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Readings in Contemporary Poetry

Paul Muldoon and Susan Wheeler

Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea

Event Details
Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 6:30 pm

Dia:Chelsea
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City 

Readings in Contemporary Poetry curator, Vincent Katz provided an introduction for the evening's reading.

Free for Dia members; $10 general admission; $6 admission for students and seniors 

Advance ticket purchases recommended. Tickets are also available for purchase at the door, subject to availability. 

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University Belfast. Muldoon’s recent collections of poetry include Poems 1968–2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and Maggot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary fellow of Hertford College. From 2007 to 2017 he served as the New Yorker’s poetry editor. Muldoon is currently Howard G. B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Director of the Princeton Atelier, and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey.

AT TUAM

Among the hundreds of children who stare up at us from their       

                                                            septic tank

is James Muldoon, who died in 1927
at the age of four months. At least he would never be forced to             

                                                              thank
the Lord for mercies large or small. That cry to high heaven
must come from Brendan Muldoon, who died in 1943
at a mere five weeks. A teenage nun bows before an unleavened
host held up by a priest like a moon held up by an ash tree.
In 1947 the eleven month old Bridget Muldoon, a namesake of 
                                                            the mother

who would shortly give birth to me,
has already distinguished herself as being a bit of a bother 

while Dermott Muldoon, three months old in 1950, is about to
                                                            join the ranks
of my foster-sisters and foster-brothers

in that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another
                                                              wasp’s face
and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering
                                                               place.

Susan Wheeler is the author of a novel, Record Palace (Graywolf Press, 2005), and six books of poetry. In 2012 her volume of poetry Meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her awards include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in ten editions of Best American Poetry as well as in New American WritingNew YorkerParis ReviewTalisman, and many other journals. She teaches at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Grieved The Death You Therefore Bring Us Is Your Own
                                                                                      
after Mark Lombardi

into the drive osmium is sovereign not that tantalum has been liberated under ytterbium’s
verification and once the stabilization board moves the protactinium zarqawi without rubidium
bringing the suiciders to kill women in lanthanum deep in the lanthanum and trailing our militaries
like allawi like it is sovereign but before the mendelevium the thulium the erbium and gilded sofa
to foil the timing had taken hold the forces in formal sovereignty green zoned among the
poloniums the retracted uuo and ununnilium hassan and hassium antinomy to bismuth and
brotherly behavior hold those forces in their glory

             manilus                                                                       

                                                                                               harithas

                syracuse                             little rock                                    houston


                                noose                                           veritas

dress down o molybdenum and hafnium whip up screens and suiciders as dysprosium militaries
has said publicly cut head off cut someone’s you just can’t o mercury o tin ununquadium graves
in hilla the ambassador his contractor the ambassador her lutetium and now they reign rain down
the rhodium with nails and forceful despots underlaying our most specious coalition integuments
the corpses of ruthenium down in fallujah down with the smallest stricken hand no head rolls unto
its manganese where weeps a rebuilt school young teacher cloaked the allah either gold or lead

            dust                                         uncuts


                         off


negraponte                                                                                         ricciardone


          cobalt                            copper                          rope 

 

 

Books

Photo: Don Stahl

Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology

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