Alan Gurganis story title snipped from The New Yorker. Yeah, I’m pretty proud of this one. Here’s the accompanying poem:
My Heart is a Snake Farm
for Alan K.
Oh Alan, I’m lying,
and neither is it a lonely hunter,
pit of vipers, thrush,
nor is it buried in Venice.
Maybe it’s a safety friend
like my son-in-law
at the Children’s Museum
in Santa Monica, protecting
those coming close, circling,
and skipping out the door.
Oh! Lucia Perillo’s poems, so cranky and earthly. “Postcard from Florida” (from Inseminating the Elephant,) ends with two little girls on a wooden bulkhead on an estuary with a hose trying to get manatees to drink: “singing Come to us humanities//and oh see how they do.”
“And language? Rhythms/of echo and interruption?/that’s/a way of breathing.” wrote Denise Levertov, who lived the last part of her life at the south end of Lake Washington, with a view of and poems about Mt. Rainier. Her poem title, “Looking, Walking, Being” pretty much sums it up for me – alive on the move.
And language. And Kaveh Akbar last night, first SAL Poet of the season read at Hugo House. We watched remotely, still feeling unsafe in crowds. He celebrated the Bushwick Book Club composer/violist/singer Alex Guy and past Youth Poet Laureate and author of “Motherland” Bitaniya Giday, as his first on-stage act, so that I liked him from the get-go. He read from “Pilgrim Bell”, his second book, stretching a leg back, lifting up on his toes so that he loomed high above the mic, twirling his amazement of thick dark hair. He conjured, sang, lamented, pled, questioned, in English and the Farsi he said he does not speak, magical and affecting. Not affected. I will never think of the punctuation mark the period at the end of a sentence in the same way. Did I mean to declare? Demand through imperative?