And already looking forward to teaching at the Indiana University Writing Conference in June.

While waiting for a man to finish explaining the significance
of the S series for the 2010 models, and how much
faster this difference will carry me
from here to there, I consider
my father’s soft hands
guiding the narrow bronchoscope tube
down a coal miner’s windpipe, then steering
the levee road back from the hospital
where last year’s tornado left
blue tarps practicing
the breath of hold-yourself-empty,
then hold-yourself-full.
I didn’t ask
for a god to chew my food and spit
gently into my mouth.
Mine drove slow, imagining
how he’d trim those trees for better light.

Robinson is from the northeast coast near Perth, but has lived for many years in London, where he is currently deputy publishing director for Jonathan Cape. His debut, A PAINTED FIELD, won the 1997 Forward First Book Prize and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and was followed by SLOW AIR in 2002. His next book, SWITHERING, took the 2006 Forward Best Collection Prize, the Scottish Arts Council Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His latest, THE WRECKING LIGHT, was published in the UK last year and has been shortlisted for the top three British poetry awards.

Here’s one for a lovely (and surprising) cool day in Texas:

False Spring

A lift in the weather: a clemency
I cling to like the legend

of myself: self-exiled
world-wounded, god

of evenings like this,
eighty degrees and half a world away.

All night, the industry
of erasure, effacement,

our one mouth
working itself dry.

But even a god can’t stop the light
that finds us, annealed,

fruitless, to strangers
broken on the field of day.

In the window-box,
the narcissi come up blind.

But someone I admire asked me to, and so I said okay. And now, thinking about performing my little bit tomorrow night, along with other Trinity women faculty and administrators, I’m not feeling ho-hum at all. I often tell my students that when you read a poem out loud, you read it with your body. And to read Eve Ensler’s lines has physically reminded me violence against women isn’t a phase. A journalist is attacked on the streets of Cairo, and people talk about how pretty she is, hinting that she should know better than to do her job. An 11-year-old girl is gang-raped in Texas, and the New York Times reports that the boys who did this are going to have to live with it for the rest of the lives. The boys? Meanwhile, our legislature is cutting both sex education, and education period. It’s 2011. Legwarmers are back. Haven’t we learned anything? I’m no actor, but all proceeds benefit the San Antonio Rape Crisis Center.

The Vagina Monologues
Stieren Theater- Trinity University
March 28, 7pm
$5 Students
$7 General Admission

And interesting to be thinking back on Sierra Leone right now, as I’ll be returning in May with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. It’s been a long time. More on that this summer.

“Every morning I think
I’ve become the new weather
Like embroidering something after, trying to remember
The half-lies of dreams
A day halfway
Between fall and spring
To which I bring
The past will rest exchanged
And forgetting but for you
To whom I turn to sing”

Thanks also to Amanda Hesser for the nice shout about my Modern Love essay on the Paris Review Blog.

Although I’m a big fan of the Reeltime Travelers, I was somehow late to Martha Scanlan’s amazing album, The West Was Burning. Buy it now. Been watching this video obsessively. And this one too.

And finally, a belated pic from our Thanksgiving stay at El Cosmico.

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’.

-George Oppen

]]> http://www.jennybrowne.com/2010/11/11/of-being-numerous-for-chuck/feed/ 0 http://www.jennybrowne.com/2010/10/26/elizabeth-alexander/ http://www.jennybrowne.com/2010/10/26/elizabeth-alexander/#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:40:17 +0000 Jenny http://www.jennybrowne.com/?p=169 Let this serve as a belated shout out to Elizabeth Alexander, who was the Steiren Arts Series speaker at Trinity a few weeks back.

An original voice, a generous spirit, and a kick-ass teacher, she was like a visiting writer trifecta.  Of course she read the inaugural poem.

She also read this favorite of mine.

Ars Poetica # 100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,

is idiosyncratic.  Poetry

is where we are ourselves,

(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)

digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,

emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from hear to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I’m sorry the dog dies.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

My stack of recent keepers includes.

Memory and Enthusiasm – W.S. DiPiero

The Lost Alphabet – Lisa Olstein

To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill: ed. Michael McGriff

The Wedding Dress – Fanny Howe

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With The Afterlife –  Lisa Miller

Nothing Happened And Then It Did – Jake Silverstein

Burn Lake – Carrie Fountain

Waking the Tiger – Peter Levine

The Anthologist- Nicholas Baker

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress – Rhoda Janzen

Transparent Gestures – Rodney Jones

Texaco – Patrick Chamoiseau

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto – David Shields