http://www.bookstores.nyu.edu/events/

Tuesday March 13, 7-8, Book Court in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn,

163 Court Street (btw Dean and Pacific)

http://www.bookcourt.org/

Recorded at the exhibition of Paul Weingarten’s paintings, Ober Gallery, Kent, CT.

Here in the woods
with the tangly vines
where we dug our fort
and wed our minds’
you as Billy, and Emily, me
with our locks entwined–

for the searcher’s key
was somehow lost.
It was up to us
to go hot and cold
all through your house
where you first met Poe
and invited your girls
to cross the bridge
to the Land of Curls,
where Blakeian beasts
and Keatsian lambs
cavorted in
their iambed pens.

Your lilting voice, Billy
echoes through
this house, these woods
and Dublin, too,
from pleasure dome
to Liffey banks–
all’s riverrun–

A thousand thanks
for all ye’d done, Billy,
all ye gave,
O Billy Boy Blue
climb out the grave!

Take one more trudge
with sweet Emily
down Four Mile grove
past Tivoli,
(where methinks yer mother took that key)
beyond the stars
where now ye lie
but never me, Billy Boy,
say “goodbye.”

—Victoria Floor 11/19/2011

Of Paul, the eminent poet, translator,  and critic Henry Weinfield said, “No one writes like Paul Bray.”

And from the novelist and poet Paul Auster: “Paul Bray is an absolute original, a demon of brilliant
erudition and pitch-perfect music, straddling the hitherto incompatible worlds of narration and lyric
to produce a poetry that simultaneously sings and tells and never fails to astonish.”

I am tremendously proud to have been Paul’s editor in the journey that brought us together
in the culmination of his magnum opus: Terrible Woods,  Poems 1965-2008 (Dos Madre Press, 2008)
http://www.dosmadres.com/shop/terrible-woods-by-paul-bray/

Dear friend, you leave us too soon.
Though these woods will forever echo with your songs,
you will be,  and already are, terribly missed.

Robert Murphy
Ex. Editor / Publisher
Dos Madres Press

Below, from the section of poems titled Croons,
out of Paul Bray’s Terrible Woods:

CROON #28

On the banks of the Meuse you sat watching the sound
of the water.  Your sorrow was wide and profound.
You were used to clouts and slaps and to being
reminded you were only a child.  Renowned

as a monster of erudition, for seeing
the milky sea and forever fleeing
Madame Rimbaud and her harsh routine
for the doorways of Paris.  Your hopes of freeing

the city were dashed.  The contrast between
the innocent face and the fierce, obscene
language the drunken husbands there
in the local cafe found funny.  So mean

to sappy Verlaine sobbing into your hair.
In Belgium through empires of luminous air
the meteors spoke and the buffaloes.  Then
in the barn you released one last scream of despair.

Later when, strangely, you put down the pen
and, oddly, did not pick it up again,
crossing the Alps on foot headfirst,
you burrowed through snow like a mole and when

the nightmare road to Herer was traversed
in greenish water, in dead lakes immersed,
volcanic mountains rose sheer.  Your tongue
told of angels of wood through its curtains of thirst.

Now teenagers love you and songs are sung
about you by rock stars and even among
the hosts of larvae and the slaves of fact
a poem like this one is sometimes flung.

And why not?  Arthur, you were one class act.

http://www.sugarmule.com/39frame.htm

When Ulysses floated into my shop, careworn,
Smudged like a burnt tin can just plunked ashore,
His hood fell away, and I could see his face.
So changed. His eye seemed fixed on final scenes
From so much gazing forward into sealight.

Certainly, on the surface, Katz seems quite different in this book from the author of The Warrior in the Forest, a collection that rather than circling toward home, looked outward toward the proverbial unknown. That collection, moreover, gave little hint of Katz’s future formalist leanings, being clearly situated in the modernist tradition of Zukofsky and Oppen. Yet, on closer examination, Katz, like his Ulysses, recalls the younger man.

Don’t let the end-rhymes fool you—Katz has retained the modernist mastery of commanding multiple registers. No middle-brow New Formalist cliché here. Katz is equally comfortable churning out a poem about James Dean as about Borges or Ulysses or Prospero, not so much in juxtaposition as in a cumulative exploration of a particular cultural time, bringing to bear the sum total of his knowledge and experience to his poems, and he is equally fluent riffing on the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and the classic horror film The Night of the Living Dead.

There is an intelligence here that is not arrogant or flashy, but, even in its moments of humor, serious. I mean this in the best way—Katz takes his own interests and obsessions, and he thinks you should, too, and he consequently produces well-crafted, erudite, frequently profound poems as a consequence. The craft here is not in the service of a series of virtuoso turns; the poems’ cerebral qualities are not in the service of self-aggrandizement. Instead, we have the result of a poet’s three-decade struggle with the alignment of medium and message, a struggle that has proven remarkably fruitful. This is a work of maturity and significance.

It is my pleasure and honor to launch David Katz’s Claims of Home.

Please join members of the local and University of Cincinnati communities at the Taft Research Center to hear Bea Opengart, Educator Assistant Professor of English, at the University of Cincinnati Taft Research Center Lecture Room. She will read from her new book of poetry In the Land, featuring poetry about Israel.

Developing Your Poetic Voice Using poems as examples and inspiration, this craft workshop led by poet, educator and editor Marianne Worthington focuses on generating, writing, and revising poems. Specifically, we’ll pay attention to musical arrangement, description, and voice in poems and practice refining what poet Ellen Bryant Voigt calls our “stylistic fingerprints” as poets. Award winning poet Marianne Worthington (Larger Bodies Than Mine Finishing Line Press, 2006) is the cofounder of Still: The Journal ( www.stilljournal.net) and editor of three Motif anthologies published by MotesBooks. Her workshop will be followed at 4 pm by a free poetry reading by contributors of the forthcoming anthology, Motif v3: Work, including Amber Whitley, Donna D. Vitucci, Jay McCoy, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Landra Lewis, Leatha Kendrick, Matthew Haughton, Mary Anne Reese, Pauletta Hansel, Roberta Schultz, Sherry Chandler, Sherry Stanforth and Marianne Worthington. Help us welcome all these fabulous out of town (and local) writers!

Developing Your Poetic Voice is offered on Sunday, October 16th, from 2 – 5 pm at Grailville (St Brigid Building, 932 O’Bannonville Road, Loveland, OH. Contact (513) 683-2340 or visit us at www.grailville.org to register.

He will also be reading Tuesday December 6th with poet Estha Weiner as part of the Perch Reading series at the Perch Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, WWW.THEPERCHCAFE.COM,
365 5th Avenue Park Slope (between 5th and 6th Sts), 7:30 p.m.