The Best American Poetry

"every day millions of people die for our sins" [by Dina Gatina]

every day millions of people die for our sins
so what

I won't say it twice

let in a little
intime

every day millions of people die for our sins
so what
you're repeating yourself
so what, so what

they die
- you're repeating yourself
- every day
repeat after me
and whatever

you are repeating yourself every day and whatever

die after me
every day
summer sales
repeat after me:

summer sales

shout it louder 

-- Dina Gatina (translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich]

On Monday, October 15,at the midtown branch of the New York Public Library three young Russian poets read with three American counterparts at an event moderated by David Lehman. This is one of the poems read by Dina Gatina on that occasion. Gatina has won the prestigious Debut Prize for poetry in Russia.  For more information, here's a link to Causa Artium, one of the sponsors of the event.

Ashbery to read at the New School: Saturday, December 8, 7 PM

Quick question: where and when will John Ashbery read from his new book? The short answer is the New School's Tishman Auditorium at 66 West 12 Street in New York City on Saturday evening December 8, 2012, at 7 PM.

John Ashbery, "the grand master and universal genius of American poetry, now eighty-five" (P. Brunst) will read from his brand-new collection, Quick Question, in the Tishman Auditorium of the New School on Saturday, December 8, at 7 PM. A dialogue between the poet and David Lehman, poetry coordinator of the School of Writing, will follow the reading.

John Ashbery has won nearly every major American award for poetry -- and numerous honors in foreign lands. A Wave (1984) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, he Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. The title of Officier de la Legion d'honneur was conferred on him by the French government in 2002. His other books include Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), April Galleons (1987), Flow Chart (1991), Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), Girls on the Run (1999), Your Name Here (2000), As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001)  Chinese Whispers (2002), Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007). and Planisphere (2009). He has also published Three Plays (1978), Reported Sightings (a selection of his art criticism) (1989),Other Traditions (revised versions of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1989 and 1990, and Selected Prose (2004). In 1988 Ashbery edited the inaugural volume in The Best American Poetry series. The evening will be introduced by Robert Polito, director of the School of Writing, with faculty member Tom Healy.

Here's a very brief Ashbery sampler:

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing. -- from Three Poems

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.  -- from "Just Walking Around"

"I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough."

So one can lose a good idea

by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides
it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations
are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does
recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.  -- from Flow Chart

" I feel that poems are going on all the time in my head and occasionally I snip off a length." 

I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors. 
My guide in these matters is your self,
Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same
Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon
Much later, I can know only the straight way out,
The distance between us. -- from "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

“I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.”

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here. -- "This Room"

"In the Promise of Catastrophe" by Alla Gorbunova [trans. John Narins]

there's a lingering moment when man and beast fall still
like the sun in the glass of skyscrapers, transfixed by the son of Nun.
atoms and molecules, viruses and amoebae,
as if waiting for the cards to fall: “believe... believe it not...”

the immobile moment hovers in the air before
the thunder rumbles, and that moment of slackening
before the catastrophe lasts for millennia
until the frail wick of hope goes out.

bodies perform impeded motions
as though under water, yearn for love and blood,
under a savagely clear sky, the final sky.

like fish on the sea-floor, doomed generations
are born and die already before the anger
in the promise of catastrophe.

 

в обещании катастрофы

есть долгий миг, когда замирают люди и звери,
как, остановленное Навином, солнце в стекле небоскрёбов.
атомы и молекулы, вирусы и амёбы
словно поставили в карты на «веришь – не веришь».

медленный миг повисает в воздухе прежде,
чем гром прогремит, и этот миг замедленья
пред катастрофой длится тысячелетья,
пока не погаснет чахлый фитиль надежды.

как под водой, замедленные движенья
совершают тела, жаждут любви и крови,
под небом жестоко ясным, последним небом.

как рыбы на дне, обречённые поколенья
успевают родиться и умереть до гнева,
в обещании катастрофы.

