Archive by Author

Boland, Eavan 1997

Wednesday, March 19, 1997

Six o’clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister
Your dark, your housewives starting to nose
Out each other’s day, the claustrophobia
Of your back gardens varicose
With shrubs, make an ugly sister
Of you suburbia.

– Eavan Boland, “Ode to Suburbia” 

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Listen to Eavan Boland’s Poetry Center of Chicago reading:

Read this interview with Eavan Boland from PBS Newshour:

Conversation: Eavan Boland

Jeffrey Brown talks to Irish poet Eavan Boland.

 

All night the room breathes out its grief.
Exhales through surfaces. The sideboard.
The curtains: the stale air stalled there.
The kiln-fired claws of the china bird.

– Eavan Boland, “Exile! Exile!”

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Watch Eavan Boland read and discuss her work on The Writing Life:

Eavan Boland on loss, history and poetry

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More info on Eavan Boland⇒

Bly, Robert 1977; 2007

Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Friday, November 4, 1977
Vintage poster of Robert Bly's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Robert Bly’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

– Robert Bly, “Waking from Sleep” 

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Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.

Buy this audio recording featuring Robert Bly⇒

In the deep fall, the body awakes,
And we find lions on the sea-shore–
Nothing to fear.
The wind rises, the water is born,
Spreading white tomb clothes on a rocky shore,
Drawing us up
From the bed of the land.

– Robert Bly, “Poem in Praise of Solitude”

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Listen to Robert Bly present on The Art of Longing at the 1995 Minnesota Men’s Conference:

Robert Bly Lecture: The Art of Longing (1995)

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More info about Robert Bly⇒

Boehme, Doro 2013

Saturday, April 13, 2013
with Lindsey French

It was Spring but that gave her a feeling of Christmas, this rush of people with bags and parcels all a gift to her and she felt so in control of the direction her life was taking moment by moment as she crisscrossed the city underneath in such a crowd, stood close to the doors so she could always read the blue-tiled station names, unfamiliar and all seductive. Then a hand moved up her thigh.

– Doro Boehme, from “Teaching Water How to Drown”

Continue reading “Teaching Water How to Drown”⇒

Read this interview with Doro Böhme and others at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago:

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Watch Doro Boehme present some of Yoko Ono’s work at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection:

Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection – Doro Boehme

This is “Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection – Doro Boehme” by School of the Art Institute on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people…

More info on Doro Boehme⇒

Black, Baxter 2005

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

And the wind is the moan of the prairie
That haunts and bedevils the plains
The soul stealin’ kind that can fray a man’s mind
Till only his whimper remains

-Baxter Black, “The West”

Broadside of “The West” by Baxter Black (Signed)

Buy the signed broadside of “The West” by Baxter Black⇒

He was every burnt out cowboy that I’d seen a million times
With dead man penny eyes, like tarnished brass,
That reflected accusations of his critics and his crimes
And drowned them in the bottom of a glass.

– Baxter Black, “The Buckskin Mare”

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Listen to Baxter Black’s mini-NPR segment, “Unlocking the Mysteries of Cows:”

More info on Baxter Black⇒

Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei 1999

Wednesday, February 24, 1999
with Marilyn Chin and Arthur Sze

The reservoir is trying to freeze over
with an expanding map shaped like an angel
Separated lovers on a coast keep walking
toward each other. Low sun reddens
their faces without heat

 – Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “The Reservoir”

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Listen to Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s 1999 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:

Read this interview with Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge from BOMB Magazine:

http://bombmagazine.org/article/2835/mei-mei-berssenbrugge

Working backward in sleep, the
last thing you numbed to is what
wakes you.

– Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “Concordance [Working backward in sleep]”

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Watch Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge read some of her work at UC Berkeley:

Lunch Poems: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Born in Beijing, China, and raised in Massachusetts, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge molds language with seemingly effortless beauty and grace that invites the reader on a journey between worlds. She has published three books of poetry. Tune is as she reads a selection of her poems before a live audience at UC Berkeley.

More info on Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge⇒

Berrigan, Ted 1979

Friday, June 1, 1979
with Ron Padgett
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Vintage poster of Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett giving a poetry reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett giving a poetry reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

I woke up today just in time
to introduce a poet
then to hear him read his rhymes
so unlike mine           & not bad
as I’d thought another time

– Ted Berrigan, “Hall of Mirrors”

Listen to Ted Berrigan reading “Hall of Mirrors:”

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Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

– Ted Berrigan, “Words for Love”

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Vintage poster of Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Paul Carroll, Alice Notley, and Peter Kostakis givnig a poetry reading in honor of Frank O'Hara at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Paul Carroll, Alice Notley, and Peter Kostakis givnig a poetry reading in honor of Frank O’Hara at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse
as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures
The birds that were singing this morning have shut up
I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no
It’s a strange bird.

