Marie Howe's Mary Magdalene Poem

Here's one of the best loved poems by official New York State Poet Marie Howe, who visits this coming Tuesday, 9/17. Like many of Howe's poems, it is inspired by Christian tradition and Catholic experience:

MAGDALENE–THE SEVEN DEVILS

by Marie Howe

“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.

The first was that I was very busy.
The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.
The third — I worried.
The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.

Poem continues on the eclectic spirituality website, Patheos, which Newsweek in 2011 called one of "21 Ways To Be Smarter in 2011". Read the rest of the poem:  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/michaboyett/2012/04/poem-a-day-friday-marie-howe/

Read more about Marie Howe's upcoming visit to UAlbany here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_lea13.html

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Frank Bidart Reads on the Fourth of July

Here's a poem to contemplate during a fireworks (or firefly) display from Frank Bidart, award-winning poet who reads at the NYS Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga on July 4th:

The Third Hour of the Night
by Frank Bidart

When the eye

When the edgeless screen receiving

light from the edgeless universe

When the eye first

When the edgeless screen facing

outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe

When the eye first saw that it

Hungry for more light

resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST

As if a dog sniffing

Ignorant of origins

familiar with hunger

As if a dog sniffing a dead dog....

 

Read more: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/146745

 

Bidart has a new collection out, Metaphysical Dog (2013). Writing in the NY Times, Stephen Burt says, "Bidart writes through passion, but also through subtraction, leaving out all but the statements that seem essential to the soul, the desire, the wisdom or the memory at hand. The results, however austere, can be revelations: his poems are doors best opened with cautious attention — behind them you might even see yourself." More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/books/review/metaphysical-dog-poems-by-frank-bidart.html?_r=0

 

The complete summer reading schedule here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html. All events are free and open to the public.

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NPR Interview with Joy Harjo

On how to get your artistic voice back, if you've lost it...

"I [had] felt like I had lost my voice, too. And sometimes, to find it ... what I've learned is it needs to be lost for a while. And when it wants to be found, you'll find it.

"But I would say is that you just put yourself in the place of poetry. You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

"And, you know, it's like looking for love. You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you."

Read more or listen to the interview: http://www.npr.org/2012/07/09/156501436/joy-harjos-crazy-brave-path-to-finding-her-voice

Harjo visits UAlbany tomorrow, 4:15 and 8pm, Campus Center 375, with a catered reception by SUNY Press to follow the evening event.

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Larry La Fountain-Stokes on Sexual Persecution and Migration

Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Puerto Rican poet and performer who will participate in tonight's "Diasporican" Cafe at UAlbany, speaks in San Juan at a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference about the persecution of people for their sexuality, and the profound effect this has on international migration (emigration and immigration).

View his talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoyjL23Bwhc

Books by La Fountain-Stokes include the scholarly work, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (2009), and the bilingual fiction collection, Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (2009).

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Zaqtan in the Times Union

Paul Grondahl of the Times Union profiles major Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, and interviews Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah. Both will visit Albany tomorrow:

Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, whose application for a visa was held up in a case described as "ethnic profiling," has rescheduled a hastily canceled April U.S. tour and will visit the University at Albany on Tuesday on a triumphant note.

"We are so happy to have him here finally, but it was a disappointing and frustrating case of an entrenched and bizarre U.S. bureaucracy," said Dr. Fady Joudah, a Houston physician who also is a Palestinian-American poet, winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize and a translator of the poetry of Zaqtan (pronounced ZOCK-tawn), who writes in Arabic.

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Poetic-license-3943081.php#ixzz29NwMLZTw

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A poem about the labor of poetry by Salgado Maranhao

Songwriter-Poet Salgado Maranhao visits us this afternoon. Here is a poem about the labor of poetry.

"Of Will," translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

Of the scratches sculpted
by a hand
only those that glow
survive.
A nomad, morning
strips bare the sun
on the surface
of the flesh,
multiple,
in the giddiness of language.
There are no floodgates
No paths prepared
No Saharas
or Viennas
In everything a battle
bedecked
with flowers
and coffins.
In everything a carving
on the other side
of things that show themselves
but don’t surrender,
that only in a verse are seen,
in the peeling of the underside.
(Offenses that in exile
drown the lyre
crimson red,
record through jubilation,
erase through rage.)
The breath of rhythm’s second chance,
the intimacy of unvoiced ways,
the breath of will, the breath of days.

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"Hurry"-- A Poem About a Young Child

Marie Howe, our new State Poet, was inspired by her preschool age daughter to write the following 2008 poem:

Hurry

By Marie Howe b. 1950 Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store

and the gas station and the green market and

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,

as she runs along two or three steps behind me

her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.  

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,

Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—

you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.  

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

 

Marie Howe will be inaugurated as New York's official State Poet on Thursday, September 20 in Page Hall on the University at Albany's downtown campus.

 

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Marie Howe, New NY State Poet, reads a poem

Here's a video clip of our new State Poet Marie Howe reading her poem "Star Market" during her last visit to the Writers Institute in 2008. Howe will be inaugurated and will read from her work at UAlbany on September 20th.

The poem was first published in the New Yorker in January 2008.

The Star Market

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/01/14/080114po_poem_howe#ixzz259WQ51xu

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Poet Henri Cole Tonight

Here is Henri Cole's elegy for his father, "Oil and Steel."

My father lived in a dirty dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil—my inheritance.
Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

Henri Cole will share the stage with author Jamaica Kincaid, tonight, Tuesday, July 24th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

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A Thanksgiving Poem

"The First Thanksgiving" by former New York State Poet Sharon Olds (1998-2000):

When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object,
like a soul in a body. More

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