Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Sylvia Gorelick and Cole Swensen
Tuesday, April 4, 2017, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea
Event Details
Tuesday, April 4, 2017, 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.
Sylvia Mae Gorelick
Sylvia Mae Gorelick is a poet, writer, and translator based in New York City. Her chapbooks include Olympians, we are breathless (Poetry will be made by all!, 2014) and Seven Poems for Bill Berkson (Kostro Editions, 2009). Her work recently appeared in the anthologies In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill, 2016) and For Bill, Anything: Images and Text for Bill Berkson (Pressed Wafer, 2015). The University of Chicago Press published her translation of Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento by Paolo D’Iorio in 2016, and her translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre is forthcoming from Exact Change Press.
POEM
Emerging somehow into power
you see the fog fall in and out of night
and women on the street
days go by in a vertigo
of wills
and wanting some
word to reach
to reinvent what
seeing means
once you wake to
war in your
country and
the games are
all over
you want to
shatter but
shattering
can’t be
had
life lines moving
through us
we are only a few
hours into
dark and
already time disappears through our
hands — the truth
does not exist — it’s everybody’s angel
all the things that keep us from thinking
there’s a difference between the abstract body we love
and the body suddenly precarious
sheltered by danger
there is nothing outside
representation
but the trembling core and us inside it
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen is the author of sixteen books of poetry, including the upcoming On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017). Swensen is the recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and a National Poetry Series selection, among others. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Also a translator, she has won the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation and has translated over fifteen volumes of contemporary French poetry into English. Swensen is also the coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009). She divides her time between Paris and Providence, where she teaches at Brown University.
Debord
à la derive de la Bièvre de Guy Debord who could sweep through any city
on a curve could river aloft even an old river knotted in the middle
of the night can be traced by its heat Debord who refused to follow
the meticulous scent only a city could in such debt could a city disarticulate
its flickering grid in walking is the destruction of city planning the de-
Haussmannization of the mind on an October afternoon filtered light fingering
a break in the seal cast aside decades later a group of young people
got into the habit of walking a straight line across Paris no matter what buildings
rivers or other obstacles happened to get in their way they unlocked
the genetic sequence and not without effect on the English Inclosure Acts of
the 18th and 19th centuries though this is difficult to document which is one
of its principal strengths.
Books
Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology