WRITERS HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES
Osip Mandelstam exiled
for writing “Stalin’s Epigram”
wife persecuted thoughts like his life
she preserved his work by reserving to memory
poems.
Boris Pasternak exiled “Doctor Zhivago”
forced by country to reject noble prize
Anna Akhmatova
expelled from writer’s union
poems banned 15 years
stripped of ration card - hungry for food she fed herself with pens
forced to rely on friends to live. remainder of days.
Dante Alighieri exiled
pen morphed Italy’s poetry with journey from satan’s fields
through purgatory to heaven’s haven;
riddled with epitaphs of his own banishment
Dennis Brutus jailed
enlightening change
imprisoned in South Africa
cracked stones with Mandela
now writes in US as political refugee
Federico García Lorca
lost feared loved compassionate,
penned to make art heard martyred, chastised because his ink
had men rethink themselves.
Died by the blade of his words.
So tell me Lorca,
what does it mean to control pens
at 5 in the afternoon
tattoo blood into the forearms of paper
be soothsayer salivating words
at 5 in the afternoon
what does it mean to gargle stanzas at the end of a sword
chew on line breaks when bullets are locomotives
spit verse to shadowbox perspective
what does it mean? there is a reason?
what does it mean? THERE IS A REASON
youth are pumping blood into microphone hearts
spitting ink through hungry teeth onto willing paper
there is a reason maturing spirits are vice gripping pens and pages
mics and stages
readied faces searching for placement
and individuality in a society that tells us
we are everyone else.
there is a reason
teething babies are biting the hand feeding carnage
to bulimic souls unable to keep down regurgitated stream of comatose.
men and women have died for their writing
made difference where there couldn’t be
change where once was enslaved hearts, panicked minds
men and women have died for their writing
lived for their writing bled for their writing
loved for their writing starved for their writing
left family for their writing been exiled
sacrificed for a pen.
Now, we are soul prostitutes singing lipstick bladed songs
on the corner of ocean-smoke
soul prostitutes in this imploding supermarket of spirits
(don’t be pimped by society’s suppression)
wade in the waters of artistry—
join Mandelstam Pasternak
Akhmatova Dante Brutus Lorca
make change and difference with pens
live into word
weave culture within breath
reconstruct the fallen temples of art
have society help us join these epic banshees,
exile me, slice my wrist
and eat our heart so they can taste poetry
then ask writers what does a pen mean to you?
“Pens” is by Tim Stafford and Dan Sullivan. Copyright © 2008 by Tim Stafford and Dan Sullivan. Used by permission of authors. All rights reserved.
More about DEATH FROM BELOW
Comprised of 2 seasoned slam veterans, Dan Sullivan and Tim Stafford. Dan held the title of Chicago Grand Slam Champion for 3 years and is winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award. Tim is the current Chicago Grand Slam Champion and Slam Master of the legendary Mental Graffiti Poetry Slam. Together, they’ve performed on HBO’s Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. And each have been published in a National Poetry Slam Anthology.
Read Full Biography
Poems From The Big Muddy
Edited by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Jeremy Richards, and Scott Woods, featuring Dan Sullivan of Death From Below
Available by special order
High Desert Voices: The 2005 National Poetry Slam Anthology
Edited by Scott Woods, featuring Tim Stafford of Death From Below
Available by special order
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.
How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?
Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.
And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car
as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.
“Consolation” is excerpted from The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins. Copyright © 1995 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
More about Billy Collins
2001-2003 U.S. Poet Laureate. Author of 8 books of poetry. Editor of 2 poetry anthologies. He has been featured on NPR, and his work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar. He is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library "Literary Lion."
Read Full Biography
The Art of Drowning
by Billy Collins
The Trouble with Poetry
by Billy Collins
From the U.S. Poet Laureate and bestselling author of "Nine Horses" and "Sailing Alone" comes a dazzling collection of poems--his first in three years. High school & older.
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems
by Billy Collins
Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.
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COULD YOU SHARE THE ADVICE THAT’S HELPED MOST WITH YOUR OWN WRITING?
