Palabra Pura

The Guild Literary Complex has a schedule thick with poets again in 2009. Here is how they describe their Palabra Pura series of poetry readings:

Palabra Pura promotes literary expression in more than one tongue through a monthly bilingual poetry reading featuring Chicano and Latino artists. With an aim to foster dialogue through literature in Chicago and beyond, each evening pairs a local poet with a visiting writer along with an open mic to engage the interaction of diverse voices, ideas, and aesthetics. The readings are held the third Wednesday of every month (except August and December) throughout 2009.

Palabra Pura se enfoca en la expresion literaria en varios idiomas a traves de una serie de lecturas mensuales bilingues con artistas Chicanos y Latinos. Nuestra meta es promover el dialogo a traves de la literatura en Chicago y mas alla. Con este fin, cado lectura combina un poeta local con uno invitado, ademas de un open mic para cultivar la interaccion de voces, ideas esteticas diversas. Las lecturas se ofrecen el tercer miercoles de cada mes (con excepcion de agosto y diciembre).

Visit their website for the full description.

See the Guild's website for the full schedule. The site has detailed information for each event as well as links to partner organizations. For instance, on April 3rd (2009), one of the readers is Raul Zurita:

Raul Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1951. He started out studying mathematics before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet's 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances.

Visit their website for the full announcement.




"It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Charles Simic at the Chicago Library

One of my favorite books is The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, the book continues to inspire me as a place where humanity and poetry intersect. I'm sure humanity and poetry intersect in other poetry as well, but in Simic's work it's like an analysis that includes inspiration. If there is such a thing as a map of intuition, this is it. The word surreal or surrealism is often applied to it. It seems to me a type of wit. Wit in the sense that the so-called Metaphysical poets used the term.

Mr. Simic is now U.S. Poet Laureate, and he will be reading in Chicago this Saturday, the 26th of April, 2008. I so want to go, but with gas prices the way they are it isn't reasonable for me to go, especially since I'm without a job and looking for work. It's a five-plus hour drive for me (one way).

Announcement:

Poetry Off the Shelf: Charles Simic
SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 12:00 PM
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium

Harold Washington Library Center

400 South State Street

Noon. Free Admission.
Charles Simic, current Poet Laureate of the United States, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953, at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New England, where he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire until his retirement. A poet, essayist, and translator, he has been honored with the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic has published numerous collections of poems, among them, My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), which won the University of Chicago's Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America's di Castagnola Award. His new book of poems, That Little Something, will be out in Spring of 2008. Simic has also published several prose books and translations.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library

This announcement and a selection of Mr. Simic's poems posted online are available at The Poetry Foundation, http://poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.html accessed 4/23/08.

Good Woman

When James Aloysius McGillicuddy
had killed the woman he loved
and refused to talk about it
he found himself making explanations
to himself:
"She could change herself
into a bubble for me to play with.
'I'll be your bubble' she says to me
'kiss me kick me kill me
break me like a big rainbow bubble
I shall be light for you
light as a lingering loving bubble
take me throw me handle me with care
or finger me like a fool
and see me vanish before your eyes.'"

And after thus quoting the woman he had killed
James Aloysius McGillicuddy began wondering to himself
whether she had talked like that so fierce so funny
whether he was imagining things after the excitement
of sending a slug of lead into a woman's bosom and yet
he swore to himself:
"She was a bubble she told me
she was a bubble made for me
and nobody else and I could
make her or break her
and why the hell I broke her
I dont [sic] know
she was a goddam good woman
I dont [sic] know why it happened
she was such a goddam good woman."

Carl Sandburg
from Poems for the People published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1999.
'Good Woman' was written when Sandburg lived in Chicago and worked as a journalist for The Day Book and Daily News.

I'm including this poem here because I like the omniscience of the narrator as it plays against the ignorance of McGillicuddy. Also because it reminds me of poems in the Spoon River Anthology. Maybe Edgar Lee Masters unwittingly helped Sandburg become what some regard as an urban Walt Whitman.