Monday, February 22nd / Tenth Muse 92nd St Y / John Ashbery

If you happen to be around NYC on Monday, February 22nd, 2010:

Tenth Muse Reading

Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y

with Marcella Durand, John Gallaher, and Robert Elstein

Hosted by John Ashbery

I’m attempting to put together my reading right now. I made the mistake of thinking about the venue. I looked at pictures of the space. I thought about the people who have read there. Needless to say, I’m now in the middle of a panic attack. Maybe they’ll let me run around the track a few times before the reading.

Anyway, the very first recording I ever heard of a poet reading was a recording of Robert Lowell at the 92nd St Y.

Just sayin.

To close, here’s a poem from Marcella Durand:


So Rare
To Anselm


so rare to write a poem at work
waiting for the chips to come down
or to calm down with the chips
light burning bright next to me
the computer screen bluer than oxygen
a mixture of chemicals?—what is inside
a computer screen anyhow?—while
people are waiting downstairs talking,
while walking down the street
looking for a mailbox, while wondering
why gerunds are so immensely
interesting, so proliferous.
And to think of interviews one could
conduct. And prone operations, while
laying, raise a hand. Scrutinize eyes,
if one is still open, the foggiest
retina of an idea, a whale passes
distantly thru the iris, an ocean
of gelatin, effervescent, with an
addition of attendance. So I write
you, the computer, and you, the
telephone, and you, the voice mail
hiding yourself away inside boxes
and cable-wires, and across this
distant space of a double-arched
harmonic acoustic freeway, with
walls the consistency of absorption,
you, waiting in the basement, you,
the one with the pen in your hand,
you, typing, thinking of excruciating
existence, the drawers and the penholders,
the whiteout and the shipping lanes,
the trademarks and the mutual funds.
Whether to invest in something the
size of a tropical depression emanating
from a continent filled with roads and
roads for the escapees of weather and
of circumstance. This water well was
planned a long time ago, during a certain
war, between the trusted and the vilified.

And in the quietude of the international

bureau, the peace of a carpeted fluorescent

skyscraper window office, the transactions

take place, in the meditative clicking of

a river without a dam, and the blueprints

of a bridge.