The shaded window.
Voices from the garden rose to
the room and soon the green blanket
soothed you. The phone rang. A door
closed. No one turning
down the gravel path, no one
taking up the garden shears.
Saskia Hamilton is the author of As for Dream (2001) and Divide These (2005), the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), and the co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). Her most recent work appears in Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American (2010).
_______________________________________________________________________________________
This is a beautiful new poem from Noelle Kocot who will be reading at the upcoming Poems about Nothing event at the Rubin Museum on January 26th. Please click on our Upcoming Events tab above for more information about the reading.
Oeuvre
The purring of incidence in the light’s disappearance,
The ground of, how many held by something
Would add dark shades to the grass? Turning on
The delighted sidewalk, I hear something ramified
By time’s purple flame. A phone call every night.
A summer I climbed once. A space between us
In that swelling river of roots. You are a writer, a poet.
You are midnight when it got back on the road.
The birds scatter their cries in the quiet sheets
Of air. Well-intended failure, oh this better be good,
Don’t eat too much, or, keep eating, or go out
For another walk. There is a certain kind of history
The band plays on and on, murder’s patron saint, while
I make my little oeuvre like a bird gathering twigs for a nest.
Noelle Kocot is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006) and Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009), as well as a discography forthcoming in 2010 from Wave, and a full-length poetry collection, The Bigger World (Wave, 2011). She has won awards from The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Fund for Poetry and The Academy of American Poets, among others. She lives in N.J.
_______________________________________________________________________
Mark Bibbins is the author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and the Lambda Award-winning Sky Lounge. He teaches at The New School and Columbia University, and edits the poetry section of The Awl.
________________________________________________________________
The Economist recently wrote an insightful article on the Rubin Museum‘s Talks About Nothing series which featured novelist Rick Moody and physicist Melissa Franklin! Including our event on January 26th, there are still several others left in this series before it ends in late January. You can find tickets here.
Also, to refresh your memory, here is the official press release for Poems About Nothing:
RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART
presents
POEMS ABOUT NOTHING
Wednesday, January 26
7pm
$12/$10.80 for RMA Members/$5 student/ advance available by phone
Admission includes access to the galleries from 5pm-7pm.
Buy tickets here.
Himalayan Happy Hour and live music in the café from 5-7pm prior to the reading.
“if there’s nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost along the way?”–Ikkyu
Poets Kimiko Hahn, Saskia Hamilton, Noelle Kocot, David Lehman, Ben Lerner, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Stacy Szymaszek read poems by themselves and others on the themes of absence, emptiness, and…nothing.
RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART
150 WEST 17TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY 212.620.5000 x344 www.rmanyc.org
This performance informs the exhibition
Grain of Emptiness
Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art
Grain of Emptiness features five contemporary artists—Sanford Biggers, Theaster Gates, Atta Kim, Wolfgang Laib, and Charmion von Wiegand—all inspired by the Buddhist notions of emptiness and impermanence and Buddhist ritual practice. These artists are from disparate backgrounds and explore a range of artistic mediums, but all have inherited the practice of incorporating Eastern religious beliefs into their works. The exhibition’s paintings, photographs, videos, and installations will be complemented by performance art. For more information on the series relating to the exhibition please visit www.rmanyc.org/nothing.
Ben Mirov grew up in Northern California. He is the author of GhostMachine (Caketrian, 2010) and the chapbooks Vortexts (SUPERMACHINE, 2011), I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2010).
Brandon Downing is a poet and visual artist originally from California. His books of poetry include The Shirt Weapon (Germ Monographs, 2002) and Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005), while a monograph of his collages from 1996-2008, Lake Antiquity, was released by Fence Books in 2010. In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of digital shorts, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, with a 2nd volume forthcoming in 2011. A longtime member of the Flarf Collective, He lives in New York City, where he co-curates the Poetry Time Reading Series at SpaceSpace.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Earlier this week we posted a poem we love by Alicia Jo Rabins. Her band, Girls in Trouble, will be playing a free (pass the hat, suggested $5 donation) show at Pete’s Candy Store this Friday, December 10th.
Girls in Trouble go on at 9 pm
Pete’s Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
One thousand lockets minus a lace handkerchief
equals a flock of passenger pigeons, each
carrying a Valentine heart. Seven hundred
ladies’ gloves plus a fishing village
amounts to one temperamental swan and a missing
engagement ring. The alphabet backwards
equals the cemetery on the hill. Marzipan
equals almonds, eggs, sugar, and a scullery maid
weeping into her apron. We’ve lost count
of cravats, hair brooches, and riding boots, traded
a deck of cards for two gentlemen playing
at charades. Top hats can be added to tapioca—
flavor with rum. Two hundred and fifty
petticoats multiplied by twelve chimneysweeps
equals a shattered femur. One locomotive
plus a dozen headmasters comes to a bakery
on Easter morning: hot cross buns with currants.
A dirge equals a dirge. Twenty-seven
daguerreotypes times three overwrought aviaries
is a solar eclipse. Christmas divided by deep mourning
equals burnt porridge. Thirteen hundred orphans left over.
_________________________________________________________________________________ Love Poem with Ebb Tide
I mistook strangers’ gestures for yours—
strangers walking toward me in the sun. Lilacs
tossed by the wind. The tiny bones
of our wrists sometimes ached when it rained,
and Sundays I bought books and artichokes,
thinking why do I have to be so fragile,
I am too fragile. You held my face
in your fingers; pantomime of a wedding
enacted by fireflies. We shielded our eyes
when the harbor was filled with sails. White
sails! And the long breaths of cool wind
from Quebec. I had a feeling someone
was looking for me, but searching the wrong
century. When I went to sea—but I didn’t,
I never went. I just stood on the pier.
You walked by, carrying a lantern.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Karin Gottshall is the author of Crocus, published by Fordham University Press in 2007, and the chapbook Flood Letters, forthcoming from Argos Books. Recent poems appear in Field, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and in the online journals Memorious and La Petite Zine. She lives in Middlebury, Vermont, and teaches poetry writing at Middlebury College. _________________________________________________________________________________
We have long esteemed the work of Kimberly Johnson and so we are thrilled that she agreed to let us post this incredibly appropriate (and lovely) poem.
On Divination by Birds
I don’t need that black
wind of crows kicking up from flax to tell
heavy weather coming, white days to drop
barricades across the interstate,
against two hundred miles of trackless white.
(The crows so obvious then against the miles
of trackless white!) More tricky the magpies
flicker and croak at the sunken carcass
of a roadkill deer, raveling with beaks
the rubbery guts, picking gravel
from scant meat: there must be in their turn-taking
some pattern, some elegant design
beyond need, something in the raw trouble
of jays, the ragged braying geese flown south.
I gaze at their weightless wingbeats daylong
working to discern whether V might stand
for valediction, or vigilance, or
the blank indifference of velocity.
_________________________________________________________________________________
This poem first appeared in the Harvard Review and later was in her book A Metaphorical God (Persea Books, Inc. New York, NY 2008).
Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and Renaissance scholar. She is the author of a previous collection, Leviathan with a Hook, and a translation of Virgil’s Georgics. Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Slate, and The Iowa Review. Johnson has received prizes from the Merton Foundation and the Utah Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Salt Lake City. _________________________________________________________________________________