“Well, I was once told years ago to keep my mouth shut and to keep my eyes and ears open. And for a long time I heeded that advice. But for a poet to keep his mouth shut, over the long haul, I think is death.
What’s most helpful to me is…
Well, reading has always been the most important thing and certain books have been very key in my development as a writer.
The Prelude by William Wordsworth is a stupendous work and it’s incredibly large in my sort of biography as a writer.
And then after years of not writing poetry…after a hiatus of 5 years of not writing poetry, I read the Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid and that got me started again. I just think, well, well I mean it was…I thought my life as a poet was over and when I read that, it began again. And I think when I say ‘books have been important,’ that’s the sort of thing I mean. I will, even in the short term when I’m stuck, when I’m writing rough drafts of poems and unable to finish them, I’ll go back and read Lorca or Machado; poems not necessarily in English because I don’t want too much of the English to carry over to my own English.
And, well you never know, I mean sometimes the reading of Kafka’s…well fiction helps a great deal. The reading of Kafka’s short fiction, his tiny prose pieces, or parables and paradoxes, and the diaries. And some of the early poems of Wallace Stevens – he’s the poet in most recent American poetry who’s been the biggest influence on me. And I do read him. But not as much as I used to. I find him too seductive. When I read Stevens, I want to write like Stevens, and alas sometimes I sort of do, but what I write is not as good as Stevens, so it’s usually kind of sad to see myself influenced by Stevens and yet come up so short. But reading Kafka is tremendous. I read him all the time. And I reread him. And I read, read, read, read, read, read without ever fathoming what it is that I’m reading, which is great.
Other writers I favor are Calvino and Beckett, Borges, and Landolfi, These are prose writers that are key for me.
I’ve left out Shakespeare. Every year I read a couple of plays of Shakespeare but I don’t know how that figures into my work. I think that figures into my spirit, or being, which later feeds my work. I mean there’s a great deal that one reads whose influence is hard to find in one’s work. But you know, all this reading sort of fills up the soup of my inner life; this dark soup that I ladle into little dishes and work on ‘til they become poems. Well, something like that. I mean that’s rather too culinary an image.
I also read my contemporaries.
The gorgeous poems of Charles Wright. I wish I could write like that but I can’t.
The tight, dark wit of Charles Simic
Those astringent lines of Louise Glück’s
The great energy of Jorie Graham, her power.
These are contemporaries that I admire. They feed me, but I’m not sure that they influence me. There’s a difference. You can go out to a restaurant and eat, but what you eat there is not necessarily what you cook for yourself. Maybe that’s not a very good image.
Anyway, I guess my advice is, to you and to myself, is to read. Read as much as you can.”
More about Mark Strand
Former U.S. Poet Laureate. Author of twelve books of poetry and winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. Recipient of the Bollingen Prize, the Edgar Allen Poe Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Award.
Read Full Biography
New Selected Poems
by Mark Strand
More than 25 years after the appearance of Strands first "Selected Poems," readers have a magnificent new gathering of his work. "New Selected Poems" represents an essential compilation from one of the most beloved and honored American poets at work today.
Man and Camel
by Mark Strand
A luminous new collection from this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet--his first since 1998--is a toast to life's transience, strangeness, and abiding beauty.
Authors and books referenced as influential to Mark Strand
Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989
by Samuel Beckett
Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing", the medium in which his ideas were most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S.E. Gontarski.
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Jorge Luis Borges
In a perfect pairing of talent, this volume blends 20 illustrations by Sis with Borges' 1957 compilation of 116 "strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination," from dragons and centaurs to Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat and the Morlocks of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine."
Italian Folktales
by Italo Calvino
Chosen by The New York Times as one of its best books in the year of its original publication, this treasure trove of 200 lively Italian folktales has won a cherished place among fans of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In this collection, Calvino combines a sensibility attuned to the fantastical with a singular writerly ability to capture the visions and dreams of a culture.
The Wild Iris
by Louise Glück
This collection of stunningly beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive. 1992 National Book Award finalist.
