Poetry Break

A 2-week poetry series on The Leonard Lopate Show

April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, we've asked some of our favorite poets to come into our studio and read for us. So tune in and take a poetry break.

Mark Doty | Jean Valentine | Eileen Myles | Philip Schultz |
Charles Bernstein | Glyn Maxwell | Anselm Berrigan | Ann Lauterbach | Patrick Rosal | Marie Ponsot

Mark Doty reads "Heaven for Stanley," from his new collection School of the Arts, published by HarperCollins. Doty is widely considered to be one of the most important writers of his generation, and he's the only American ever to have received Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize.

More about Mark Doty
More about School of the Arts
Listen to Mark Doty reading Heaven for Stanley

Music: Triptych Myth (Cooper-Moore, Tom Abbs, Chad Taylor) - "The Fox" - from Hopscotch Records

Heaven for Stanley by Mark Doty (from School of the Arts)

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn't have to wait for the flowers.

He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he'd spent ninety-eight years

anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.

I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice's cool saline,

but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden's all furious change,

budding and rot and then the coming up again;

why prefer any single part of the round?
I don't know that he'd change a word of it;

I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.

He writes it down. Heaven steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He's already there.

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Jean Valentine
Tuesday, April 19

Jean Valentine reads "Trust Me" and "Once I Was Girls and Boys." Shewas born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger PoetsAward for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her most recent collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

"Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: youcan see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, atthe place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way." —Adrienne Rich

More about Jean Valentine
Listen to Jean Valentine read "Trust Me" and "Once I Was Girls and Boys"

Music: Chicago Underground Duo (Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek) - "Micro Exit" - from the album Axis and Alignment from Thrill Jockey

Trust Me by Jean Valentine

Who did I write last night? leaning
over this yellow pad, her, inside,
making chicken tracks: two
sets of blue footprints, tracking out
on a yellow ground,
child's colors.

Who am I?
who want so much to move
like a fish through water,
through life...

Fish like to be
underwater.

Fish move through fish! Who
are you?

And Trust Me said, There's another way to go,
we'll go by the river which is frozen under the snow;

my shining, your shining life draws close, draws closer,
God fills us as a woman fills a pitcher.

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Eileen Myles
Wednesday, April 20

Eileen Myles has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB's in 1974. Bust magazine calls her "the rock star of modern poetry" and The New York Times says she's "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde." Her books include Skies, Cool For You, and School of Fish; recently she wrote the libretto for an opera called Hell, based on Dante's Inferno.

Go to Eileen Myles's website
Listen to Eileen Myles reading To Hell

Music: Triptych Myth (Cooper-Moore, Tom Abbs, Chad Taylor) - "The Fox" - from Hopscotch Records

Events: Eileen Myles will be reading with Nick Flynn and Fred Schmalz at 55 Mercer Gallery on Friday, May 20th, at 7 pm, in conjunction with the show Triage: Collaborative Works by Paul Bowen, M.P. Landis, and Bert Yarborough.

To Hell for J.

I'm not sure who I walk with in American today. I miss you, my imagined accomplice, while we're
moving among men

One man stands up and says his daughter's gay

Like we didn't know that she says, he thinks it's so great

We can't think it's so wonderful, being lied to for years

We've accomplished bright cynicism, then struggle for love

We flounder, we fail, the elephant eliminates the con-
fusions of love.

Love probably didn't need a war, couldn't eat, is rolling
on waves today

The city is emptying. The elephants have been planning
their party for years.

I'm heading into it. New York my home bursting with men.

Conservative women, heading downtown to see a cross made
of girders: "Great!"

Jesus marked this city, threw planes at it, face it those
pilots were gay

We're gonna make a constitutional amendment against em
for being gay.

Gay to hit buildings, to want to meet in great numbers,
being no one Love

Moving like an angry sunflower, wanting bandages, space,
something great

I want to live here feeling celebrated for breathing open
today.

