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Readings in Contemporary Poetry

Steven Seidenberg and Alan Felsenthal

Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea

Event Details
Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 6:30 pm

Dia:Chelsea
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City 

Readings in Contemporary Poetry curator, Vincent Katz provided an introduction for the evening's reading.

Free for Dia members; $10 general admission; $6 admission for students and seniors 

Advance ticket purchases recommended. Tickets are also available for purchase at the door, subject to availability. 

Steven Seidenberg’s recent works include Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Null Set (Spooky Action Books, 2015), Itch (Raw Art Press, 2014), and numerous chapbooks of verse and aphorism. He coedits pallaksch. pallaksch. (Instance Press), an occasional journal of experimental poetry, and organizes poetry events at the Lab in San Francisco. Seidenberg’s photo collections include Pipevalve: Berlin (Lodima Press, 2017).

from Situ

But that’s not all. This seat, his seat, has never been another’s, has always only been dispensed to find his occupancy near. To suit his nearing occupation, if not the present circumstance of being thereby occupied, of being set upon by only him, by him alone. This is to say that as he turns his gaze back to his harbor, no matter what corrosive goad provoked him to dethrone, the cardinal intimation that his pulp should find no lading on that ramshackle recliner leaves him hardly an existence—hardly corrigibly extant—a manifold of carrion both drifting past and soon to come, and soon to spoil here

Surely it has happened before, he thinks, he has left his bench before, many times, countless times, which does nothing to prevent him from attempting such a count, an assay that’s near equal to the feint of its achievement, at least when it’s considered from the outside, or…the outside of the outside, nearly the inside, but not quite—not yet—he still knows the difference…knows the difference is all difference, every difference held in state both in and out, in state and kind…

Alan Felsenthal runs a small press called the Song Cave. With Ben Estes, he edited A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (Song Cave, 2013). His writing has appeared in BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and Harper’s. Lowly, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2017, is his first collection of poems.

Sailing Bones

Suffering I drifted to you
Seeing my suffering you suffered
Our conference on calamity
Our joints moved against wind
Sustained our growing pain
Until protruding bones
From our rumpled skin coats
Broke through to expose
Their staid, stagnant structures
To a cat we were dual cat castles
A bird perched upon my clavicle
To a friend traveling by
We no longer existed
But our suffering did

 

 

Books

Photo: Don Stahl

Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology

View details

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