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Artists Space Reading 5/7/08

Thanks for coming. I’m Catherine Woodard. A past president of Artists Space and much to my family’s chagrin, a poet. They can blame Artists Space for my swerve from journalism to poetry. Artists are reporters, important ones, who like Emily Dickinson tell it slant. For 35 years Artists Space has encouraged experimentation and dialog in contemporary culture. So think of us as a linguistic exhibition in 3-minute segments. (not more we promise) A special thanks to our poetry mentor Lucie Brock-Broido. We will read in reverse alphabetical order. In the interest of your time, please hold applause or catcalls to the end. Afterward Denise Banker will talk a bit about Copper Canyon Press, arguably the best poetry publisher in the nation.

Visual art, it seems, was secretly pushing me to poetry. My mother’s wedding present was a Jasper Johns etching I’d wanted, that just happened to be in a poetry book. Only later in life would I be smitten by Wallace Stevens, the poet, and Helen Vendler, who wrote the introduction. As long as we’ve owned it, I’ve always hung this Johns close to my desk. When I started writing a novel, a terrible one I might add, each morning I would put my hand in his to draw from his creative powers- a ritual both comforting and terrifying.

My Skin Print

Hand pressed.
Ear pressed.
Face pressed.
Shadow pressed.

TOLERENCES (EXCEPT AS NOTED) BY JASPER JOHNS
APPROVED BY FRANK O’HARA MADE IN USA
ENGINEER “SKIN WITH O’HARA POEM”

Hand push
Back.
Ink push back. Fingers push back. Push back from paper. Push
Into glass. My hand touch
His hand. Push. My side of paper, my side of glass, my side of
Skin.

Two readers tonight are transgenre friends: Helen also writes novels. Desiree is stunning as visual artist and poet. Plus she edits poems with hilarious sketches. The book I’m working on is at least a cross dresser, a novelistic story told by poems. It’s about a family in a small town in the South, with odd associations with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Just recently I rolled out of bed to a piece of art I’ve been sleeping beside for at least a decade and suddenly saw it as a visual mirror of my story. My narrator and the children in this work by Annette Lemieux are both struggling to make sense of what they cannot understand. Which is not all that different than why first the pharaohs and then all Egyptians who could afford it commissioned a manual to navigate the afterlife. Many of my titles do evoke spells.


Spell For Not Playing Dead

I start first grade
With a blue book bag
Two fat pencils and a rule

Not to leave school
With my father in a car.
Mother says we can die

If he’s drinking.
Mother says to scream
Kick if we must

Or play dead
Like the soldier on TV
Who fooled well.



The Unanswered Letter

The suicide note, like my father sober, says little
will stay folded I presume
in the dresser Mother keeps bank papers and report cards. But the other note sent my freshman year hasn’t found its place, pauses between sweaters, parachutes from overdue books. His words flicker: So proud… So sorry I’ve not… So bright your…
If I could look words in the eye smell their breath... Must a word slurred be tainted? Or is my doubt the shame? A letter never answered but still read. The capital B’s sturdy, mark of his name. I crawl into the bottom loop,
And think of the word bridge.


I’ll end with another spell.

For Being Any Shape One May Wish
My brother collects the dead sparrows that crash into the roof.
He thinks the birds kill our shot at Yard of the Month. Ladies of the Garden Club inspect, drive slowly round town
with a white proclamation in the trunk.
Only the front yard matters.

Regret to Inform That Due to Flight Reroutement You Must Deplane and Check In To Dacca Airport Hotel

BY HELEN KLEIN ROSS

Yellow light in the lobby
where guards sleep, wrapped

in tablecloths—Drone
of mosquitoes and words

I do not understand—
Heat unrelieved

by an overhead fan—
Twin bed for us both,

one dent in the pillow

Path

There is so little to go on: a pale
trembling hand as I stand over you,
my finger tracing the words on the page,
a foreign language you are learning
for a journey without me. You will do
fine, I say. You will wrap your tongue
around these sounds and be understood,
be given what you desire: a loaf of bread,
change for your money, an antique doll
with violent eyes. Paintings are hanging
on walls, behind glass, waiting for you
to admire them. Their plaintive beauty
will move through you and you will walk
back to your hotel through the park
I know well. I spent years there walking
its bridle path, a gray cat in my arms,
moving toward you, blind, in another life.

first published in The ThreePenny Review

Helen Klein Ross

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec ac nunc. In sapien. Donec scelerisque. Mauris fringilla. Etiam congue rutrum sapien. Maecenas malesuada condimentum augue. Quisque aliquet. Vivamus vel orci vitae ligula accumsan placerat. Pellentesque felis quam, dignissim rhoncus, pharetra quis, vehicula in, ante. Integer felis enim, blandit eu, accumsan quis, venenatis eget, neque. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec eu diam. Donec mollis rhoncus elit. Nunc eleifend sapien at est. Nulla facilisi. Pellentesque non eros sit amet dolor ultricies lobortis.

Catherine Woodard

I thank Rupert Murdoch for making me a poet. For 15 years I was an award-winning newspaper reporter and new media editor at New York Newsday and other publications, but left a Murdoch site that morphed from news to TV Guide Online. I thought I had a middle-grade novel in my head but happily wandered into poetry.

My manuscript Field of Reeds is a story that unfolds by poems but with a novelistic narrative. The story focuses on a family in a small town in the South of several decades ago struggling to live with a father who seems dead long before his suicide. It’s also a riff on the Egyptian manual for navigating the afterlife known in English as the Book of the Dead but by ancient Egyptians as Chapters for Coming Forth by Day. The narrator is the youngest child who notices some Egyptian associations in her family’s rituals and her fears about her father’s depression and alcoholism.

The narrator of Field of Reeds is trying to make sense and control the surface to manage overwhelming emotions and fears. Which is not all that different than why first the pharaohs and then any Egyptian who could afford it (eventually there were even Wal-Mart versions) wanted the security of a manual on how to live and how to die, how to find peace in the Field of Eternal Reeds.

I am a past president of Artists Space, one of the oldest alternative spaces in New York City for emerging visual artists. I have a masters in journalism from Columbia University and courses in the masters program in poetry at the New School University.

I live in New York with my husband, Nelson Blitz, Jr., and daughters, Perri and Allie, and wonderful art, thanks to my daughters’ talent and my husband’s eye. I play basketball on aging knees but still set a mean pick and will get you the ball if you’re open.