I want to show you complicated dyke love, construct a poem
about women and men

In my country there's a basic responsibility to struggle
and not for years.

To walk away, to turn around seeing you and progress and be
loving your smile for years

Sometimes I think there's complication with men but I'm
probably gay

Gay to be glad to keep expressing and knowing the im-
possible hopes of women and men

I would want to learn more, be firmer, open up,
revolutionize love streaming

A house on a hill is pretty but there's something
rhapsodically fine today

Stay here while the American ship is moving and rocking,
vincible, great.

My moment alone in front of everyone is hopelessly great
I don't have to wonder where I'm going this time or this
year

I don't have to wonder whose group I'm in today.

Certainly the people who always think the public problem is
theirs are gay

When the moment comes to move like trees to free the city I
love

I don't know John Kerry and we can name that feeling Bud-
dhist for the next four years

The pond reflects the sky, if the highway curls it's gay.

A public moment, a political moment is what's possible
today

We trust more than men, something's eating our years

The uneven horizon's great and of course she's gay

The buildings are falling in love, and we opened its eye
today

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Philip Schultz
Thursday, April 21

Philip Schultz reads two selections from his recent book-length poem, Living in the Past.He's the founder and director of The Writers Studio, and a former director of NYU's Graduate Creative Writing program. His work has been published widely, including in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The New Republic.

More about Living in the Past (Harcourt)
Listen to Philip Schultz reading #11

Music: Chicago Underground Duo (Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek) - "Micro Exit" - from the album Axis and Alignment from Thrill Jockey

# 11, from Living in the Past

Everyone dickers with God. Everyone gets something:
Grandma gets one dead husband who does nothing
but read Torah and complain, the kitchen ceiling where
all her curses live rent-free, a lifetime of oy veis. ... Uncle gets
his wieners, eight varieties of sauerkraut, five newspapers spread
over the kitchen table like a vast strategy, the Paramount screen
where he pulls curtains shut on Marlena D who shaves her legs
four times a day. Father gets free room and board, a coal-burner
to intimidate, all the blame. Mother gets the lower left half of
the icebox, where she hides bacon, popsicles, all her glee.
I get the best hiding places, Uncle's girlie books, the stained glass
attic window where the wind sings of inner and outer things,
as Martin Buber said, what are they but things—"O secrecy
without a secret! O accumulation of information!" I get faith
and intuition and 5763 years of longing and despair, a passion
for hearsay, boogieing, and epistemology...

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Charles Bernstein
Friday, April 22

Charles Bernstein reads "Ballad of a Girly Man." He has been at theforefront of poetry's avant-garde for three decades. Along with BruceAndrews, Bernstein edited the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, heco-founded and serves as the Executive Editor of The Electronic Poetry Center, and he recently launched PennSound, a digital poetry archive that makes performances of poets from Guillaume Apollinaire to Kenneth Koch available for download and exchange. His recent books include With Strings and My Way: Speeches and Poems.

Music: Chicago Underground Duo (Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek) - "Lifelines" - from the album Axis and Alignment from Thrill Jockey

The Ballad of the Girlie Man For Felix

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

A democracy once proposed
Is slimmed and grimed again
By men with brute design
Who prefer hate to rime

Complexity's a four-letter word
For those who count by nots and haves
Who revile the facts of Darwin
To worship the truth according to Halliburton

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store
The rich get richer, the poor die quicker
& the only god that sanctions that
Is no god at all but rhetorical crap

So be a girly man
& take a gurly stand
Sing a gurly song
& dance with a girly sarong

Poetry will never win the war on terror
But neither will error abetted by error

We girly men are not afraid
Of uncertainly or reason or interdependence
We think before we fight, then think some more
Proclaim our faith in listening, in art, in compromise

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The girly men killed christ
So the platinum DVD says
The Jews & blacks & gays
Are still standing in the way

We're sorry we killed your god
A long, long time ago
But each dead solider in Iraq
Kills the god inside, the god that's still not dead.

