Assumption College, Emmanuel d'Alzon Library
D'Alzon Arts

Past Poetry Readings, 2004-2005

Student Poets from the Phoenix
Plus Featured Poet Laura Menides
Friday, April 15

Janet Shainheit & John Hodgen  
Friday, February 18

Linda Warren & George Drew
Friday, March 18
Diane Wald & Michael Burkard
Friday, November 19

bg Thurston & Elizabeth Lund
Friday, October 15        

Debra Kang Dean & Michael Teig
Friday, September 17

2001-2002 2002-2003 2003-2004 2004-2005
2007-2008
D'Alzon Arts Schedule
Future Poetry Readings Poetry Gallery
April 15, 2005
MAKING ALLOWANCES
by Laura Jehn Menides

If Mozart and I were having dinner
and he rushed to the piano
during dessert, I'd understand.
I'd finish my cake, listening,
as sounds explode the air.
 
If Einstein were kissing me
and suddenly became distracted,
I'd think it okay and no insult:
he's working on a theory—
my body's relation to some star.
 
If Shakespeare were my father
(my mother was a dark lady who
might well have inspired poetry)
and he left me one day
—this gets harder—
to be with a fair friend,
I'd know the price we mortals pay
to our demons of work and art.
 
If I leave you, my love,
it won't be hubris that prompts me
(it was jest to name those names)
but a brazen, reckless urge
to chase and corner that demon,
and without encumbrances,
to possess him entirely.
Laura MenidesLaura Jehn Menides is a literature professor at WPI and has published critical works on Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Robert Frost, H.D., Flannery O'Connor, and other authors. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Diner, Sahara, The Issue, The Worcester Review, The Galley Sail Review, Anemone, and Kafla International. She's written several short stories and an opera libretto based on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

March 18, 2005
Linda Warren
Linda Warren Mount Holyoke College graduate Linda Warren received an MFA from Cornell University. Since 1987, she has published twelve novels for Berkley Books, Harlequin Books, and Bantam/Doubleday/Dell.  In addition to her fiction, Warren's poetry has appeared in Diner and The Worcester Review.
 As a performance poet, she has presented her work at venues throughout central New England.  She has been a guest commentator for NPR through WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts, and does technical writing and quality assurance for a Natick, Massachusetts, firm.

She thinks poetry is dangerous but can be handled safely if the poet curbs her impulses toward reckless abandon, except when it’s justified.
Insomnia

It’s not the tossing and turning,
the trip to the bathroom
wondering if you’re hungry,
If that’s the cat making strange noises
In the empty house,

it’s the realization that you have joined the ranks
of the night crew, those who populate the dark:
arsonists waiting for 
the black backdrop to the bonfire
crazy survivalists in Arizona
checking their nightscopes,
insomniac South American novelists
dreaming up the idea that
we’re all just figments of someone else’s dream.

You wonder if you should get up,
get yourself something to eat,
ingest a little normality,
replace the banal song lyric
that keeps repeating in your brain
with something more like Brahms, 
or at least early Dylan,
maybe dig out a pair of walking shoes
from the back of your closet,
set off from here in search of Orpheus,
who could sing you to sleep.
but you decide to give that idea 
more thought 

because you are unarmed 
except with poetry 
and there are surely other creatures on that search: 
bears for example, awake weeks before
the equinox, pacing through the night,
insomniac bears walking the dark neighborhoods.
Even now they could be gathered on your back porch
waiting for you to come and let them in
because they can’t sleep
and they are very hungry. 
George Drew
I was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York, where I currently reside. I have been published in journals such as Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Hollins Critic, Maine Times, Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Quarterly West, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, Vermont Literary Review, and many others.  Toads in a Poisoned Tank, my first book, was published in 1986, and a chapbook, So Many Bones (Poems of Russia), in 1997 by a Russian press, in a bilingual edition. One of my poems received an Honorable Mention in the Robert Frost Foundation’s  poetry competition, 2002, and another will be appearing in The Breath of  Parted Lips: Volume II, an anthology for The Frost Place, Cavankerry Press. A poem will also be appearing in Visiting Frost, an anthology, The University of Iowa Press, spring, 2005. I am the winner of the 2003 Paumanok Poetry Award.

