"Monday Night at KGB" [by Julia Cohen]

We have the goods for you. Or rather, Jill Bialosky and D. Nurkse have the goods for us. Bialosky is a versatile writer who has published two novels and three collections of poetry and you’ve probably read her work in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Kenyan Review amongst others. She re-evaluates and redefines the way in which we acclimate to or form private spaces. The poems appear insular at first, begin in a bedroom, an art studio, or capture an intimate conversation, and then the intruding inquiries Bialosky asks of herself and of the reader dissolve these boundaries to let us find the startling pricks of passion or unsettling honesty that disrupt and revitalize the quieter or more routine aspects of our lives. She read from her recently released book, The Intruder (Knopf, 2008) and told us:

 “I wanted to say a few words about the Intruder in these poems. It is the intrusion of imagination, of art, of Eros on everyday life. This figure took on many guises from muse, to doppelganger, to a lover.”

“I began to realize that the intruder was a way for the self to be challenged.”

 “This poem [The Figure] came out of my experience of the art room. I was always amazed at how things were constantly emerging.”

 “I used to be obsessed with the painter Eric Fischl. I’ve written a series of poems based on his work, which centers on the provocation between intimate people. For instance, a figure of a mother and a young boy.”

 “I wanted to read you a poem where the Intruder appears out of these erotic manuscripts at the Morgan Library.”

 “That was supposed to be my funny poem.”

 “I took a ski trip to the Rocky Mountains. I was in the ski lift during a cold day with a blizzard. There was the Upper Bowl and the Lower Bowl and it conveyed to me the essence of Paradise Lost. This is my version of the Fall.”

D. Nurkse chatted about and read from his new collection The Border Kingdom (Knopf, 2008). One of my favorite lines of poetry from the evening is his, “You can get there by holding your breath.”

“Poets suffer but then we get these introductions and it makes up for everything.”

“The Border Kingdom is about limbo, which might be the Bush era. It’s also about my generation thinking the world would end during the Cold war and then experiencing the Civil Rights movement.”

“People in the book end up in thoughtful transitional stages, terrified to live in a world where human life is prolonged indefinitely. I’ll start with a few poems written to me by a woman from the future.”

“Anthropocene. It’s the age where weather is created or affected by humans. I thought I invented the term when I wrote this poem.”

“This is a poem about raising a child in a finite world.”

“I read these poems in Seattle and my daughter was in the audience. It made me really nervous because I die at the end of the book, although not presumably at the end of the reading.”

“Everything in this poem is true. We do move 18.5 miles per second. The ‘we’ that hasn’t changed since the bronze age. What change the mind last was the subjunctive clause. The arena of possibility.”

“The last poem I’m going to read is about the lyrical subject of American Interrogation procedures and takes place in Iraq.”

-- Julia Cohen