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

So be a girly man
& sing a gurly song
Take a gurly stand
& dance with a girly sarong

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store
The rich get richer, the poor die quicker
& the only god that sanctions that
Is no god at all but rhetorical crap

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
The truth is hidden in a veil of tears

Note: This is the full text of the poem. Charles Bernstein read an abbreviated version for us.

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Glyn Maxwell
Monday, April 25

Glyn Maxwell reads "Sally Playing Patience" from his new book, Sugar Mile, which is published by Houghton Mifflin. Since 2001, he has been the poetry editor of The New Republic. Maxwell is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received theE.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Go to Glyn Maxwell's website
More about Sugar Mile
Listen to Glynn Maxwell reading "Sally Playing Patience"

Music: Chicago Underground Duo (Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek) - "Two Concepts for the Storage of Light" - from the album Axis and Alignment from Thrill Jockey

Sally Playing Patience by Glyn Maxwell

It's even got a cinema
the farmers like to go there
Joey, then they smoke cigars
they have a film discussion
in a room with velvet fittings.

But what nobody tells them
as nobody tells anyone
is all the famous actors
and all the leading ladies
Robby you can think of

have also been escorted
to the villages selected.
No one's saying much about it
Joey but these stars
in costumes and disguises

could pass us on the meadow
or you could be hop-picking
Joey did you ever
and next to you right there there's
Merle Oberon, who knows,

Harry, and all the Hammers
are operating tractors,
people with great talents
are all to be protected
Julie for the future

so there'll still be the pictures
to go to when it's over
and cups to play for Harry
and parties and by that time
some of them will know us

you'll stand there with your wineglass
you don't' have to be famous
but they know you, you were there, Joey
side by side at harvest
when stars were nothing special.

Julie, in the wheat barns
at midnight when the work's done
anyone could stand there
meaning what you hope's
their meaning. When it's over

everyone who went there
will have this bond forever
and we'll bring our children out there
in cars with silver streamlines
for the grand reunion dancing.

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Anselm Berrigan
Tuesday, April 26

Anselm Berrigan reads "We're Not Gonna Turn Me In" from his forthcoming book Some Notes on My Programming, which will be published later this year by Edge Books. Berrigan is the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. He's also written three previous books of poems, including Zero Star Hotel.

More about the Poetry Project
Listen to Anselm Berrigan reading "We're Not Gonna Turn Me In"

We're Not Gonna Turn Me In by Anselm Berrigan

Apparition host turns on sight
of a barbed sun. Warmth to gouge
a way with, catch flesh upon
and display. Western garden
will cut a deal: grow something
and be rewarded with growth
A city kid's green things: plastic
and metal veins pumping ideas
out of every tag-a-long fantasy
of changing names, time zones
or body types. I'd like to be
ocean-shaped and crashing
at my edges, vicious and open
Become an outpost of irrational
compassion instead, on the interior
run at all times while my surface
adapts to all these faces, these photos
of blood-soaked children carrying
each other between blasts. Sleep
so well I dream of bills. Why so
afraid of the bear in the closet?
It will shake me out of my ideals
the attractive drunk and her unfinished
sentences. Doom is pretty sexy:
the track lighting and pictures of plants
the ambience of an audience expecting
what it will receive. My heart does not
beat too fast, is replaceable. The same
themes slap me into inaction, but I run
owe, program, state, lift, grasp, love
Having lost all sense of tone and its enemy
shame. I worship no one, idolize
no one, have no heroes and want none
A magnetic pansy rocking the division
in our sheathed collateral wreckage
Won't take my life. Won't take yours

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Ann Lauterbach
Wednesday April 27

Ann Lauterbach reads "After Mahler" from her new book of poems, Hum, published by Penguin. It's her seventh poetry collection. She also has a new collection of essays called The Night Sky. Ann Lauterbach is a New York City native and has taught at Bard College since 1991.