-- Alla Gorbunova [trans. John Narins]

This is one of the poems Ms. Gorbunova read at the "warm peace" reading celebrating young Russian and American poets. The reading took place oin October 15, 2012, at the midtown branch of the New York Public Library. Following the reading and discussion, the celebrants concluded the evening with navy grogs and vodka martinis at the Algonquin.

The Best American Poetry 2012 Draws a Crowd in California [by Stephanie Brown]

 

The crowd turns out for the Best American Poetry 2012 Launch at the Mill Valley, CA public library (photo by Mill Valley public library).

About 260 people reserved seats for The Best American Poetry 2012 West Coast Launch at the Mill Valley Public Library on November 8. 260 people! That's quite a turnout for a mid-week poetry reading. To accommodate the crowd, City Librarian Anji Brenner and library staff removed the periodical shelves and emptied the room to set up chairs facing a fireplace that was set into a white stucco Spanish-revival wall.  A fire roared. The ceilings soared. The big windows framed the pine-y outdoors of beautiful Marin County. 

 

Kay Ryan, left, at the West Coast Launch (photo by Mill Valley Public Library)

The 260 came to see and hear eight poets who were picked by guest editor Mark Doty for inclusion in this year’s volume of the annual anthology. The lineup of readers included heavy-hitters such as Rae Armantrout, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirschfield, and Kay Ryan along with Dean Rader and Amy Glynn Greacen, Bay Area poets with followings of their own.  Bruce Bond, originally from southern California like me, came in from Texas and I from Orange County. These particular poets have a way with a crowd— they're not just confident public speakers but the kind that can hold an audience in thrall. It was therefore a night of entertainment and emotional connection from beginning to end. The audience listened and responded with laughter, that “mmmm” sound of understanding, spontaneous applause, and later, kind words of thanks. I was in awe to be in such company, but found everyone to be so welcoming and warm that I did not feel nervous or out-of-place among these rock stars of the poetry world.

The format of the evening was to have each poet introduce the next by responding to his or her poem in the anthology instead of by reciting awards and bona fides. These responses were personal, respectful, and insightful.  Kay Ryan revealed her admiration for what Rae Armantrout leaves out of a poem as much as for what she keeps in; Brenda Hillman singled out the spiritual notes in Jane Hirshfield’s work. Dean Rader noted that he finds himself placed between Robert Pinsky and Kay Ryan in the anthology, and I think we all understood his trepidation introducing the great Kay Ryan, though he did so with humor and aplomb. This format for introductions, unique in my experience, was Anji Brenner's idea. It worked beautifully and I'd like to see other coordinators try it.

The library reference desk had been turned into a bar. I am a librarian and was on something of a busman’s holiday, so I made conversation with one of the bartending staff members when I sighted the Haines Criss-Cross Directory behind her. Do we still get requests for Haines Criss Cross? she asked. "No," I said but our segue into talk about the conversion of reference books to electronic format was interrupted by the clamor of the entire audience lining up for more wine. The wine flowed generously all night, free of charge and happily shared by the library staff. The audience stayed for over two hours, and was as engaged at the end of the night as they were at the beginning.  When Brenda Hillman asked for a show of hands, we discovered that many in the audience had traveled from San Francisco and the East Bay and from as far away as Sacramento. Driving around the Bay Area is not easy, so when people make a long drive to come to an event, it means they were committed to being there.

As a library manager as well as a poet, I contend with the changing notion of the public library (they ask: “Who needs a library in the age of Google?”). The Best American Poetry 2012 West Coach launch at the Mill Valley Public Library is an example of the public library at its best: a place for storage and retrieval of information, a place for contemplation, but also a welcoming space for cultural and community gatherings. This night in November for The Best American Poetry 2012 brought a community of readers into the public library because of poets and poetry. Not only do people read poetry, they come out in large numbers to hear it. This pleases me no end.