George DrewUPCOMING PUBLICATIONS AND READINGS

I have poems upcoming in Connecticut Review, Poetry East, Sou’Wester, Robert Frost Foundation (“Frost Notes”) website, and my book, The Horse's Name Was Physics, has been accepted for publication by Word Tech  Communications,  to appear under their imprint, Turning Point, scheduled for release in Spring 2006.

I have readings upcoming at Bucks County Community College (PA), Border’s 2K4 Series (Bangor, ME), Mount St. Mary’s College (NY), Assumption College (MA), and the State University of NY at Farmingdale (Paumanok Poetry Award reading).

I was in residency at the Vermont Studio Center last March, and I just completed a stint as a Guest Poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH.



 
 THE WOMEN

Well yes, we did come and go all right,
and let me tell you it wasn’t easy
in high heels and by three or four
in the morning when the horizon looked
like a gray slab of bad salmon
even the most experienced of us
were bitching about our sore feet
and bad backs. You get the point.
Even scotch straight up didn’t help,
and the pianist the Brixtons had hired
didn’t, either---God, he was horrible!
Simply horrible! Scotch did help that,
each tinkling key becoming more and more
distant the more intoxicated one became.
And honey, we were loaded! Fifty years ago
we were young, and with a war going on
what could we do but drink and talk?
Believe me, we were good at that.
There was Fran and her new fake fur,
Maxie and the silver flask she kept
in her cleavage to impress the men,
Gracie Maddox and her parasol silk-
screened in the latest Japanese motif,
and especially Bertha and her new beau.
Oh my, what a handsome man he was,
all muscles and waxed black hair
that gleamed under the chandelier,
and a head as perfectly proportioned
as the marble bust of Hercules
that graced the foyer. By and large,
the men were all stuffed shirts,
interested only in cricket and politics---
except of course for their bank accounts.
If we talked about them at all it was
to wager which had the cutest derriere.
And it was unanimous---Bertha’s beau,
hands down. His name was Michael,
and contrary to rumour he was what
we talked about over double shots,
not the art of some sculptor who liked
naked men. The only Renaissance we knew
was a club in Soho that was stylishly apt
and aptly dull. We twirled our glass
bead pearls and lusted after the backside
of that Italian god. We did come and go,
our group as malleable as Bertha’s smile
as she hung on his arm. And oh,
how fifteen pairs of eyes would flick
as he passed by! How the mascara ran!
But when we went forth to meet the dawn
with tea and crumpets in some restaurant
with shells and sawdust on the floor,
it was I on Michael’s arm---Diangelo,
by the way: two words, not one.

Copyright Chiron Review

February 18, 2005
Janet A. Shainheit

    I was born in Montague, Massachusetts and have lived (with the exception of interludes in North Carolina and Nigeria) in New England all my life.  Married since 1963, my husband and I were Peace Corps Volunteers in Nigeria between 1964 and 1966, an experience we consider one of the most important of our lives.  I taught English for awhile and gradually oozed into library work.  Since 1975 I’ve been the Library Director at Worcester Academy.

    I’ve been published in the Worcester Review, the Larcom Review, and Diner among others and have won prizes in the WCPA Poetry Contest and the Worcester Magazine Poetry Contest.  I write because it’s sweaty frustrating work, because the successes are few and sweet.  I’ve been part of a workshop run by John Hodgen for quite a few years now – an experience of unalloyed bliss.
 of late my nouns

are slippery
sliding off and away
leaving me
seated at the turnstile 
with a glass of welcome
cauliflower breasts from the butcher
and broth from the baker
my house locked with a carrot
the whales closed against the storm
shuddering as the liver flashes

waking with a cry
my tongue too full
to tell
I want somehow somewhere
in my stumble over
this stubble of words shorn
some sense harvested.
some monkey at my mouth’s typewriter
finding one line
of poem

John Hodgen--See John's biographical information from our  October 18, 2002 poetry reading.
November 19, 2004
Diane Wald
Diane Wald and cat
Diane Wald has published over 200 poems in literary magazines since 1966. She was the recipient of a two-year fellowship in poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, and The Open Voice Award. She also received a state grant from the Artists Foundation (Massachusetts Council on the Arts).

