When Reality Gets Tossed, Like A Salad

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 86^th

          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

          or Van Goghs

          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,

     the real thing

     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.

Two blocks away

from the Viand Coffee Shop

on Madison Avenue

     which must not be confused

     with the Viand on East 86^th

     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. 

In Search of Truths, Both Small and Large: Ron Padgett At Greenwich Library This Sunday

Tomorrow’s featured spoken artist of the The Poet’s Voice program began writing and publishing with friends Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard--while still in high school. Despite lasting only five issues, The White Dove Review boasted the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other seminal voices of the Beats.

In the years following his relocation in 1960 from Oklahoma to New York, Ron Padgett studied with Kenneth Koch and Lionel Trilling at Columbia College, complemented by a year in Paris under a Fulbright fellowship in French Literature.

Since the 1967 release of Bean Spasms (Granary Books), his first poetry collection co-written with Ted Berrigan (see the interview above about Padgett and his role in helping re-define the New York School of Poetry in the mid-‘60s), Ron Padgett has published numerous collections, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist How Long (Coffee House Press, 2011), How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007), Poems I Guess I Wrote (CUZ Editions, 2001), as well as 1993’s Blood Work (Bamberger Books), a prose collection.

Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems (University of California Press, 1992) and Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Viking, 1971) are representative of his parallel accomplishments in translation, for which Padgett received numerous grants and awards from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts and Columbia University’s Translation Center.

Praised by James Tate for his ability to make his work “sing with absolutely true pitch,” Padgett’s poetry demonstrates a probing commitment to “truths, both small and large,” inspiring “laughter, or at least a thoughtful sigh." In that spirit, here's a jaunty keyboard adaptation of Canadian poet Stuart Ross’ homage, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Ron Padgett”, performed by UK singer Ben Walker:

A resident of New York City, Padgett edited the comprehensive three-volume World Poets (Scribner, 2000) and was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008. He also received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and has placed pieces in The Best American Poetry (Scribner, various editions), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1994), and The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006); his work has been translated into fourteen languages.  

Enjoying its 36^th year since inception, The Poet's Voice is supported in Greenwich by the Horace E. Manacher Poetry Fund and the Friends of Greenwich Library. The reading is free and all are invited to attend.

Where:

Meeting Room

The Greenwich Library

101 W. Putnam Ave., Greenwich

When:

Sunday, March 24

3 PM

Contact:

Alice Bonvenuto, (203) 622-7919

Charles Rafferty Featured Tonight At pi-New Haven’s Open Mic

As director of the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College, Sandy Hook resident Charles Rafferty has contributed poetry to The New Yorker, Doubletake, the Southern Quarterly and the Connecticut Review. Read the sample below to see why Ian Morris of TriQuarterly regards him a creator of “marvels of certainty and dread, of form and lyric, of--in the words of the poet himself—‘pith and essence’.”

APPETITES

When he gets home she is drinking
from the aquarium, and as she brushes the hair back
to give him her face hello, he swears
he can see the ragged fin of a damselfish
sucked in. What kind of woman is this--
who eats his fish in secret, whose salty kiss
he's starting to understand? There was a time
when he found her pockets full of soil.
Days later he discovered the scoop marks
where her fingers had been in the dirt
of his potted palms. Another time her mouth
had tasted like dimes, and he regretted
the coin collection--the little gods
and Indians that lived underneath his socks.
Suddenly he has an explanation for his missing
keys, the remote control, the photos
in the album removed like words
in a steady redaction of his past.
Could she really have been swallowing his life
while he kissed her hard and paid the bills?
He remembers her penchant for negligees
and dirty stories, the arch of her body
above him. And there it is. His breath held fast
and devoured, without effort or malice,
as if it were the plaything of a woman bored
who hasn't come round to cruelty.

Rafferty will be reading tonight at the Poetry Institute selections from Unleashable Dog, his tenth collection forthcoming from Steel Toe Books. A grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, Rafferty’s other collections include The Man On the Tower (University of Arkansas Press, 1995), Where the Glories of April Lead (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001) and A Less Fabulous Infinity (Louisiana Literature Press, 2006). Saturday Night at Magellan's, a short story collection, is due for release from Fomite Press.

Charles Rafferty explains his creative process at the blog How a Poem Happens, here.

An eclectic celebration of the form, the Poetry Institute’s Open Mic Poetry program is hosted by Alice-Anne Harwood, Elizabeth Cleary and Mark McGuire-Schwartz and meets the third Thursday of each month in the warm setting of the New Haven-based Young Men’s Institute Library reading room on the second floor, beginning at 7:00 pm (please arrive early to sign up to read). Refreshments are served. 

For more information, contact pi-New Haven at:

The Institute Library
847 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT

Email: PoetryInstitute@gmail.com

Homepage: http://thepoetryinstitute.com