Tag: Open Mic

Wednesday, July 11, 2018, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

Originally from Minnesota, JULIE HART has lived in London, Zurich, and Tokyo, and now in Brooklyn Heights. Her work can be found in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Anti-Herion Chic, Beautiful Losers, Juniper and at juliehartwrites.com. She is a founder, with Mirielle Clifford and Emily Blair, of the poetry collective “Sweet Action.”

Memento Mori

I see you’ve noticed the skull–it was his
idea. After donating the brain
to Princeton, it was picked clean by beetles
at the Science Museum, sawn in half,
hinged, fitted with this hook. I could keep things
in it—old keys, rubber bands, paper clips,
worn erasers—but I won’t. Yes, I talk
to it. The teeth still seem to be him, the rest—
not so much. Some people find it creepy,
but to me it’s comforting, this part of him
that thought and ate and talked—above all, talked.
I’m still honing my thoughts against his head
as a whetstone, imagining his jaw
dropping, his eye sockets thrown to the sky,
his laugh filling the whole room, any room.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Wednesday, June 6, 2018, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Free

STEPHEN BLUESTONE lives and works in New York City, where he was born. His volume THE LAUGHING MONKEYS OF GRAVITY was nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry. THE FLAGRANT DEAD, also nominated for the National Book Award, has been called “original and beautiful” by Gerald Stern. Louis Simpson called the same volume “delightful and astonishing.” Bluestone has won The Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, The Thomas Merton Prize, as well as prizes in the Robert Penn Warren Competition and elsewhere. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, and many other journals. His latest book, THE PAINTED CLOCK, was released this year on March 1 and is already in its second printing.

From “The Unveiling”

Now the world’s only
Season’s growing older,
The low stubble
Of the shuttling sky
And night, too,
A blanket of conclusions.
Of course, we could also say:
When night comes,
Whatever’s in the ground
Will keep like a new year
In winter’s closet,
And, sooner or later, it, too,
Will make ghosts of all
Brief distinctions.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com