The Dream of the Unified Field, Selected Poems 1971-1994
by Jorie Graham
The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.
The Iliad
by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Since it was first published more than twenty-five years ago, Robert Fitzgerald's prizewinning translation of Homer's battle epic has become a classic in its own right: a standard against which all other versions of "The Iliad" are compared. Fitzgerald's work is accessible, ironic, faithful, written in a swift vernacular blank verse that "makes Homer live as never before" ("Library Journal"). This edition includes a new foreword by Andrew Ford.
The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony & Other Stories
by Franz Kafka
The best-known novellas and stories of one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century. Included are "The Judgment," "A Country Doctor," and "A Hunger Artist." New Foreword by Anne Rice.
Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories
by Tommaso Landolfi
Book of Poems / Libro de Poemas (A Dual-Language Book)
by Federico Garcîa Lorca
Although the life of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was tragically brief, the Spanish poet and dramatist created an enduring body of work that remains internationally important. This selection of 55 poems from the 1921 collection "Libro de poemas" represents some of his finest work. Imbued with Andalusian folklore, rich in metaphor, and spiritually complex.
Border of a Dream
by Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado is Spain's master poet, the explorer of dream and landscape, and of consciousness below language. Widely regarded as the greatest twentieth century poet who wrote in Spanish, Machado-like his contemporary Rilke-is intensely introspective and meditative. In this collection, the unparalleled translator Willis Barnstone, returns to the poet with whom he first started his distinguished career, offering a new bilingual edition which provides a sweeping assessment of Machado's work. In addition, "Border of a Dream" includes a reminiscence by Nobel Laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez and a foreword by John Dos Passos.
Complete Works of Shakespeare
by William Shakespeare
The discipline's most reader-friendly Shakespeare anthology is now available in a Portable Edition: a boxed set of four portable, paperback volumes organized by genre. This convenient new format features all the content of the hardcover original, "The Complete Works of Shakespeare," 5e, in four paperbacks packaged in a slipcase. The four separate genre volumes can also be purchased on their own. A balanced editorial approach, a highly respected editor, and proven apparatus combine to make Bevington's the most accessible "Complete Works" available. A prestigious editorial board provides state-of-the-art scholarship and interpretative balance on each play. In-depth historical coverage helps students understand the cultural context behind each play, without dictating their reading of it. Extensive notes and glosses give students the support they need to understand Elizabethan language and idiomatic expressions. For those who want Shakespeare's complete works in a portable format.
The World Doesn’t End
by Charles Simic
In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens lived long enough to see the establishment of his unquestioned position as one of the significant and enduring poets of twentieth-century America. For more than four decades he had written poetry marked by inclusive thoughtfulness, magical evocativeness of language, and an unmistakable individuality that sets him apart from his confreres. The present volume was published to honor him on his seventy-fifth birthday, October 2, 1954.
The Prelude
by William Wordsworth
This book is the first to present Wordsworth's greatest poem in all three of its separate forms. It reprints, on facing pages, the version of The Prelude that was completed in 1805, together with the much-revised work published after the poet's death in 1850. In addition the editors include the two-part version of the poem, composed 1798-99. Each of these poems has its distinctive qualities and values; to read them together provides an incomparable chance to observe a great poet composing and recomposing, through a long life, his major work.
