Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Alan Bernheimer and Jean Day
Tuesday, May 14, 2019, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea
Event Details
Tuesday, May 14, 2019, 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 are recommended. Tickets are also available for purchase at the door, subject to availability.
Alan Bernheimer’s new collection of poetry, From Nature, is forthcoming from Cuneiform Press in 2019. Recent work has appeared at Across the Margin and in Delineator, Equalizer, and Hambone. Born and raised in New York City, he has lived in the Bay Area since the 1970s. He produces a portrait gallery of poets reading on flickr. His translation of Philippe Soupault’s memoir, Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism was published by City Lights in 2016.
BREAKFAST
Forgetting words
The moment you
Hear or read them
Is one way to avoid
Plagiarizing but just
Keep their flavor
And then try
Expressing that
In your own words
As if you could
Own words
You can't even
Keep thoughts
From slipping away
They’re the slipperiest
Of all the slippery
Things in life
The hotel elevator
That rises way
Past the roof
And slips across
A higher landscape
A different neighborhood
Why not ask
If any of these
Places will be
Open for breakfast
Jean Day is an editor, a poet, and a union activist, whose Triumph of Life was just published in 2018 by Insurance Editions. Recent poems can also be seen in Across the Margin, Breather, Chicago Review, Delineator, Jongler (French), and Open House, as well as in her Daydream, published last year by Litmus Press. Earlier works include Early Bird (O’Clock, 2014) and Enthusiasm (Adventures in Poetry, 2006), among other books. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, including the recent Resist Much/Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street, 2015). She lives in Berkeley, where she works as managing editor of Representations, an interdisciplinary humanities journal published by University of California Press.
FROM A DISTANT STAR
Sectarian quiet is a myth.
I knew it would be like this:
Milky sky of late
wild turkeys in traffic
an earlier and earlier dinner.
It pays to be smart
in any universe.
But we are down to the final call
for volunteers
–from The Triumph of Life
Books
Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology