm to 2:00pm for the final Word for Word Poetry event of the season at the Bryant Park Reading Room.  


Mary Austin Speaker on Word for Word Poetry, September 7  

This Tuesday on a sunny, windswept afternoon, three poets from the venerable Cave Canem writers workshop shared their work with the audience at Bryant Park. Paul Romero started off the reading by acknowledging, with pride, the three years that Bryant Park has hosted Cave Canem poets. Jocelyn Burrell, Lorelei Williams and Monica A. Hand were introduced by Camille Rankine, programs coordinator for Cave Canem, who mentioned their upcoming participating in the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Jocelyn Burrell, who I'd had the pleasure of meeting at dinner following the Blue Flower Arts reading on June 15, gave the first reading of the afternoon. After editing "Word: on being a [woman] writer," a collection of essays by women authors from Sandra Cisneros to Barbara Kingsolver, Jocelyn is at work on her first manuscript of poems and read from a series called Duels, which she aptly described as "haunted by anxiety," a description that would inadvertently cover a great many of the poems we heard from all three readers, particularly the anxiety about identity, diaspora, the exotic, and the fraught relationship between mother and child.  The first of these was "What is Born," which examined the anxiety of diaspora, rhyming "what stands for the family" with "break into his gallery." The poem had a draggy, labored rhythm that spoke to the difficulty of contending with an identity that is as much mystery as it is tragedy, that is as championed as it is cast out— a favorite line: "Jefferson was a liar / Just like your father." The poem exuded a rough vulnerability that found its way into the following poems, such as "She Will Not," a poem that pried open the mythic gloss of a wedding day to discover the rift between the idea and practice of marriage. "Accounting for the Damage," written when its author was digesting the news of the earthquake in Haiti this year, had the terrifying effect of bringing the reader to the disturbing present of the disaster ("palms wander, bayonet the sky"), through its history as a supplier of raw goods to colonial powers, ("the murmur of sugar"), and then to the forgetful, notably abstract present ("the world already winding its watch and moving on without you"). A truly shattering poem that I will not soon forget. She ended her set with a nod to the changing of the seasons as we sloughed off the heat of August and looked toward the first days of fall. Persephone, to Demeter: "Summer, / I cherish your grief, long you / dead." (link: http://leximaven.wordpress.com/)

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at each event and divulge about the talented poets who share their work in the park. Experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 14, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.


Anne Lovering Rounds on Word for Word Poetry, August 31

Before any of the poets took the mike on Tuesday night for a program entitled “The Katrina Project,” Bryant Park’s own Paul Romero shared two poems: Patricia Smith’s “Siblings: Hurricaines 2005” and “Victoria Green (mother of four),” by Cynthia Hogue. Smith’s poem, an alphabetical litany of hurricane names and personifications (“Rita was a vicious flirt”), came to Katrina only in its last, haunting line: “None of them talked about Katrina. She was the blood dazzler.” The second poem, from Cynthia Hogue’s recently-published When the Water Came, is an “interview-poem” whose speaker recalls Katrina with both tough irony and pride of place. Together, this pair of poems set the stage for a night whose three readers would cross genre boundaries, blend tones, report, reveal, remember. This past week, many “Katrina five years after” events have been in the atmosphere and in the media. The Katrina Project was not such a marking of anniversary, as if to celebrate; but nor was it all about anger; nor was it all about lament. What emerged from the three voices in this project—Nicole Cooley, Tonya Foster, and Yusef Komunyakaa— was power of poetry to intertwine creation, observation, and remembrance.

The first poem Nicole Cooley read, “September Notebook,” immediately connected New York and New Orleans. At points, the poem put the two seasons of 9/11 and Katrina, and the two cities Cooley calls home, into mythical perspective, terms that transcended circumstance: “Once upon a time there were two Septembers in two cities: / the one of the towers on fire / and the one of floodwaters rising.” At the same time, Cooley’s takes on both events were always personal; the fire and the flood came across in memories of her child’s hair, a family phone conversation: “The sharp smell threaded through / my daughter’s hair for days”; “I / was on the phone with my parents, begging them to leave the city.” Throughout, “September Notebook” maintained this balance between talking small (“I hold my daughter on my lap”) and talking big (“I’d like to sit with her, Our Lady of the Breach”; “I’d like to force the floodwaters down her throat”). Throughout, Cooley’s poems reflected the reach of disaster by calling out intimate details and individual memories, carefully listing the objects of land- and cityscape, then letting these portraits speak for themselves. In “Debris,” for example, she turned her eye to the stratigraphy of rubble in New Orleans: “The face of a metal fan”; “A front door”; “A sign: do not destroy”; “A refrigerator spray painted Help Me Jesus”; “A sign: we’re coming home.” In “Write a Love Note to Camellia Grill,” she catalogued messages on post-it notes that covered the iconic diner of New Orleans when it closed: “Dear street car”; “Dear neutral ground”; “I will stay hungry forever.” A poem written along Highway 90, Hurricane Alley, described a “new lexicon” in “The spray painted X”; “The house marked O”; “Missing a whole story.” By noticing that lexicon of destruction and naming its features in her poetry, Cooley suggests the stories that are missing, that we may otherwise have missed.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at each event and divulge about the talented poets who share their work in the park. Experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 14, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.


Anne Lovering Rounds on Word for Word Poetry, August 24

Who would have known it was summer? Last Tuesday, audiences braved a cool and blustery night in the park, gathering to hear four exceptional poets. Their poems of place, as organizer Tess Taylor called the work on the evening’s agenda, went far beyond the city, though in the end we were called back to Manhattan. Each of these poets engaged in questions of travel: literal journeys and metaphysical, explorations without and within.

Sean Hill read first, starting with poems from his 2008 book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press). The title alone is a clue to the way Hill writes colors—of urban environment, of nature, of skin—into his poetry. The poems in Blood Ties are set in Hill’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but to call them “historical” isn’t enough to capture their sensuousness. Listen to the ways the speaker multiplies the implications of “McIntosh Street,” a black business district: “like the apple red but not / red delicious red but red / like redeye gravy on grits / at Gus’s or red like stoplights / but they’re also green and yellow / like apples in Allen’s Market…” Hill takes what seems ordinary (a red apple) and carefully and consistently adds to the palette; different reds thicken the world. Again and again, shades and particular colors defined the spaces of these poems: “Ivory soap,” “graying water,” and “colored soldiers cross[ing] the slate ocean” in “Auspice”; the “yellow sunshine on a white plate,” a breakfast in “Uncle John”; hands the “black-brown / of crossties— / creosote soaked” in “Hands 1921.” Hill currently lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, a place he called “very white,” both in its harsh winters and in its racial makeup. His final poem, “Sam Kee, I imagine…” envisioned the life of an opium dealer, put on trial and acquitted in Bemidji, “left / in peace to make a living getting / their sheets as white as snow.” From jade green to blood red to snow white, Hill’s colors are gorgeous, intricate, painful; they are the hinges on which his poems turn, observing landscape, working out identity.