Jack Collom & Dan Raphael

Sunday, November 27th
7:30 pm

New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny Street
$5 suggested donation.

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Jack Collom teaches ecology-poetics and oversees Project Outreach at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he has been resident faculty for over a decade. A prolific writer, he has been published in over a hundred magazines and anthologies in the United States and abroad. His books include Arguing With Something Plato Said, The Task, and Entering the City. He has worked extensively with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York City and published his ars poetica on teaching poetry, Moving Windows, under their aegis. He has twice been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Red Car Goes By (a selected poems 1955-2000) is published by Tuumba Press. Jack Collom lives in Boulder CO.

Dan Raphael writes:
"What can I say here to entice you to come hear me read? I'm not sure how a list of books I've published (fifteen of them, including When a Flying City Falls, Greatest Hits, and Showing Light a Good Time), or of magazines or websistes where my poems have appeared will incline you to come hear me. I have a good performance track record--Bumbershoot, Wordstock, Powell's, Reed College, Burning Word, Seattle Poetry Festival, Silverton Poetry Festival, Portland Community College, the Super Bowl of Poetry, KBOO, and Portland Cable Access. Especially like working with musicians, which I've done w/ Salon des Refuse, Dave Captein, and Glenn Moore."

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12-24-94

Crazy writings on the mottled, lighted sky,
Romantic slate, are trees, bare, ruined choirs
Perhaps but also branch essentials. Why
Question their configures, their live wires
To us all, this morning? Sheer potential
Holds the sky in fragments—actualized
In rough, black bark. Eftsoons torrential
Sap will climb, and all be notarized.
Before I rose I spotted out my skylight,
By chance of space, just cast in arms of sumac,
Star-triangle marked on morning twilight,
Attenuate, a turn I took as runic.
It's not the thinness, much, that makes it "mine";
It's more the variation (angle, line).

   —Jack Collom

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at night the street is more like my skin
my bones feel like fire escapes—stretched   counterbalanced
           always requiring a leap to exit or enter—
i have an inner fear that prevents me from jumping into water
though i swim well enough its been so long i may no longer float
as water at night is less buoyant    hungrier     with a mind of its own
when all its natural outlets have closed til dawn
i dive off the pier like a cross between an owl and a pelican,
barely flapping,    barely a legs length from the surface,
with just one chance to impale the slippery answer
cause aroma is too long a book—i need the quicker hit, the high speed unraveling,
as water always takes, is always sampling    saving    accumulating
in order to clone everything we do to it, sending a rain of our excess and industry

   —Dan Raphael (from Black Medicine)