Black Zodiac
by Charles Wright
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award "Black Zodiac" offers poems suffused with spiritual longing--lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
Stephen Radio has heroes but still doesn't know how to spend his time
he finds himself most weekends in stranger's kitchens in apartments that
want to be starships, and, if he's lucky,
the windows open and the leopards spill out onto the shoulders
of Boston, beloved city,
eldritch swamp colossus
Stephen Radio likes rooftops
he hunts for parties for the chance to scale the crowns of buildings
making friends with Allston high plains BBQers
and mission hill art school cat burglars
pushing his way past bathrooms hallways filled with boys with wrists
and elbows like scissors and board games and girls
with eyes lurking under bangs like deadly swingsets
maybe you know him
maybe you can tell from his name
Stephen Radio has his eyes fixed on the sky
he only knows where his feet are during wishes
he's a simple boy, he's no greaseball tightpants
with steamengine thighs
there are earnest dreams sprinkled on his cheekbones
he's trapped in the upper margin of the hub of the universe
where fire insinuates itself into the rust of the clouds
and the dotted lines of constellations comes into focus
And the rooftop argument is always the same
and the glowing coral mercury windows say
"You, will not find what you are looking for up there"
and Stephen Radio says
"I will not stop looking
I can taste these rooftops through my sneakers
I can taste the sky through my sneakers
the frozen descending marine songs of clouds
are attached to my shoulders
the stars live between my eyelashes"
and the shattered desert choir of bricks say
"You, will not find what you are looking for up there
You are lost
You are lost like the insomniac kiteflyers who cannot
rise above the living nightmare of dead family
and settle for windtangled orphancy
You are lost like cars, and lamps, and candles
You are lost like the moon has lost the sun for
the sake of the earth"
Stephen Radio says
"The trees know why we run
we turned one blonde unblinking eye to the ocean
and went wolf on oxygen
our jeans can turn these streets into forests
our fingers can turn rooftops to magic
Boston is a god
I will not stop looking"
And All the Lost Baseballs ask
"How can there be a god in heaven
if there are so many here on earth?"
Stephen Radio says
"the whole and the hule of the concealed divinities
of the sky can balance upon open eyelids
understand that to preserve is an active adventure of the heart"
and the ghosts of weathervanes howl
"the more you look, the less you'll see
it is impossible to learn how
to not touch something by touching it
the harder you search for the openness
of the world the more you will find
the concealment of the earth
the mystery is always the mystery
and it is never anything else
You, will not find what you are looking for up there"
Stephen Radio says
"I will not stop looking
there are questions that curl like saltwater
there are questions that smother like marbles
there are questions that smother like front end crash
and ten ankle pile up
but there are answers that can hold you like skin
there are answers that breath back
there are answers that can spread like radio signals
I will not stop looking for them."
“Stephen Radio” is by Brian S. Ellis. Copyright © 2007 by Brian S. Ellis. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.
More about Brian S. Ellis & Shira Erlichman
Both members of the 2007 Cantab Lounge Slam Team, Brian is its current slam champion and Shira showcased on Finals Stage at Nationals. They've each published their chapbooks through Destructible Heart Press and both have been a strong addition to the Boston spoken word tradition.
More about Brian S. EllisMore about Shira Erlichman
Advertisement For A Human Being
by Shira Erlichman
Available by special order
Shira Erlichman
"The Piano Speaks"
For the musicians staying at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA
I am the mental hospital piano and I have seen hands.
Yes, you would call them hands, but I call them night-creatures
clasping chords in their teeth, translucent spiders cooing dawn home.
I’ve been touched by black boil-fettered fingers fat as tarantulas,
let me tell you about the spiders I’ve seen…
These are not hands, these are sky-scouting web-weavers.
These are not hands, these are teeth and eyes, and fingers like legs,
running, jumping, leaving, they are the quiet legs of children standing after being left,
they are the hospital-socked shuffling arrivals at 2 a.m. come to sleep in aluminum beds.
I have heard them speak in the language of pressed flowers: take me home.
And I remember every single last one of them:
Shamanistic surgeons, they tore music out of me with a rusty knife.
Dogs the color of urine, they howled hymns in neon hospital moonlight.
Heroin-blooded teenagers who wet the bed they were so terrified
of their hallucinations, they smoked me instead and got higher than Jesus.
I remember those towering monuments to loneliness
you call hands. They were peacocks spreading in front of me
and I saw their coats of bruises.
They sang like the dying, sang like mothers to children,
sang like a choir of prophets in jail.
They wanted me honest. They liked me honest which is to say I was broken.
Nobody on staff fixed my raspy keys.
My notes remained sour and they played me like loving:
not quite perfect, unlearned, without a how-to-book—played me solemn,
like tortoises making at loving, slow and fevered and with their eyes closed.
