Star Black (pictured here with Michael Quattrone) will be the featured guest at a poetry forum at the New School on Wednesday, 19 October. It promises to be a great event.
Star has done exceptional things with the sonnet form that have led critics to link her to Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer among other celebrated modern practitioners. John Ashbery has written,"Like a set of études, Star Black's sonnets ...fluently and gracefully, chart the amazing course of the quotidian." Star Black is also an acclaimed collagist, who has enjoyed a number of one-woman shows and been included in important group exhibitions of poets who are also visual artists.
In February 1997 Star Black and I initiated the Monday night KGB Bar poetry reading series. She and I were co-directors of the series for its first seven years and co-editors of The KGB Bar Book of Poems.
Star's books of sonnets include Balefire (Painted Leaf Press) and Ghostwood (Melville House) She is the author also of Double Time (a book of double sestinas), Waterworn, and October for Idas. She has collaborated with the poet Bill Knott on a book of poems and collages, Stigmata Errata Etcetera (Saturnalia Books, 2007). The forum is in room 510 of 66 West 12 Street. It will begin at 6:30 PM. -- DL
For four recent poems by Star Black, each consisting of four quatrains, click here. Black's sonnet "Twilit" appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of The Paris Review. Here is one of Star Black's sonnets from Balefire:
Idyll
Are, as Kingsley Amis said, women much nicer
than men? Well, I am, I'm much nicer than you,
rat fink, plunderer, at least, in this mooing
prophesy, I am supposed to be. You said, not I,
you talk about women all the time, how nice
they are, how much you hate their guts, their
nice guts, how much you'd wish they'd just shut
up and lie down, quit frazzling the equilibrium
with disarming questions when, lo, the made
bed may be unmade, maidly. But, deep down,
you know I'm nice. You wouldn't want me for
a wife, but I'm still nice, right? a homebody
type, one prays, will marry someone else and
be happy. Oh lord, alas, I pass, yet, yet, sadly.
