Third Event: Ryan Murphy reads from his poetry
May 19th, 2007 by Axel
Sunday May 20th 2007, 7.00 pm
Vermeer’s Theory Of Light
Here is a string tied to a sun,
tulips erupt from every mouth.
Tell again the drained music
of a fountain—
Earlier, this was earlier…
Yellow leaves on a yellow street,
a past soggy with sunlight.
The needle trembles on its pin,
here is a string tied to a sun—
The mirror gone out like a candle.
Conviction Want
Each day is everything
like the rest
By threes undoes us.
Thrush eve’s thunder,
surf of traffic from the west
Side Highway.
Seashore machine
By sevens, by threes.
The high metallic whine
of katydids or a neighbor’s
air conditioner.
This hammer heart
Snow white, bone white,
cloud white, stone white
Empathy is divisive.
Just as discreet systems of undersea movement—each ripple to the eye individually insignificant—gather force and momentum to bring down ships and topple stilted oceanfront paradise homes, so does the mesmerizing re-arrangement and -organization of otherwise innocuous phrases, fragments, and lists in Down With the Ship culminate in groundswells of unexpected resonance. These poems are above all made things, with their doubts and hesitations, elegies and brand names, bravado, despair, poverty and exuberance, materials through which an insistent lyric resonates. Ryan Murphy is the winner of the 2005 Chelsea Magazine Award for Poetry and recipient of a grant from the Fund for Poetry. Down with the Ship was published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2006.
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