Poem by Chris Olson

The City

A society, one with great poise

Fills the earth with elegant noise.
Cutting through the air, leaving behind trails
With the words in our minds leaving a vast amount of detail!
Capture the words before it’s too late,
For the words will settle and desecrate.
Everyone around young and old
Will listen to noise and let them u  n   f   o   l    d
Through thick, thin, smooth, or rough
The noise turns to words sure enough
A once elegant noise has transformed
Covering everything like a bee’s swarm
Words to sentences the noise becomes
As steady as a beat from a snare drum
Sloshing around in our brains
The words of wisdom will remain
Society’s blindfold has been lifted away
Power of noise will sustain
This noise should ascertain
Ensuring all the people refrain
From always playing the same, old, damn game.

discontinuous. poem by Cola Hines

just call me on the phone

I’m sitting here at home

I like to be alone

but I want to know you’re there

liquid pink fringe 

(poly

valences) 

     your hands, your belly : tilt back 

against the table —

happy sometimes — a sunny night —

I don’t think you’re 

ever finished;

you end up where you once began

pick book up & start again

crackling 

slender form

you taunt me

from the shelf —

truncated coyote howl

saying step aside I need a coffee

Joanna Solfrian reading tomorrow

  6:30-7:30 at the Lower Gym Friday March 23rd 2012

          Featuring

JOANNA SOLFRIAN author of Visible Heavens (Kent State University Press), winner of the 2009 Wick Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship; nominated for a Pushcart Prize        

PLEASE JOIN

 ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING....& Other Special Guests

artwork by Chris Olson

To Zakynthos. Sonnet by Ugo Foscolo

Never will I touch your sacred shore again

where my young form reclined at rest,

Zakynthos, regarding yourself in waves 

of the Greek sea, where Venus was

virgin born, and made those islands bloom

with her first smile; nor did he bypass

your lacy clouds and leafy fronds

in glorious verse, the one who sang

of fatal seas, and of the broad exile

after which, exalted by fame and by adventure,

Ulysses kissed his rocky native Ithaca.

You will have nothing of your son but his song,

motherland of mine: and our fate already 

written, the unmourned grave.

translation by Nick Benson of Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827), Sonnet IX, "A Zacinto" written 1802-1803

photo by Ian Engelberger

On Tommaso Landolfi

There is often the greatest pleasure in reading those authors whose stories defy our attempts at definition or description...
[Click here for notes on Tommaso Landolfi by Nick Benson, from NER Digital.]