Poetry

Reading: Eating Together by Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957) is a American poet born to Chinese exiles. His father, who plays an important role in his poetry, was the personal physician to Mao Zedong. His poetry has been compared to John Keats, Rilke and Roethke and he was influenced by old Chinese poems like Tu Fu, which shows in his economic use ...
Reading: Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse by Lucie Brock-Broido
Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) was an American poet who said that a poem is a 'thing that wounds'. Her poetry looks and sounds original, but she was influenced by Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve. The soul, like a trinket, is a she. I ...
Bird
Oh beguiling creature, I will observe you quietly without the desire to know your scientific name, or how many there are of you. I will follow you in your flight, I will look at the color of your feathers, or at the mournful bend of your beak, and call you that. I will listen to ...
Reading: Dusk by Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout (b. 1947) is one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets (language poetry: started in the 1970s; language dictates meaning; reader participates in constructing meaning) . Her poetry is characterized by the clashes of the elements they are composed of. She has said that she is seeking to ...
Reading: Lines on my face by J.D. McClatchy
J.D. McClatchy (1945 - 2018) was a prolific poet, editor, critic and librettist from Pennsylvania. He was praised for his polished and erudite verse. Lines on my face Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma ...
Call me if you are a publisher and I will see if I can mention you in my next poem
Reading: Wedding by Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald (b. 1966) is an Oxford-educated classicist and award-winning poet. She has written poetically about ecology and wrote her own take on the Iliad. Her 2016 book is called "Falling Awake". I read the 1996 poem "Wedding": Wedding From time to time our love is like a sail and when the sail begins to alternate from tack to ...
What is it like to be a pig’s brain
I read about scientists who brought a pig's brain back to life for 36 hours. What is it like to be a pig without a body? If that question is answerable, it can be answered only in the language of the mind, which is produced by that pig's brain.
Reading: Discussing Death with Death Row Inmates by Liao Yiwu
Liao Yiwu (b. 1958) is a Chinese poet and critic of the Communist regime, for which he has been imprisoned after he wrote a poem about the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. I read one of his poems today, on his 60th birthday. Discussing Death with Death Row Inmates Each night of stars is a ...