Reading March 4th, 2009 Hart Hart Hart!

Matt Hart

Dobby Gibson

Van Wheeler

That's right, the guy I for whose poetry I made a metal book will be here in pdx reading that poetry at Powells on Hawthorne. Gibson's new collection of poetry, Skirmish (Graywolf), is said to be "satisfyingly challenging"-- sounds a little bourgeois.  

Sunday

March 8th

4 p.m.

Powells on Hawthorne 

Lists of things that happen in this world

from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1900)

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft;
The carpenter dresses his plank—the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp;
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner;
The pilot seizes the king-pin—he heaves down with a strong arm;
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat—lance and harpoon are ready;
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches;
The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar;
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel;
The farmer stops by the bars, as he walks on a First-day loafe, and looks at the oats and rye;
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirm’d case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;


It surprises me to be able to use truthfully this world that we have misused so many times.
Parallel present participles; 20 verbs; managing unfaithful logic.