This Friday through Sunday, over 80 poets will participate in a weekend-long poetry reading in Boston. Each poet has eight minutes of reading time. The participants range from the up-and-coming to the well established. Such an ambitious and impressive event promises to send thousands of words into the heads of thousands of poetry enthusiasts.
This is one of those events that makes having a private plane seem like an imperative life holding. Strictly for purposes of attending far-off readings, of course…
But if you’re in the area, definitely stop by, for eight minutes or eighty, and enjoy some of Boston’s best poetry voices.
Dark Sky Books author Ben Mazer is scheduled to read on Sunday afternoon. And next week’s featured poet, Elisa Gabbert, takes the stage Friday night.
Check out the rest of the line-up after the jump. And visit the Boston Poet Tea Party for venue information and contacts.
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Tagged as:
Ben Mazer,
Boston Poet Tea Party,
Elisa Gabbert,
Poetry Readings
None of the 135 poems comprising Ben Mazer’s January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010), written shortly after the death of the poet Landis Everson, have been previously published in periodicals, due to the sudden nature of the book’s publication. Here are eight poems from the collection. May they induce you to acquire this epic, tour de force 149 pp. volume of poetry.
Embarrassing the Gods
My urination violation
helped to pay for my vacation.
Oh do not ask what is it
when you make your mental visit,
quoth the raven, while my mental
escapades are accidental
only when I do not think it.
So I’m making you this trinket
in case you want to contemplate
our coinciding at this date.
I could not express it better
than by talking through your sweater
like an Indian chieftain or
a gentle army of wild boar.
All that I can do is wing it,
hoping back to me you’ll sing it,
sometimes embarrassing the gods,
exposing all the inner thoughts
that make me want to
categorize them all in lots,
I think I can do.
When it is pouring in the noon
maybe it won’t be too soon
to softly name
and itemize the groves of June.
Like a fire then will fame
enjoy its promise without shame.
Occidents of welter rudge
may discontinue to misjudge
the preening prom queen
and turn her quizzi-
cal extremptions to a quasi-
mathematically obscene
half exposition
on the strength of my position
and orgasms of myopic
caring for my biopic.
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Tagged as:
Ben Mazer,
Dark Sky Books,
January 2008
by Ben Mazer
The broad outlines shrink and descend
into the grotto where at land’s end
the many pallored wait by the wall
of night blooming jasmine to recall
the terms of kisses and of promises
that no one misses fading to a turn
of honey briars where the shadows burn
an evanescent moment at the last
resort the present breaks into the past.
What have they become, do they remain
to bury there until the morning plane,
exhibits of headlines that are stellar
until the last keg smashes through the cellar
and reconfigured as Christmas lights
blend Hollywood with Honolulu nights
till the dreamt flights hang from them like pearls
amid an ocean of a thousand girls,
what is it that they whisper in the ear
as if at last their meaning could come near.
_______________________________
Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964. His poetry collections include Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010), and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books). He lives in Boston, where he is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.
Tagged as:
Ben Mazer,
Independence Day,
Poetry
Many people fashion themselves poets. They stay quiet when everyone else talks. They find drama in their Budweisers, call the sky cobalt, and sometimes kind of smell (or is that just me?). Less than many people who fashion themselves poets are truly decent working poets — you know, the kind whose work you actually want to read. And fewer people still look like poets and write like poets and are respected by poets and have their poems praised in poetry magazines.
Case in point: Ben Mazer.
Recently Mazer (January 2008 / Dark Sky Books) was praised in Jacket Magazine.
Here’s a snippet from the review, written by Christopher Bock:
The poems in January 2008 sputter like severed electrical wires firing and trying to find a place to reconnect their currency. Handling these poems is like handling live electricity. As in Poems, the poet is composing a symphony of objects for the ear and mind. Yet these poems feel more desperate, more exhausted, more alive, and less apparently wedded to the English lyric tradition.
It seems extremely difficult to talk about a book that contains 135 poems, the bulk of which are without titles, which enact such a broad range of verse as:
Ice kindled trees to life in passive fog.
The shadows settle on the wires log
too absent early. Then he heard eavesdrop
the marching others hush and the wind stop.
and:
Snaggly waggly went to fair,
saw the natty raccoon there.
When the raccoon went to play,
Snaggly waggly ran away.
These two isolated examples speak to the range of the poems contained within January 2008. There are moments of grace in which the self confronts the self in the shadow of nature and the echo of the sublime.
Read the entire review at Jacket Magazine.
And if you want to get your hands on some of Ben’s poetry, visit Dark Sky Books now and we’ll ship you a copy of his stellar collection.
Tagged as:
Ben Mazer,
Jacket Magazine,
January 2008
