Mitch Sisskind has arrived in NYC from LA in order to take part in tomorrow night's Best American Poetry 2013 launch reading at the New School (Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th Street. 7:00 PM. Free). Here's what he writes about his poem:
"'Joe Adamczyk'" was inspired first by memories of street corner taverns on the Northwest Side of Chicago: the pinball machines, the television sets, the beers--Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, Old Milwaukee. There was a man who, after retiring from the post office, read Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel and began to have opinions on topics that had not previously interested him, and he also took up paint-by-numbers. I tried to imagine how this man's life would change if he went from painting to philosophy and just didn't stop. In the last stanza of the poem I tried to copy the final paragraph of Crime and Punishment, which (in my translation) refers to a 'hitherto undreamed of reality' and to another story that has not yet been written, but will be."
For a complete lineup of tomorrow night's launch reading go here.