And though some were old, they were all ancient,
they were all legends for sleeping in hell while others walked through and got out.
They played symphonies that tore-down the walls
so drugged up hall-walkers fled their loneliness and joined in the fever.
They played onetime, completely improvised, endless and sky-scraping AIDS cures,
they played healing and they tore off their tourniquets for me to kiss
their bloody wildfires.
I have never belonged to opera-houses or your mother’s cushy living room.
I live with those who bang daylight out of moondust,
now you tell me how you do that unless you are built of magic.
They study their own burning bodies.
They transcribe smoke signals and tear the lightning from their throats.
I have heard five-tongued creatures smash sunrise into pulp.
I have seen rhododendrons blossom thunderously
with the quiet hope and hunger of living and dying
as they play and bloom and smash and burn.
And you call them hands,
you call them hands.
“The Piano Speaks” is excerpted from Advertisement For A Human Being by Shira Erlichman.
Copyright © 2007 by Shira Erlichman. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.
More about Shira Erlichman
A showcased poet on Finals Stage at the 2007 National Slam Championship.
2004 Worcester Youth Grand Slam Champion and Worcester 2005 Grand Slam Champion. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Small Presses series.
Advertisement For A Human Being
by Shira Erlichman
Available by special order
The mountain is holding out
for news from the sea
of the raid on the redoubt.
The plain won’t level with me
for news from the sea
is harder and harder to find.
The plain won’t level with me
now it’s nonaligned
and harder and harder to find.
The forest won’t fill me in
now it, too, is nonaligned
and its patience wearing thin.
The forest won’t fill me in
or the lake confess
to its patience wearing thin.
I’d no more try to guess
why the lake might confess
to a regard for its own sheen,
no more try to guess
why the river won’t come clean
on its regard for its own sheen
than why you and I’ve faced off across a ditch.
For the river not coming clean
is only one of the issues on which
you and I’ve faced off across a ditch
and the raid on the redoubt
only one of the issues on which
the mountain is holding out.
“The Mountain Is Holding Out” is excerpted from Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon. Copyright © 2006 by Paul Muldoon. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber, Ltd. All rights reserved.
More About Paul Muldoon
2003 winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of twelve collections of poetry. Recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the Aspen Prize for Poetry, the Shakespeare Prize and the European Prize for Poetry.
Read Full Biography
Horse Latitudes
by Paul Muldoon
The title of "Horse Latitudes," Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. "Horse Latitudes "is a triumphant collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.
Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems
by Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since "Hay" (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.
I’m 29 years old and am trying to figure out most days what being a man means
I don’t drink fight or love
but these days I find myself wanting to do all three
and I don’t really have a favorite color anymore
but I did when I was a kid and back then that color was blue
and back then
I wanted to be an architect an artist an astronaut a secret agent
a ranger for the world wildlife fund
and a hobo
when I was six years old or so I used to always throw my clothes
into my blue and yellow
plastic vinyl
Hot Wheels
car carrying suitcase
and run away
to beneath the dining room table
I’ve made out with more girls then I wish I’ve had
and not nearly as many as I’d like to
I’ve been in love 4 or 5 times
so I doubt I’m gonna try that much more often
and I spend most days making pictures or thinking about making pictures
or masturbating
or thinking about masturbating
and I dream too much and don’t write enough
and I’m trying to find God everywhere
trying to figure out this thing He made called a man
and the television set tells me that it’s bareknuckled bombing
and if I had a tank or was a movie star my penis would be huge I guess
cuz that’s what they keep telling me
and that’s what I want cuz that’s what being a man means
or least that’s what they keep telling me
my pops
takes care of us
he puts the garbage out twice a week
he drives forty five minutes to water flowers
I’m sitting on the bus on Valentine’s Day
when a seven year old boy carrying a book of Robin Hood
sits down next to me and asks me my name
Anis.
That’s a nice name.
Thank you what’s yours?
Quentin.
