Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Robert Hershon and Simon Pettet
Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea
Dia:Chelsea
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City
Introduction by Vincent Katz
Robert Hershon
Robert Hershon’s fourteenth poetry book, Freeze Frame, appeared this year from Pressed Wafer. His other recent titles include Goldfish and Rose (2013) and Calls from the Outside World (2006), both published by Hanging Loose Press. Hershon’s awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts. As a founding coeditor of Hanging Loose Press, he is making plans for the press’s fiftieth anniversary next year.
At the Victoria and Albert
A sunny day at the V & A
I am in the William Morris Tea Room
surrounded by peacocks and paisleys
and Andre and Donna, but I am the only one
drinking tea, because I try to do the right thing
Andre is wearing shorts because of the record
London heat wave: 79 degrees
There is a painting: The Slaughter in Cologne
of St. Ursula and Her 11,000 Virgins
and the manager in me begins to worry about
straightening this out
How do we know they were all virgins/why
were they in Cologne/what were their dinner plans
How do you kill 11,000 chickens or cows, much less virgins
Did they struggle did they pray What were the last virgins doing
while the first virgins bled /What do you do with 11,000 heads
What do you do with 11,000 torsos
How many Huns can you fit on the head of an axe
Is there a great hill in Cologne today where
flowers grow especially tall and devout
Once we were on the tube going to Andre’s in West Hampstead
for one of Tony’s hearty New Zealand dinners and we were lost
I asked directions from a clerkish man in a tired suit and
he was helpful and we walked though the same tunnels
and boarded the same second train so I
joked to Donna, Maybe we should take him along to dinner
and his eyes lit up at the prospect of an adventure, away
from Mum and the telly and I was filled with remorse
Andre, we’ve brought a stranger to dinner and we’re all
going to talk about plumbing inventories while
savoring our Pavlovas/Would that have been so terrible
Now Wikipedia tells me St. Ursula probably never existed
and her 11,000 virgins were a monk’s mistranslation
for an 11-year-old girl/and isn’t that enough beheading
to commemorate/It didn’t take much to become a saint
in those early days/ I myself honored St. Gottfried who
gave a potato to a dog, but there’s no painting of that
or of a dinner laid before a lonely man
I like to wander in the V & A and be by myself with
the entire history of wrought iron or blue glass or
the Saint George altarpiece. Life wasn’t all slaying dragons
He died a complicated martyr’s death
Did they split him lengthwise and
then behead him or the other way around
Talk about overkill/And on this bright spring day
beheading remains a popular worldwide sport
11,000 virgins? All in a week’s work
I am in the William Morris Tea Room
surrounded by peacocks and paisleys
and Andre and Donna, but I am the only one
drinking tea, because I try to do the right thing
Andre is wearing shorts because of the record
London heat wave: 79 degrees
There is a painting: The Slaughter in Cologne
of St. Ursula and Her 11,000 Virgins
and the manager in me begins to worry about
straightening this out
How do we know they were all virgins/why
were they in Cologne/what were their dinner plans
How do you kill 11,000 chickens or cows, much less virgins
Did they struggle did they pray What were the last virgins doing
while the first virgins bled /What do you do with 11,000 heads
What do you do with 11,000 torsos
How many Huns can you fit on the head of an axe
Is there a great hill in Cologne today where
flowers grow especially tall and devout
Once we were on the tube going to Andre’s in West Hampstead
for one of Tony’s hearty New Zealand dinners and we were lost
I asked directions from a clerkish man in a tired suit and
he was helpful and we walked though the same tunnels
and boarded the same second train so I
joked to Donna, Maybe we should take him along to dinner
and his eyes lit up at the prospect of an adventure, away
from Mum and the telly and I was filled with remorse
Andre, we’ve brought a stranger to dinner and we’re all
going to talk about plumbing inventories while
savoring our Pavlovas/Would that have been so terrible
Now Wikipedia tells me St. Ursula probably never existed
and her 11,000 virgins were a monk’s mistranslation
for an 11-year-old girl/and isn’t that enough beheading
to commemorate/It didn’t take much to become a saint
in those early days/ I myself honored St. Gottfried who
gave a potato to a dog, but there’s no painting of that
or of a dinner laid before a lonely man
I like to wander in the V & A and be by myself with
the entire history of wrought iron or blue glass or
the Saint George altarpiece. Life wasn’t all slaying dragons
He died a complicated martyr’s death
Did they split him lengthwise and
then behead him or the other way around
Talk about overkill/And on this bright spring day
beheading remains a popular worldwide sport
11,000 virgins? All in a week’s work
Simon Pettet
Simon Pettet is an English-born poet and long-time resident of New York’s Lower East Side. Hearth (2008), his collected poems, and As a Bee (2014), an addendum to his collected poems, were both recently published by Talisman. Talisman also issued his Selected Poems (1995) and the volume More Winnowed Fragments (2006). Pettet compiled and edited a selection of James Schuyler’s art writings (Black Sparrow, 1998) and coedited Schuyler’s posthumous poems, Other Flowers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), with James Meetze. He collaborated with photographer-filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt to create Conversations with Rudy Burckhardt about Everything (Vehicle, 1987) and Talking Pictures (Zoland, 1994), as well as a limited edition of Abundant Treasures(Granary Books, 2001) with the painter Duncan Hannah.
HESTIA
First
seek
a settled home
for your bees,
a place, a hearth,
something not violent
yet resembling a roaring fire
- safe -
"whither the winds
seek
a settled home
for your bees,
a place, a hearth,
something not violent
yet resembling a roaring fire
- safe -
"whither the winds
may find
no access"
no access"
Books
Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology