Mark Levine and Robert Fernandez May 3rd!

Mark Levine - an author of several books of poetry, including Debt, Enola Gay, and The Wilds. Mark has won multiple NEA awards and was Whiting Award Recipient in the 1990s for poetry. He earned his MFA from the renowned Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and is currently an instructor there while also continuing with his own writing.






Robert Fernandez - earned his BA in English, MFA in Poetry. Robert attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he studied with Mark Levine and received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. He was also a recipient of the PIP award in 2010.
 

"Hell Me Down" by Robert Fernandez. Next reading: May 3rd!

We take stock of the forearms:
They are like red snapper, slick
And sharp; they are like glass.
You see I am falling through

My pleasure like an intimacy
Of mirrors rubbing against
The face and you cannot uncut
The stomach: it is a die.

Here is the heat because we must begin.
Red rainbow spread like a hawk's gills;
Red rainbow tied off in its black holes
Which dot the ceiling because it is enough.

A nurse raises
Her beak from my chest:
All my vultures are warm
And with gold discs for heads,
All my vultures are form.

Lord find me,
Who is another? Where is the flesh
Of gain? Venture and thighs
Of gold and living glass?

I forget that I consented to wander
To wander by the pier; I consent
That I wander and am like paper:
A black kite wet with night.

Grid I am good and like the Aeon,
A child playing with colored balls.
In the hall because they know me,
The young ones, the eternally. They see

The stela in the flesh of my throat they divine
The throat-rod and its glyphs. Bright to burn
And nurse on cold marrow-like light:
It is midnight and I am speed cut

Into thirds of day; I am threes everlasting &
Hells of foment. Then I stand like eternal resistance
Like hell. No one who walks over this
Ground senses it is sound: look again:

We find ourselves on the shore
And the flame follows us it flows
Through our speaking it is here.
I have failed again, I am no longer I am failed.

I am first to run aground I am seen.
Let us style vital light: New moon again but I am light;
We are not otherwise we are seen.
How shall I stand how shall I be seen?

The morning curled around us like warm like
I am clasped by infinite waters, I am seen.

Sam's pick, from Mark Levine

This is my favorite poem, from Mark Levine's collection, The Wilds.

Willow

Okay, willow, breathe on me
from the sunless opening in you —
crescent of gouges and breezes — slope
on which beetles stumble and are
flushed out —
Traffic, human traffic with its rinse
of promises and pauses is coming
for keeps.
And look there goes a swallow transplanting soil.
Me (let me think it)
I can sit on this bench longer than nature
and not know or crave a thing
about this bench, bottle cap dented into its plank
and initials scratched beside it, beside
the point: two raw letters forward to back just
as rare as any combination.
And now the date, plume of digits, daily
statistic.
This is behavior, willow, this
drone, it accompanied you once
in your grove of which
you have a memory — a lush one — don't you?
Was there no breath of you there?
I crossed the arc of your silhouette and lapped
your leaves' signature.
Things grew from you
beneath you in the patched grass
and not far away sat a man on
a bench.
You take it in or you don't.
You hide the sky or else.
Things lived in you.
You, stranger.

Highlights from our April 5th reading! Nick Demske and Amy Plettner.

YAPRS Coordinators, interns, Demske, and Plettner at Beaverdale Books. Thank you for an amazing evening!

Reminder: Poetry on April 5th!

Hello Fans and Friends,

Don't forget to stop out for a short but sweet hour of poetry with the one and only Nick Demske and Amy Plettner!

As always, it'll be at Beaverdale Books at 7pm, and is free and open to all, so we hope to see all of you there! :)

Best,

Vlad Frederick
Coordinator

Samantha's Pick, Amy Plettner

Here's a poem of Amy's, Vow.

Marry me moon
on a country road
in July's luminescent dust
where fireflies orgy over a stretch of corn
and your smell of half light
breaks through the grasses
parts me open
devours
marry me like this
like a firefly
absolute
in everyone else's
darkness