Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Susan Howe and Kate Colby
Monday, February 11, 2013, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea
Monday, February 11, 2013, 6:30 pm
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City
Introduction by Vincent Katz
Susan Howe
Susan Howe is known for innovative verse that crosses genres and disciplines in its theoretical underpinnings and approach to history. Layered and allusive, her work draws on her Irish roots and early American history weaving quotation and image into poems that often revise standard typography. Her most recent work includes The Midnight(New Directions, 2003), Souls of Labadie Tract (New Directions, 2007), and THAT THIS (New Directions, 2010). Howe has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including, most recently the 2010 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She has been a Stanford Institute for Humanities Distinguished Fellow, as well as the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She taught for many years at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where she held the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities.
Kate Colby
Kate Colby is author of four book of poetry, including Fruitlands (Litmus Press, 2006), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award in 2007. Other published works include Beauport (Litmus Press, 2010) and The Return of the Native (Ugly Duckling Press, 2011). In 2013 she was awarded a fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. She is a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she also runs a quarterly poetry series. She lives and works primarily in Providence, RI.
Through the Moonlight
(from Return of the Native)
Let us always be about
to be leaving
one another for the evening
uncurl my fingers and kiss
the center of my palm
feel the chemistry
I bleed so you can
see yourself in it.
Slowly rowing
through water
lilies, a lady
reclined at the en
d of a better century
begging you, please
don’t rain on my tracing paper.
Living in cities,
architectural moments
when you become the space
that the body contains
—feel the physics—
and shrink with me
under my para-
pluie of bent tines.
I’d like to be the hairdryer
trained on the pipes
in the freezing ceiling of your cellar
to go ahead and sell the substance
even if the shadow isn’t budging.
Sluggish bees in late season
suckle empty soda cans.
to be leaving
one another for the evening
uncurl my fingers and kiss
the center of my palm
feel the chemistry
I bleed so you can
see yourself in it.
Slowly rowing
through water
lilies, a lady
reclined at the en
d of a better century
begging you, please
don’t rain on my tracing paper.
Living in cities,
architectural moments
when you become the space
that the body contains
—feel the physics—
and shrink with me
under my para-
pluie of bent tines.
I’d like to be the hairdryer
trained on the pipes
in the freezing ceiling of your cellar
to go ahead and sell the substance
even if the shadow isn’t budging.
Sluggish bees in late season
suckle empty soda cans.