-- Stephanie Brown

"FIU Reading by David Lehman" (by Robert B. Miller)

I don’t know where he hung his hat
but am sure it was well placed—as we hung
on his every word, gracefully placed,
as he graced you, which was needed by me, and us
for a reading that otherwise would be lonely
as he explained at the bookstore, telling me he loved me,
although he actually said you and probably meant “you.”

I also don’t know what or where “time’s cellar” was,
but felt sure I wanted to be a buyer
of this, or that, in fact, of whatever he was selling.
Nor do I know what woman loved him, but
I think it was the one he asked
whether to read to us this poem, or that.

With grace he spoke to us, me and you, of what is needed
to get on his bus, which drove like a three/one count with men on base
through poignant moments, on occasion beautiful --
on demand sublime -- and you sensed some poems
he may have written while imagining himself
a young boy in Ithaca, New York, in an orange cap and green shorts
cutting out from a writers’ workshop—cutting away
from the sawdust of lathes cutting out adverbs and
stones polished over rocks he could make chuckle,
eating ripe apples and not wiping his chin when he snuck outside
as the sun crept
just far enough
across the lawn.

That evening Mr. Lehman was loved by you, a woman, and us,
but I don’t know where he hung his hat.

-- Robert B. Miller

Editor's note: Denise Duhamel, undoubtedly one "you" in this poem, introduced David Lehman at a poetry reading in the bookstore of Florida International University in October. In response to the reading, Robert B. Miller wrote this poem, which makes allusions to many of the poems Lehman read that evening -- including "Why I Love 'You'," "When a Woman Loves a Man," "Anywhere I Hang My Hat," "Story of My Life," "The Count," and "On the Beautiful and Sublime."

The Bookstore [by Michael Schiavo]

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Anne Waldman at Poets House: Thursday, November 15, 2012

 

Thursday

November 15, 2012

@7 pm

A polyvocal 

IOVIS reading at Poets House

 Location: Poets House,
10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

 

Join the Belladonna* Collaborative at a group/polyvocal performance from Anne Waldman's epic work The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment featuring her own reading with musical accompaniment by her son, Ambrose Bye. The Iovis Trilogy is the winner of Pen Center USA's Poetry Award for 2012.

Suggested donation $10. Nobody turned away.

 

-- sdh

Wed, Oct 24 at 7:30 PM: Anthony Madrid, Michael Robbins, Susan Wheeler @ Poets House

L to R: Michael Robbins, Anthony Madrid, Susan Wheeler

This just in from The Millay Colony:

Join us for a reading featuring new work and bon mots from esteemed and bedazzling poets Anthony Madrid, Michael Robbins and Susan Wheeler.

Then walk up the curvacious stairway at Poets House to sample autumnal wines, eat some delicious snacks and talk the evening while watching the moon rise over the Hudson River.

ADMISSION IS FREE

POETS HOUSE 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

ANTHONY MADRID lives in Chicago. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Lana Turner, LIT, Poetry, Washington Square, and WEB CONJUNCTIONS. His first book is called I AM YOUR SLAVE NOW DO WHAT I SAY (Canarium Books, 2012).

MICHAEL ROBBINS is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He reviews books regularly for the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New York Observer, the Chicago Tribune, and several other publications. He received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago.

SUSAN WHEELER is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Meme (U of Iowa), a finalist for a National Book Award, and a novel, Record Palace, published by Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Princeton University and lives in the New York area.

-- sdh

Building Bridges: Young American and Russian Poets Share Stage and Verse (by Madge McKeithen)

From left to right: David Lehman (moderator), Russian poets Alla Gorbunova, Dina Gatina, Lev Oborin, American poets Heather Christle, Tina Chang, Matthew Yeager.

David Lehman’s scintillating introduction to Monday night’s reading of poetry by three young Russians and three young Americans at the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library brought Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Babel, Akhmatova, Blok, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Nabokov, and Brodsky into the room, a perfect stage for the next ninety minutes of verse in two languages.

 In an evening presented by the Debut Prize and Causa Artium, Dina Gatina, Alla Gorbunova, and Lev Oborin, winners of the prestigious Russian literary honor, read and conversed with three award-winning American poets -- Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate Tina Chang, the delightfully imaginative Heather Christle, and the inimitable Matthew Yeager. The overflow crowd thrilled to the discovery of new voices, rhythms, and images amid glimmers of recognition and recollections of the familiar. John William Narins’s translations and David Lehman’s insightful and witty moderation of the conversation kept the evening’s focus on each poet’s individual talents as well as the cross-connections of poetic heritage.

 Following are some excerpts of the poems read:

Dina Gatina, born in the Russian provinces in 1981, an illustrator and poet:

every day millions of
people die for our sins
so what
you’re repeating
yourself

so what, so what
they die
“you’re repeating yourself”
“every day”
repeat after me
and whatever

                        from “Untitled,” translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich

Tina Chang, born in 1969 in Oklahoma, poet and teacher of poetry at Sarah Lawrence:

It wasn’t holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.

Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on a farm.

In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
That is beginning.

      from “The Idea of Revelation”  

Alla Gorbunova, born in 1985 on Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg, poet, translator, reviewer, journalist and teacher of philosophy:

a monument to those who have fallen into oblivion
to the woodland villages

a temple to the profundity of the cranes;
teardrops in the hooflets of thaw-patches.

a monument to those who have fallen into oblivion

         from “in the promise of catastrophe”

Heather Christle, born in 1980 in New Hampshire, poet, teacher of poetry at Sarah Lawrence and web editor for jubilat:

It’s no good trying to talk to a roof
A roof already knows everything
It will only turn away
Better to stand on it
and yell facts at the stars
as if you were a real rocket
I’m tired of my constant apologies
All the sorrows I’ve whispered to leaves
who do nothing who tremble
who will not be appeased
I will be a leaf myself
                                                from “Up Again With The Night”

Lev Oborin, born in 1987 in Moscow, poet, critic, translator, and musician:

The crumb of the bread in a thick of ducks
is quite the black hole, no mistake
(except white, and it doesn’t act both near and far,
so it’s really a neutron star).
and inwards the birds are all sucked
towards the lump on the autumn lake
a rare and perfect day,
almost time to fly away,
                                                 from “Untitled”

 

Matthew Yeagar, graduated high school in 1998, a poet and filmmaker:

You’re Henry Hudson, and one hour ago, you were asleep,
You were in you bunk in your cabin on your back,
And the weird northern light through your porthole, etc.
Now you are watching your own ship sail away without you on it.
You’re Henry Hudson
And you are having a hard time believing so.

                                                from “poem [You’re Henry Hudson]”

  As the organizers promised beforehand, the evening of young, award-winning Russian and American poets was full of variety, richness, confidence and vibrancy, and the program one of connections, bringing to mind the ribs, cables, wires, and expanses of bridges, the similes and swagger David Lehman captured in translation in  “Brooklyn Bridge, after Vladimir Mayakovsky”

 

And finally I see –

                                here stood Mayakovsky,

                                                                        composing verse, syllable by syllable.

I look at you

                        as an Eskimo admires a train.

I stick to you

as a tick to an ear.

 Brooklyn Bridge,

                         You’re really something, aren’t you?

 Madge McKeithen teaches writing at the New School, is at work on her second book, and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com

An Evening of Poetry from Russia and the United States

Last night, in the Corner Room of the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch (40th Street and Fifth Avenue), an attentive audience was wowed by poems from Russia (with translations read by John Narins) and the United States. From left to right below: David Lehman (moderator), Russian poets Alla Gorbunova, Dina Gatina, Lev Oborin, American poets Heather Christle, Tina Chang, Matthew Yeager.