Anis? Do you wanna read with me?
so tell me what my fists are writing
my fingers open like gates when I type
and the wind is swinging in the wake
I lift bridges with poems
and forests grow
in my mother’s eyes
I am looking for GOD
Quentin
while this world tries to forget you for trying
for this world hates your eyes Quentin
for they are simple and pure
and Quentin
this world hates your fingers
little like the stems of flowers
for not being able to pick up the things you have left behind
because you are still learning to do so
I don’t drink fight or love but these days Quentin
it’s only two out of those three that I don’t do
and I’ve fallen in love 6 7 8 9 10times Quentin so I don’t want to want to
but I still do
and I want to find GOD
in the morning
and
in the tired hands of dusk
at the mouth of the river and down by its feet
but instead
I drive sixty
through residential streets
praying to hit children
so that they may stay forever angels
and may stay forever full of night and light and red and crayons
and simple outstretched limbs trying to pick up way too much way too fast
forgetting what it means to be a person
in a world
where egos are measured with tabloids
where automobiles double for morals
where beliefs are like naps
you leave them behind when somebody touches you
and in a place where oil always takes precedence over life
I find myself sitting on a bus watching a small boy float down like fresh
water
carrying a book I used to
asking if I want to share what he sees if only for a little while
and I do
and then asks if I want to give to him what I see if only for a little while
and I read to him
and then says to me he is going to show me the world
and starts reading me the words himself
moving his hands beneath the sentences
not noticing all the time what is written
sometimes skipping whole lines
because his fingers are moving faster then what they are showing his eyes
and I want to tell him
slow
down Quentin
slow down
you don’t have to touch and go
you can see it all if your finger whispers on one word
slow down Quentin
and hold what you see just a little bit longer
for you are already holding my attention
and in a world of fast faces
I’m looking for God everywhere
trying to figure out a little better
this little thing He made called a man
“For Those Who Can Still Ride An Airplane For The First Time” is excerpted from Solomon Sparrow’s Electric Whale Revival by Anis Mojgani, Derrick Brown, Mike McGee, Buddy Wakefield, Dan Leaman. Copyright © 2007 by Anis Mojgani. Revised version used by permission of the author and Write Bloody Publishing. All rights reserved.
More About Anis Mojgani
2007 World Cup Poetry Slam Champion. Individual National Poetry Slam Champion of 2006. And 2005. Featured poet on NPR, HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and subject of the documentary, Slam Planet: War of the Words.
Read Full Biography
Spoken Word Revolution Redux
featuring Anis Mojgani by Mark Eleveld
Solomon Sparrow’s Electric Whale Revival
by Anis Mojgani, Derrick Brown, Mike McGee, Buddy Wakefield, Dan Leamen
Available by special order
open-door poetry: episode 2
Complete show will play automatically, or choose a poet below to jump to a chapter.
the poets
Billy CollinsDeath from Below
Brian S. Ellis
Shira Erlichman
Donald Hall
Taylor Mali
Oveous Maximus
Anis Mojgani
Valzhyna Mort
Paul Muldoon
Patricia Smith
Mark Strand
Buddy Wakefield
about
open-door poetry
featured books/cds/DVDsshow credits
background
past episodes
episode one
poetry contest
with Mark Strand
The Borders Open-Door Poetry Contest is now being judged! The top 10 (5 adult, 5 student) poems submitted, in text or in video, will be published on our site right alongside poems by Pulitzer-Prize winner Mark Strand in April - National Poetry Month! KEEP YOUR SUBMISSIONS COMING, as we’ll soon be announcing our next contest judge. Click here for more contest details, and for some heartfelt encouragement from Mark.
get writing advice
with Paul Muldoon
Borders Open-Door Poetry invited you to submit your writing question (as text or video) for a chance to have it answered in a video response from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Muldoon—hundreds of you did and during April’s National Poetry Month episode, Paul has answers for you! KEEP YOUR QUESTIONS COMING. Read more.
Gather & Write
with Anthony Tedesco
Any attempt at words expressed is worthy of celebration, so get in on the gala at opendoorpoetry.gather.com
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