September 30, 2007
Michael Kelleher & Kathleen Fraser
New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny
$5.00 suggested donation
Kathleen Fraser has published seventeen books of poems, most recently W I T N E S S , a letterpress sequence with linoleum prints by Nancy Tokar Miller (Chax); Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling (Apogee); and hi dde violeth i dde violet (Nomados). Her collected essays, Translating the Unspeakable, Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, are part of the Contemporary Poetics Series from University of Alabama Press, and her Selected Poems, 1970-1995, il cuore : the heart, is available from Wesleyan University Press. A recent interview with Fraser can be found at Jacket magazine online.
In 1973, Fraser founded The American Poetry Archives during her tenure as Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Between 1983 and 1992, she published and edited HOW(ever), a journal for poets and scholars interested in modernist/ innovative directions in writing by women -- updated to the current electronic journal How2.
Fraser currently teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts/SF and lives for five months of each year in Italy, reading and lecturing widely on American poetry and actively translating work by contemporary Italian poets.
Michael Kelleher is the author of two collections of poems from BlazeVOX: the just-released Human Scale (2007), and To Be Sung (2005), as well as the chapbooks Cuba (Phylum), Bacchanalia (Quinella: Three Poems Series), and The Necessary Elephant (Ota Molloy). Kelleher's poems and essays have appeared at the Poetry Foundation Website, and in Brooklyn Rail, Ecopoetics, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Kiosk, Rampike, Queen St. Quarterly, verdure, murmur, The Transcendental Friend, Lagniappe, and others. With Ammiel Alcalay, he runs 'OlsonNow,' a project (including events and a blog) dedicated to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. He lives in Buffalo, NY, where he works as Artistic Director for Just Buffalo Literary Center and edits the artist book/poet's press Elevator.
Hotel Classic
The interior stress of a leaf was forming its own new section
when the hotel came under renovation. Steps led downward
to a drawing of trees, at least in the early draft pinned to his light box.
The architect described in his notes what he thought they wanted,
the clients equal to stargazers or foreign diplomats and wives of
officials from Milano, and he felt that something should happen
on the stairs, an event or motion, as if to rush towards
that noise of the entire tree in stress.
—Kathleen Fraser
Nachtmusik
Noir, noir,
The night has come,
The human scale
Is tipped, the rut,
The groove, the frame
Of mind forming
Out of themselves
Themselves.
Out of the heart’s
Dark corners
A single tolling note --
Clouds drift overhead
Slow, white --
In these moving shapes
A hidden ultimatum
Moves. One looks to
And listens for, say,
A future, in which
One imagines what is
Spoken has meaning, is
Carried over, as over
A causeway to a city
About to be sacked.
Around him now
The temple starts to burn.
He is singing.
What is he singing?
He is singing.
Why is he singing?
He is singing.
>From lowered eyes
A touch of malice
Twinkles. In lips’
Trifling tremors,
In cheeks’ checked
Bloom -- a word,
A tone, a measure.
It might be true
The thing I hunger for
Is here in all its fullness,
Slightly obscured
And just out of reach.
Only give me
The name that
Calls it forth
To frighten and amaze
By the spectacle
Of its own privation.
The invisible sun
Within flickers still.
It burns. Let it burn.
For no one.
—Michael Kelleher