Desert City Poetry Series

[Ken Rumble <rumblek AT bellsouth.net>]

Please spread far and wide....

Who:  Sarah Manguso, author of _The Captain Lands in Paradise_ and the 
forthcoming _Siste Viator_; Breadloaf Fellow and Pushcart Prize winner; can 
simultaneously disassemble a chainsaw and shot-gun a Fanta.

Who:  Julian Semilian, author of _Transgender Organ Grinder_, _A Spy in 
Amnesia_, and the forthcoming _Osiris with a Trombone Across the Seam of 
Insubstance_; translator of Paul Celan's _Romanian Poems_ and Mircea 
Carterescu's _Nostalgia_; film editing instructor at NC School of the Arts; wove 
a series of decorative doll vests from strands of the world wide web.

What:  Desert City Poetry Series, kicking out 2005 with steel-toes and stilleto 
heels.

When:  This Saturday, November 12th, 8pm, 2005.

Where:  Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, it's a 
whole new I-books.

How much:  $2 donation requested to support the series & the readers.

Why:  ""What concerns me now is the drag queen shouting her monologue into the 
sky / which is not so much "there" as it is visible to the tourists that walk 
under it" "How we loved you comrade rump! how you grilled us with your copper 
wires when we lied! How they glittered like penalizing mirrors to better 
contemplate the likeness of our guilty decadence in! The tar tugging at our 
hearts now is our guilty love for the quicksand of your elephant thighs, your 
seams, comrade rump!"

See you there.....

Upcoming readings:

January 14th, 8pm:  Ed Roberson & TBA

February 11th, 8pm:  Claudia Rankine & TBA


*Internationalist Books:
http://www.internationalistbooks.org

*Desert City Poetry Series:
http://desertcity.blogspot.com

*Sarah Manguso:
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/07/sarah-manguso-is-author-of-captain.html

*Julian Semilian:
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/authors/JulianSemilian.htm

Contact the DCPS:  Ken Rumble, director
rumblek at bellsouth dot net

The Desert City is supported by grants from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the 
North Carolina Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission.

"Reverence"
by Sarah Manguso

Love not the rider but the old rider,
the ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.
We bolt. We stand still in bad weather.
We rely on things we know are unreliable,
it feels so good just to "rely."
We are relied on.
But I do not know who knows that bad secret.
I do not see who sits astride my back,
who cuts my flank so lovingly on our way to the dark mountain.


"ALGAZY & GRUMMER (1)"
by Urmuz
translated by Julian Semilian

Algazy is a pleasant old man, gap toothed and grinny, with sparse and silky 
beard, neatly placed upon a gridiron screwed under the chin and hedged with 
barbed wire...

Algazy speaks no European language... But if you wait for him in the dawn of 
day, at the break of morn, and say to him: “What goez, Algazy!” dwelling on 
stressing the sound of Z, Algazy grins, and so as to manifest his gratitude, 
pushes his mitt in his pocket and yanks at the start of a string, prompting his 
beard to jump for joy an entire quarter of an hour... Unscrewed, the gridiron 
serves to resolve any quandary, pertinent to the harmony or hygiene of the home...

Algazy never accepts bribes. Once only he lowered himself to this mode of 
demeanor, when he was a copyist for the Church Notary, and even then he took no 
cash but only a few crock shards, eager to endow with dowry several of his 
indigent sisters who were about to become betrothed the very next day...

Algazy's greatest bliss — along with his customary tasks at the store — is to 
harness himself of his own good will to a wheelbarrow, and tagged at the 
distance of two meters by his crony Grummer — to hop at a gallop, with the 
singular ambition of collecting old rags, punctured vegetable oil tins, but 
notably, knucklebones, which then the two gobble together, after midnight, under 
the most sinister silence...

Grummer, moreover, sports a beak of scented wood...