PSH: Poets of the Week

Bio (auto)

Diane Elayne Dees writes poetry, fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction. A series of her poems is being read on "The Naturalist's Datebook," a segment of Martha Stewart Living Radio. Diane publishes a blog, The Dees Diversion, and has poetry forthcoming in Mobius, The Eleventh Muse, HazMat Literary Review, The Binnacle, Out of Line, Ghoti, and other journals.

Talkin' Nagin Hurricane Blues

...............................(found poetry)

Thousands of people stuck in attics;
old ladies, man, stuck in attics.
Somebody need to get their ass on a plane
and sit down and figure this out right now.
They're feeding the public a line of bull;
they're spinning, and people are dying down here.
I need troops, I need five hundred buses.
They're thinking small, and this is a major, major deal.
This is crazy. Somebody need to get their ass on a plane--
I'm not one of those drug addicts looking for something
to take the edge off their jones. I am thinking very clearly.
We authorized eight billion to go lickety-quick
to Iraq. Get their asses moving to New Orleans.
I need everything.

The Geography of Ground Zero

Raining ash and shattered glass,
floating paper, streams of smoke
and screams of anguish. Clouds
of memories shift in the light.
Then the silence of glaciers,
and the ablation of moments frozen
forever. Years from now, what will
be said about the alluvial plain of despair
at the bottom of civilization? Who will
lecture on the geology of revenge?
Who will listen?

Bio (auto)

Burt Kimmelman has published four collections of poetry -- Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, and Somehow (2005). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is an associate professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).

Visit Burt on the web here: http://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma

The following work is Copyright © 2006, and owned by Burt Kimmelman and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Neo Rauch's Renegaten, 6.16.05

...............David Zwirner Gallery, NYC

In the brooding landscape of grays
and blues, we begin again - the
colors slipping past all knowledge.
What happens here will happen there -
an odd, incongruous drama.

The calm faces, resembling each
other, are surely who we are,
if only we could live in a
world. Somehow we go on breathing -
a catastrophe unfolding.

Under the dark sky someone stands
over someone, as in a tale
of cruelty. And, as if we rise
from sleep in a world out of time,
we avoid the torturer's eyes.

Let us look to the far, quiet
horizon - shades, hues, which frighten
the innocent - colors, forms, which
no longer reveal to us the
history of where we must dwell.

The Coming Snow

It's not so strange how
a day turns gray in
winter, without the
slightest hope of an

afternoon sun - long
since the bright, brief dawn.
Now is a time when
we can be sure of
a storm, the stark cold

suddenly come on
the wind. Indoors, we
sit, sipping coffee

and conversation -
no sense thinking of
the end of things, though,

how each of us will
slip into bed from
where, through a window,

one can witness the
graceful descent of
white, its delicate
curtain covering
the world in silence.