More on Ann Lauterbach
More on Hum
Listen to Ann Lauterbach read "After Mahler"

Music: Chicago Underground Duo (Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek) - "Micro Exit" - from the album Axis and Alignment from Thrill Jockey

Patrick Rosal
Thursday, April 28

Patrick Rosal reads "Tito's Field" and "When You Haven't Made Love in a Long Time." He's the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books). His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award, and he currently at work on his second full-length collection My American Kundiman. He is Assistant Professor of English at Bloomfield College.

More about Patrick Rosal
Listen to Patrick Rosal reading Tito's Field

Music: Chicago Underground Duo (Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek) - "Lifelines" - from the album Axis and Alignment from Thrill Jockey

Tito's Field

We shot my tito's guns in a field
somewhere in the middle of Louisiana
This man - my uncle - was a genius
By day they paid him to figure out a way -
when there was none -to suture kidneys shut
- and he did Then he'd come home
to put his son's kings in check
He swatted at the swift flies
everyone else was too stupid to see
and rambled about hearing new
prophecies in his Walkman
Because the seven horsemen
and their fairy counterparts
were quick to trample out my tito's last few
lingering flintsparks of logic
my auntie in the end stormed
out of their house with their sons
the same way reason must have
stormed out of his brain
But everyone and everything that summer
kept their tenuous residence long enough
for me to play with small artillery
in the seemingly endless backyard
that belonged to my raving uncle
Tito June explained the mechanics of each weapon
and even knew the physics of every echoed blam!
He pointed out our targets
like a pre-school teacher points out
the alphabet: one oak broken like an old hip
a stack of flat stones near the edge of the yard
motley and muddied bottles lined
along the wooden fence My aim was terrible
I was just a Jersey kid drunk
on the triple-jump twenty-gauge
cuss and rumble of a shotgun
thrumming its way out of this
seventeen-acre field in a hurry
When he told me to knock a single fat grackle off
the lowest branch of a bare catalpa about
forty feet from where we stood
I surprised myself when I saw the body
drop to the dirt still fluttering
Tito June pulled a .22 off his hip
walked up to the final full
twitch that remained of the bird
and sent a slug through its tiny gut
(I stopped the yuck in my throat )
When he picked it up and held it by one
toe dangling it like an iridescent planet
we knew he'd pack that one away
with all the other critters in his freezer
He peered long at that scavenger
as though he could see clear
through its belly to a hole in heaven's skull

I should thank you Tito
I didn't care you stopped believing in God
As long as I've known you you've stood
on the edge of madness like a child
clad in clean white knickers
held back from diving into the mud
But no one after all could stop you
You cackled loud when you pulled a trigger
You cackled loud when you didn't
For all your quirky brilliance
For all your ravishing lunacy
For all your universe-be-damned bravado
I don't envy you your dreams: the gun -
blast echoes rippling through the field
of your mind: littered tangled overgrown
where you stand gaping
about to pronounce some twisted
epistle or botched psalm from
a world in which - for as long as you live -
there is no such thing as lies and chaos
is the last science you shall ever love

When You Haven't Made Love in a Long Time

Whatever first summons back her mouth
to yours - gin or lies or the massive electric
wreck of a dying man's heart Whatever rouse
your chest's cadence to its own hectic

footstomp charge Whatever villain
or halo or headlock you mimic
or thoracic harbor your passions thrill in
Whatever ash and lye Whatever fragrant muck

let your tongue be neither simple nor mad-dash
without knowing first the ramshackle
angles of angels rising Do not rush
point A to B Travel the gentle curve of sickle

Climb her thigh's solfeggio Hush along her hips like
some cool crooning devil eager to lose his wits

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Marie Ponsot
Friday, April 29

Marie Ponsot reads a poem called "Winter," as well as a poem about Easter in the New York City of her childhood. She's a native New Yorker who has taught writing at Queens College, New York University and Columbia University, among other institutions. Her most recent book of poems is Springing: New and Selected Poems (Knopf). Her other books include The Green Dark, Admit Impediment, True Minds, and The Bird Catcher.

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