She has published three chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, and Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her latest book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. She works for animal welfare at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
 A Ptarmigan                   
These two—they have such a pale understanding
of each other—not pale in a washed-out way but pale
as in understated, fine, subtle,
like a pale wine-stain that becomes part of the fabric's design
and would be missed if removed. And here they are,
two people on a very small island (the size, let's say,
of a 1950's convertible), in the dark, in the fog,
with the silken waters lapping
all around, and they are not afraid
exactly, just weary. They've brought with them, as always,
flashlights; one even has a lantern. They have
jackets, waterproof ones, and they have
conversation of an interesting type and they have bright,
bright eyes
in the darkness. They do not touch, for they do not
know each other well, but you can tell they will touch
at some undesignated future point, or would touch
if circumstances demanded it—would touch in a minute-
to save themselves, say, if the water rose too high,
or to huddle together if the wind became too fierce,
or the rain. Or they would touch if the conversation,
now at another interesting juncture—clever, you might say,
although never sarcastic—turned to reveal that one of them
suffered pain. What are they saying? In the cool drift
of the water and the night, delicate words can be heard
on the brine-scented air. One mentions a book, the other pretends
to have read it, but knows enough about it in fact
to be able to ask a fair question. This goes on for some time
and they are growing somewhat cold
and wearier, and although they do not like to admit it,
a little afraid. A ptarmigan dips down through the fog
to look at them, yet they do not kiss. The expressions
on their faces are kind, if puzzled, if bemused. What they do
not know is that the land is just nearby
beyond where the fog drops off and their line of vision
dissolves. They can hear the frogs on shore
beguiling their mates in deep voices,
yet their weariness stops them from believing
they could stretch out their four hands and touch them.

Michael Burkardcurrently teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.  He is the author of nine books of poetry, the most recent being Unsleeping and Pennsylvania Collection Agency (both 2001). His poetry - daring, dangerous, darkly intense - has won him a Whiting Writers' Award, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Besides teaching at a number of colleges and universities, most recently in the MFA Fine Writing Program at Syracuse University, Burkard has worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children impacted by alcoholism. His poems have appeared in APR, Ironwood, Quarterly West, Paris Review,  Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Central Park, Salt Hill Journal, Volt, Plum Review, and Zone 3.
(Biographical information from www.writerscenter.org)
Moon's Rule
by Michael Burkard
 
Complete lack of peace,

so same dust which is
only as some consistency
to the moon's rule over

and through the night
trees. Here, eat this
flower as you might eat
a stranger, stem and all

and road given to going
crazily between peace
and hatred for agreement,
water slight against slight

road, the door to the dream
so open.


Copyright © Michael Burkard

October 15, 2004
bg Thurston
bg Thurston bg Thurston is a graduate of Vermont College's MFA in Writing Program.  Her poetry has appeared in Tar River Poetry, The Comstock Review, The Worcester Review, and The Christian Science Monitor.  Currently she teaches poetry for Vermont College’s Lifelong Learning Program and at the Lifetime Learning Center in Newton.  She hosts the poetry series for the Borders Bookshop in Framingham.
 Climbing Mount Grace
I was sent from myself as a messenger to myself.
And my essence testified to myself by my signs.
 Ibn Al-Farid – "Inner Secrets of the Path"

My swollen eyes are hooded by sky.
     Between these humps of mountains,
          the wing-shadows of birds

bright or beaten against the empty air
     all around me. Noisy messengers
          come from beyond, deliver my signs.

Broken by spring, I wait
     to be done with its firsts,
          refuse forsythia's blossoms.

Heaven folds back into blue
     while below March roars,
          melted snow tumbling over stone.

Published in The MetroWest Daily News, April 28, 2002


Elizabeth Lund

Elizabeth Lund covers and reviews poetry for The Christian Science Monitor. She also edits the paper's online poetry site, Of Poems and Poetry.

In her spare time, she teaches a poetry workshop at MCI-Framingham, the women's prison in Massachusetts. Ms. Lund earned her MFA from Cornell, where she then taught creative writing. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including the Connecticut Review, Kalliope, and the Dalhousie Review. She has been a finalist for the Brittingham Prize and the Four Way Books Intro Prize. In 2002 she read at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

To read one of her CSM columns, go to http://weblogs.csmonitor.com/the_poetic_life/

December 1
       by Elizabeth Lund

One great blue heron
punctuates the shore,
huddling in first snow.

What keeps this steel-eyed
juvenile here, weeks after
the others have flown?

Gray on gray he stands
like a wrought-iron
question mark.

What does he read
in the tinfoil sky,
its indecipherable script?

