Robert Bense and Ann Conradsen to Read SPC March 12

Presents
Robert Bense, and Ann Conradsen
Monday, March 12, 2012 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at SPC
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke

Robert Bense grew up in southern Illinois on a farm, worked in business and taught at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania.  His work has appeared in many magazines, including Agni, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Poetry, Salmagundi, Shenandoah and The New Republic.   A book of poems, Readings in Ordinary Time, was published by The Backwaters Press.  He now lives in Sacramento, California.

Sample Poems

Guarding Paradise 

Cracked mirrors of the stars.

Abyss of hand-cupped darknesses

dithery like short wave.

Messages between the Cyclopses

and The Underworld intercepted.

Broken glass of villa walls.

Confinement to small talk

after brevity of sex.  In the cities

cardboard tenements of the lost.

Trickle of urine and a pigeon.

Shadowy men with holy grievances.

Hotmail accounts filtered globally.

Yahoo down for the duration.

Razor wire slicing the sun.

Searchlights scanning low

for anxious night overhead.

Winds of constant sorrow

at thirty knots.

You will be turned back at the frontier

but only if you suffer enough.

            At the Sea Mouth

From the cabin I watch fugitive lights

fireflies in a black meadow

the ships loaded with

Toyotas, Chinese tires

Rolexes from Shenzhen

Arabian oil and gas

and with heartland cargoes

of grain, ammonia, coal

lifting anchor and heading into the Gulf

beyond the rushes, reeds, the islands

where a continent runs out

and sea birds set down on water

the wide river a vast enigma at flood now

ladened with daily quiddities of those

living close to the American quick

and gathering skies, land, livelihoods

poisons and mistakes

the rims and surfaces of a country

and taking them back.

Ann Conradsen has an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University where she also taught for several years.  She has studied with Stan Rice, Frances Mayes, Kathleen Fraser, and Rich Yurman, as well as many other teachers and catalysts.  Her poems have appeared in Laurel Review, Plainsongs, Transfer, and Ink, and locally in Poetry Now and The Sacramento Anthology:  One Hundred Poems About Sacramento.

In the past, Ann has made films, had her photographs of jazz musicians and Charles Bukowski published internationally, written film criticism, and sung with Oakland Opera.  Currently, she lives in Sacramento and loves her son, her friends, her guitar, and baseball—usually in that order.

Sample Poems

On not being able to write #32

In this huge house, poetry—Cornell, Cobain,

Weiland, Maynard, Tankian, Bellamy—eternally
falls over the edge of the bed, rafts
the icy air, infiltrates the bills, smothers
the laundry, gushes  to the ceilings.

            The composer says, when I touch

            the new page, it is thick and
            black with notation.  All writing
            is removal.  (He was noteworthy
            when he was playing.  Now
            that his only idea is a knife, I cannot
            take my eyes from him.

Evolution pares the vestigial.

Everywhere:  Cage, Rodin, Pinter, Oppen.
Outside every window:  leafdrop. 
Inside every room:  my ears, my hand
with the pen still
too greedy.

                        Ann Conradsen

Ear Training III

This morning, the parkway—stilled

river of ice—from this distance,
silent as fog.
                      The Canada geese
and I move in and begin
to hear the crackling as each blade
of grass unshoulders its silver
into the sun.
                      Soon, again,
silence.  I lie with my ear hard
against the winter field.
                                      I know
what should be singing:  roots
reaching beyond themselves, death
composing itself into warmth.

                                                All

I hear is silence and the beating
of only my own blood.

                                    Ann Conradsen