The Human Factor by David Lehman

Indiana power plant after flood, 1913. Photograph by DJ Angus.

It is our great pleasure to present this poem by David Lehman, one of the readers at tomorrow night’s Poems about Nothing event at the Rubin Museum. “The Human Factor” appears in When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005).

 

The Human Factor

 

The gambler knows nothing’s
more addictive than deception
with the chance that the betrayed one,
the spouse or the State, is pretending
or consenting to be deceived
for motives of vanity and greed
not different from his own,
leaving him with a choice to make
between his mistress and his self-respect —
which may be why the ideal reader
of Graham Greene’s novels went
to a parochial school, was married
and divorced, has lived abroad
in Europe or Asia, plays in a weekly
small-stakes poker game, works
for a newspaper, lies to make a living.

 

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David Lehman is the editor of  “The Oxford Book of American Poetry.” He initiated “The Best American Poetry” and continues as the series editor of the annual anthology. His latest books of poems are “Yeshiva Boys” and “When a Woman Loves a Man.” The most recent of his six prose books is “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs” which recently won the 42nd Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor award for outstanding print, broadcast, and new media coverage of music.

Heteralocha Acutirostris by Kimiko Hahn

Photograph by Hester Angus

This week we continue to post work by the readers at the upcoming Poems about Nothing reading at the Rubin Museum. The event will take place this coming Wednesday, January 26th–for more details, please click on the Upcoming Events tab above. Today, we are pleased to present a poem by Kimiko Hahn from her book Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton, 2010)

 

Heteralocha Acutirostris

When the stunning huia became scarce,
Maori priests would declare a ban
on killing these small black birds, so prized,
their tail feathers were presented as mementos
and worn in battle and funeral rites.
But the Europeans ignored the priests
and soon the Maori themselves did not listen.
So now, the males with their short sharp beaks
to drill through bark and the females
with their long bowed ones to pluck out the grubs
have perished but for museum specimens.
Is this how we admire success in pairing—
kill then stuff then display as exemplar?
Ah, my beloved, hold fast to me, in terror.

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Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight books of poems, including: Earshot (awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize); The Unbearable Heart (an American Book Award); The Narrow Road to the Interior, which utilizes Japanese forms; and her latest Toxic Flora, poems inspired by science. Hahn is a recipient of a number awards—the most recent area Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award and The Shelley Memorial Prize—and she is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

An excerpt from Shift at Oars by Stacy Szymaszek

Stacy Szymaszek will be reading at the upcoming Poems about Nothing event at the Rubin Museum on January 26th. For more information about the reading, please click on our Upcoming Events tab. This is an excerpt from “Shift at Oars” which can be found in her book Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, New York, NY, 2005).

From “Shift at Oars”

water
relives
reservoir

boat
bottom
draft
displaced

º

lineal
thought
backward
body

no one
knows
the brains
I am now

_____

tree
an oar
origin

joints ruptured
soak in
deep ink
º

wallpaper
remnant
flower
float

chandelier

brief case
hundred words
logged

erode
my
Arabic

_____

congestion
of resin

person

forecasts
final position

restless sleep

º

width of
back
belted

sodium
poultice

exhausts
courtship

_____

agora

drain
a home
of you

wind
lashes
fronds

cellophane

º

where a
mammal
bled

activity
not yet
diffused

blackened
patch
of water

_____

weight
of oyster
in gloved
hand he
shucks

dented
pewter

º

assonance
her aspect

relocated

wind
shatters
plexi

phenomena
forgone
for me

shift
at oars

new
muscle
grown
bone

never
held
you

º

case
of dried
apricot

gorge

I am
summoned

capable
a day

outlast
forecast

coral reef

feeler

º

paper
cover
mallet
awl

downfall

fire-
box

androgyne

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Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, WI. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005) and Hyperglossia (Litmus Press, 2009), as well as numerous chapbooks, including Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), and from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009). From 1999 to 2005, she worked at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood.  In 2005 she moved to New York City where she is the current Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

Oeuvre by Noelle Kocot

Toad Hall by Patrick Doughtery

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.

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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.
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