Does he stand, like me,
awaiting a sign, has he
hunkered too far down?

How do winged creatures
lose their lift, their bold
exclamation point?

One could say the sky
turns a deaf ear, that some
stories are meant to trail off.

He stands ram-rod straight,
like a stubborn suicide,
or a righteous sacrifice.

But I’m not ready to let
him die, as the season’s
first storm spits and swirls.

Fly away, bird, don’t wait
for another to show you
the long route home.

Sometimes we must bolt
without maps, without words,
just one lonely, terrifying leap.
September 17, 2004Debra Kang Dean
Debra Kang Dean
Debra Kang Dean has published three collections of poetry including: Back to Back (North Carolina Writers’ Network, 1997), which won the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition, judged by Ruth Stone; and News of Home (BOA, 1998), which was co-winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Award, and Precipitates (BOA, 2003). 

 Her work has appeared in many journals and a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000), Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City (2000) and Yobo: Korean American Writing in Hawai‘i (2003).  She is on the graduate faculty of Spalding University’s brief-residency program and teaches online through the UCLA Extension School’s Writers’ Program.  She lives in West Peterborough, New Hampshire.







Michael Teig Michael Teig
Michael Teig was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He attended Oberlin College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His poems have appeared in many journals including FIELD, The Black Warrior Review, The Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, and The Gettysburg Review. His first book, Big Back Yard (BOA Editions, 2003), was selected by Stephen Dobyns to receive the inaugural A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He is a Co-Founder and Co-Editor of jubilat. Currently he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he works as a freelance writer and editor.

“The poems in Big Back Yard have something that is missing from much contemporary poetry; that is, they are a pleasure to read. They delight the mind while also being moving and serious and intelligent….  they also have this ability to make the world fresh again and make us realize once again why we love the world, despite its failings and our own. This is a great gift for a poet to have and it makes Big Back Yard a rich beginning.”
                 —Stephen Dobyns, from the introduction.

Big Back Yard attests to the proximity of the miraculous, that we are in the neighborhood of quiet alarms and alarming quiet. These poems don’t try to blow the mind up with pyrotechnics, rather they come through the front door, take off their hat and set mines under the furniture of the ordinary. “Sometimes a windmill glints above the treeline.” A “three-legged dog stumbles into my knee.” Marvelously composed with strange decorums and keen perception, Michael Teig’s work shows us the surreal plenitude of dream with composure, with a dignity in recognition of life’s privations and surfeits.
            —Dean Young

Teig’s panoramic, visual acuity and prodigious sensibility enables us to perceive domestic and pastoral themes with endless variety and surprise. Modest, accessible diction and familiar narrative are juxtaposed by an exquisite and sensual vibrancy. Shifting between the ordinary and the extraordinary, readers of Big Back Yard are thereby invited to re-evaluate their own worlds with fresh eyes. Teig is unquestionably a major new talent, a witty and vivacious storyteller in love with life’s luminous details.
            —Pleiades

Teig's work understands that the finest poetry is at once mystery and clarity…These poems conceive a world where familiar things are utterly strange, and the possibilities for profound tenderness are manifold.
            —Boston Review
 When I Looked Next

I found the orchard anxious with bees and a bowlegged dog
and I knew I was home.

On the opposite hill, the houses strung out like laundry
along the ridgelines and the fields face up.

Shuttling sun. The neighbor lady
sweeping as if god said, Sweep.

I found my father with a seed catalogue and a blue plastic pail.
Hold this, he says, Hold still.

For years I found his shirts in my closet. Apparently the way
I scratch my head is his.

I saw him later at the gas station and spent two nights across
from his ruined face in a bar.

After the music stopped I went on
more or less singing.

In one story we can’t stop playing whiffle ball, the trees
done up in uniforms of dusk.

In another my friends and I phone every Richard in the book
including Richard Richards

who is a cousin. I remember a brief cameo with a fire engine,
the sunflowers grown stiff and bankrupt

in the yard, unrelenting.
I have the pictures.

They show a man younger than myself with something like evening
settling beneath his eyeglasses,

the afternoon so warm and simple it looks ridiculous
to believe in a day like that.
Take a look at our list of favorite poems !
D'Alzon Arts Schedule

Emmanuel d'Alzon Library, First Floor
Assumption College
500 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA  01609
508-767-7272

Page last updated: April 6, 2006