Tonight’s featured poet at Curley’s Diner was initially
drawn to the form by no less than Frank McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of Angela’s Ashes), his English
teacher while attending New York City’s Stuyvesant High School. Neil
Silberblatt began penning his own work while at Cornell University.
In addition to his writing, Neil is very active in
organizing Voices of Poetry, a traveling venue for prominent poets and
musicians, held at The Sherman Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary
Art Museum (Ridgefield), the New Britain Museum of American Art and other locations around Connecticut.
Most recently, Neil has placed two pieces in last October’s
“It’s Political” issue of the literary publication Verse Wisconsin. So Far, So Good (Lulu), his 2012 collection, is prized by fellow poet and Voices participant, Joan Kantor, for its blend of “… honesty
and accessibility” with humor and elegant word-choice.
Madison Avenue (part of his New
York Suite), Grand Prize Winner in the Open Community Poetry Contest
sponsored by Hennen's Observer (which also nominated the poet for a Pushcart
Prize), conveys with sparse power how standard mandates of self-worth, opportunity
and integrity get twisted out of all meaning on the altar of globalized
consumerism:
MADISON AVENUE
At the Viand Coffee Shop...
on Madison Avenue
which must not be confused
with the Viand on East 86th
or the Viand on Broadway
come the young ladies fresh from
their visit to the Met
or, if they dare, the Whitney
because one can only
take so many Rothkos
in a morning
wearing their
dazzling tennis whites
which have never seen,
and will never see,
a ground stroke,
as they pick apart their
salads
and each other.
Now enter
the ladies
bearing handbags
with names
like children,
of course,
no knock offs here
as they survey the
dieter’s special
and eye the desserts
cordoned off
behind the counter.
Their conversations hushed
as they spread
butter
and gossip.
from the Viand Coffee Shop
on Madison Avenue
which must not be
confused
with the Viand on
East 86th
or the Viand on
Broadway
stands a refugee
from Senegal
as black as the plum
into which she bites,
its juices dripping
down the side of her hand,
as she quickly sets up
her display of
counterfeit handbags
on the street-corner.
She is
real;
the plum is
real;
the bags –
as she will quietly
tell you
in her rich
Senegalese accent,
with her breath
scented by plum -
are beautiful,
but fake.
Neil has a second collection of poems,
tentatively titled Present Tense, due for release later this year.
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