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"lyre and tuba together
joined"
Gregory
Corso
(March 26, 1930 -
January 18, 2001)
Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then
marriage would be possible -
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her
Egyptian lover
so i wait - bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of
life.
Trading Tigers with Slovenia
Poberesˇ kamen, ga tezˇkasˇ v dlaneh,
in odsotno zamrmrasˇ:
Tu je bil tiger.
You find a stone, you weigh it in your palm,
you murmur
absently: There was a tiger here.
(Gregor Strnisˇa -- Transl. T. Lozˇar)
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his
boots,
Catches tigers
in red weather.
(Wallace Stevens)
Live Performances
On January 22, Enid Dame, Jan
Clausen, Chocolate Waters and others from last month's "Because They
Did" feature recorded the complete collection at Caffè Taci for CD
and proofed galleys for inclusion in the Big City Lit™ Print
Series.
On February 12, Big City Lit™
will sponsor a staged reading of "The Fox and the Ocelot," an
erotic verse fable in one act. 9:30 p.m., The Underground Lounge (107th at West End).
On March 19, a dozen award-winning
poets and musicians from Lyric Recovery Festival™ at Carnegie Hall
2000 appear at Caffè Taci in multilingual performance as part of the
United Nations project, "Dialogues Among Civilizations Through
Poetry" (www.dialoguepoetry.org). On March 29, James Ragan, who
featured with Galway Kinnell at LyR Carnegie and has read for four heads
of state, reads at the UN itself along with Yusef Komunyakaa and Joyce
Carol Oates.
In This Issue
Note: Big City Lit™ Call for Submissions - Deadline,
March 1 - Consult Submissions Page
Poetry
We've chosen to mark Valentine's Day on the Twelve-12 page, with a
venture in risk we call "Roughly Love," featuring a remarkable
trilogy by Tobias Deehan, plus poems by Nicholas Johnson, Brant Lyon and Amanda
Ysamp. The mid-winter shadow play known as 'Groundhog Day' (February 2) derives
from a pagan German ritual whose Urprognosticator was the less compliant (and
reportedly less edible) badger ("Dachs"). Work in our feature
smorgasbord, "The Occasional Groundhog," includes
Beowulf translator Bertha Rogers wielding her Anglo-Saxon skills and
artist's brush to depict the groundhog as Grendel, as well as retakes on the
shadow from Thom Ward of BOA Editions and others. Our "Global Poem
Zones" series continues, with pink prose on Jaipur alongside poems by
Robert Minhinnick of Poetry Wales and Patrick Henry of Yorkshire. Ron
Price hits the road-from-nowhere despair, while Peter Chelnik sets two hearts
off on criss-cross-country anywhere transcendance. The Big City, Little
page focuses on Prague, with work by Pulitzer-nominee James Ragan and by
Viktor Tichy. Yves Ros reopens his carnet on Bridge City
Lit/Paris.
Fiction
We inaugurated the Fiction page in
January with shorts. This month, our own George Dickerson contributes "The
Cause," a feature-length return to the Fifties, when Americans, black and
white, first took the crash course of Brown v. Board of Education.
The story recalled to mind these lines by Galway Kinnell:
Did I come all this way only for this,
only
to feel out the world-braille of my complicity,
only to choke down
these last poison wafers?
("The Last River" (Body Rags))
Essays
Part Two of Senior Essayist Maureen Holm's "Ego-Free, The Poem
Aloft" is complemented by Thom Ward's "A Little Primer on What
& How," which reaffirms that "[t]he poem is the cry of its
occasion / Part of the res itself and not about it." (Wallace Stevens),
exposes the relationship between what and how, and that between poetic surfaces
and poetic temperament, concluding with imagination and
surprise.
Articles
Martin Mitchell, veteran editor (Pivot, Rattapallax) and recent
Cambridge (England) resident, cycles bridges and brews in near-by Grantchester,
with a wave to poets Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owens. Whatever Robert Dunn,
co-editor of Medicinal Purposes and originator of NYC's
"Poet-to-Poet" circuit, cannot re-engineer of Pennsylvania's
infrastructure he happily re-covers in, "The Bridges of Moccasin
County."
Reviews
"A great poet poses unity within
diversity, synthesis within apparent analysis. The good poet's song drones; the
great poet's song modulates." So writes Michael T. Young
(Transcriptions of Daylight) in his review of Derek Walcott's
Tiepolo's Hound, whose mutations reflect the various
assertions of the artist's power over the authority of history. Maureen Holm's
review of Mark Nickels's Cicada has been reclaimed from our former
cyberspace to reappear here. Tireless Tim Scannell briefly reviews chapbooks by
Patricia Wellingham-Jones, William Hart and Donna Cartelli.
Interview
Vic Schermer's long interview with poet Elaine Schwager (I Want Your
Chair) has garnered so much positive feedback that we have left it in place
for the convenience of new visitors to the magazine (Hello, Singapore!) and of
those who may not have finished reading it.
Series on Series: The Cornelia Street Café
"What sets The Sunday Series at
Cornelia apart from other readings is its intimate cabaret atmosphere. New
networks, friendships, alliances form as first-time listeners wind up
shoulder-to-shoulder with heard-it-all circuit veterans." (Curator, Angelo
Verga)
Series Reviews:
Sherod Santos and Charles Wright at the 92nd Street Y (January 8)
The Chelsea Hotel Tour (January 14)
New Page Loads:
This month we've loaded three new
pages, Letters, Free Expression and Other Arts. Appearing on Free Expression is "Advice
and Consent," an article which argues forcefully against Senate
confirmation of John Ashford (Sen. Mo.-R), George W. Bush's nominee for Attorney
General, based on Ashford's 25-year record of right-wing extremism. The author,
journalist Marty Jezer, also warns against Gail Gordon, Bush's choice for
Secretary of the Interior, an advocate of corporate "self-regulation,"
whom even Republicans denounce as the ally of polluters.
Note regarding font selection:
The magazine is intended to appear in Palatino.
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