– Ted Berrigan, “Frank O’Hara” 

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Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

More info on Ted Berrigan⇒

Bellow, Saul 1976

Friday, February 6, 1976
Francis Parker School
Vintage poster of Saul Bellow's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Saul Bellow’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

I am an American, Chicago born–Chicago, that somber city–and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

– Saul Bellow, “The Adventures of Augie March”

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Read this interview with Saul Bellow from the Paris Review:

The Art of Fiction No. 37

Drawing by Rosalie Seidler. The interview “took place” over a period of several weeks. Beginning with some exploratory discussions during May of 1965, it was shelved during the summer, and actually accomplished during September and October. Two recording sessions were held, tota…

Listen to Saul Bellow read from “Humboldt’s Gift:”

Saul Bellow Reads from “Humboldt’s Gift” and “Henderson the Rain King,” October 10, 1988 by The Paris Review

Bellow reads from “Humboldt” and then “Henderson,” with audience Q/A starting at about 50:55.

More info on Saul Bellow⇒

Beachy-Quick, Dan 2004

Monday, February 2, 2004
with Peter Streckfus and Arielle Greenberg

Must I anger and must my anger pearl,
My anger pearl, must I pearl, must I polish
Madness daily, rub nacre into a world
Perfect, round, what in my hand should finish

-Dan Beachy-Quick, “Sonnet”

Broadside of "Sonnet" by Dan Beachy-Quick

Buy the broadside of “Sonnet” by Dan Beachy-Quick⇒

…Or buy the series broadsides of Dan Beachy-Quick, Peter Streckfus, and Arielle Greenberg⇒

Read this interview with Dan Beachy-Quick from the Kenyon Review:

A metaphysic of the page, a mode of inquiry called wonder: an interview with Dan Beachy-Quick ” Kenyon Review Blog

B. K. Fischer, writing about two of Dan Beachy-Quick’s books for the Boston Review, locates what she sees as a struggle for him and his contemporaries-or for any poet born […]

Record no oiled tongue, diary–
Note my lantern bruises the low
Clouds with light the evening
We talked. Almonds in a bowl;
She ate none. I did
Not bid her remove her dark
Gloves as sometime before she had done.

– Dan Beachy-Quick, “[Record no oiled tongue, diary]

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Watch Dan Beachy-Quick discuss his work on The American Literary Review’s A Literary Thought Bubble series:

A Literary Thought Bubble — Dan Beachy Quick

Karl Zuehlke interviews Dan Beachy-Quick for A Literary Thought Bubble, created by The American Literary Review.

More info on Dan Beachy-Quick⇒

Baraka, Amiri 1982

Friday, November 19, 1982
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Vintage poster of Amiri Baraka's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Amiri Baraka’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

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The gaunt thing
with no organs
creeps along the streets
of Europe, she will
commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown
with no organs
with sores on her insides…

– Amiri Baraka, “Babylon Revisted” 

Continue reading this poem⇒

Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. (Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold.

– Amiri Baraka, “The Liar”

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Watch Amiri Baraka read his work with Rob Brown on saxophone accompaniment:

Amiri Baraka “Somebody Blew Up America”

“Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka with Rob Brown-saxophone, recorded live on February 21, 2009 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY.

More info on Amiri Baraka⇒

Ashbery, John 1977

Friday, April 15, 1977
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Vintage poster of John Ashbery's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of John Ashbery’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Buy this poster⇒

Never mind, dears, the afternoon
will fold you up, along with preoccupations
that now seem so important, until only a child
running around on a unicycle occupies center stage. 

– John Ashbery, “Like A Sentence”
Read this interview with John Ashbery from the Paris Review:

Ahead, starting from the far north, it wanders.
Its radish-strong gasoline fumes have probably been
Locked into your sinuses while you were away.
You will have to deliver it.
The flowers exist on the edge of breath, loose,
Having been laid there.
One gives pause to the other,
Or there will be a symmetry about their movements
Through which each is also an individual.

– John Ashbery, “Flowering Death”
Watch John Ashbery discuss poetry with TIME Magazine:

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